You Are Here

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “So what are you gonna do about your brother’s car?” he asked, once they’d ordered and carried their trays back outside again. They were joined by the dog, who gazed expectantly at the food, following each fry like a spectator at a tennis match.

  Emma took a sip of her milk shake. “Leave it here, I guess.”

  “Won’t it get towed?”

  “I doubt it,” she said, not really knowing at all. “We shouldn’t be gone much more than a week, and there are so many cars coming in and out of here.”

  He licked his fingers one at a time. “So then what happens in a week?”

  “We’ll get it repaired,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t know. We’ll figure something out then.”

  Peter seemed pleased at the “we,” and Emma realized she was too. It was a strange little crew she’d gathered—her slightly odd next-door neighbor and a three-legged dog—but it felt good to have company all the same.

  “I saw your parents yesterday,” Peter said, and Emma lowered her eyes. “It didn’t seem like they realized you’d be gone for so long.”

  As if on cue her phone began to ring again, and she jammed her thumb against the off button. “You didn’t say anything, did you?”

  He shook his head. “My dad doesn’t exactly know where I am either.”

  “Oh,” Emma said, feeling worse instead of better. This only meant they’d have more people worried about them, more parents trying to figure out where they were. Peter’s dad was a police officer—the town sheriff, of all things—and she wondered what kind of trouble two almost-seventeen-year-olds could get into for this kind of thing.

  But Peter was now beaming at her from across the table, his eyes large against his freckled face—looking as desperate for approval as the dog at their feet—and so she smiled back at him with more confidence than she felt.

  When he finished his burger, he balled up the wrapper to toss into the nearby garbage can. But his throw went wide, glancing off the side of the bin, and the dog pounced on it, bobbing his head up and down and looking confused when it didn’t easily clear his throat. Before she had a chance to think better of it, Emma sprang up and wrestled him into a headlock. Ignoring Peter’s protests, she pried open the dog’s mouth and thrust a hand in, emerging triumphantly with the slobbery wrapper. The dog coughed a few times, and Peter stared at her.

  “You shouldn’t stick your hand into a strange dog’s mouth,” he said, sounding so much like her father that all Emma could do was nod wearily as she returned to her seat, the dog now pressed against her leg and eyeing her with a look of great devotion.

  Peter regarded him skeptically. “He’s not coming along, is he?”

  “From what I’ve seen of your driving, I doubt he’d be up for it,” she teased, and Peter turned as red as the dot of ketchup on the end of his nose.

  But even so, Emma wasn’t surprised when the dog trotted after them later, waiting patiently while Peter helped her check the engine of the car one more time. Once they were satisfied it was good and dead, she locked the door and they carried her things across the parking lot, moving from the old blue convertible to the new one. They climbed inside, and Peter put the top down, and then the dog—looking slightly miffed at not having been invited—took a running start and catapulted himself into the back, his toenails skittering across the trunk before he slid down into the seat.

  Emma twisted around to look, and Peter stared at his rearview mirror in surprise. “Well,” he said after a moment. “I guess he earned it.”

  The dog wagged his tail and rested his chin on the side of the car as they pulled out of the rest stop. The wind flattened his fur and made his nose twitch, and he closed his eyes, looking about as happy as Emma suddenly felt.

  “I’ve always wanted a dog,” she said. “I feel like every kid should have one.”

  “Maybe not one this big though,” Peter said. “He could just about flatten someone with those paws.”

  “Nah,” Emma said, reaching back to rub the dog’s ears. “He’s a gentle giant. I can tell.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said with a grin. “And I hope he doesn’t decide he’d like to eat us.”

  They drove on in silence for the first hour or so, heading west across Pennsylvania, moving fast along the tree-lined highways that sliced through rivers and ravines. Every so often Peter reached over and swiveled the gearshift in small baffling circles, like the joystick to some old video game, and the car staggered onward, the open top and rushing wind making it too loud to talk. Emma pulled on a sweatshirt and curled up in the seat, content to let herself be carried along by someone else for a change.

  But even later, once they hit the back roads and the breezes fell flat all around them, Peter remained quiet, and Emma began to fidget. She glanced over, watching him as he drove, his back straight and his eyes roving the horizon, where a pink band had formed above the bluish hills. A field of cows gazed back at her from the side of the road with vacant, dull-eyed stares, and Emma frowned back at them.

  It was hard to understand Peter’s lack of curiosity, of surprise, of anything. If the situation had been reversed, if he’d called from a rest stop in New Jersey and asked her to come get him—and not just to pick him up and take him home, but to drive on to North Carolina for no apparent reason—she wouldn’t have hesitated to tell him he was out of his mind.

  But Peter was different. Not only had he agreed to come get her, but he’d done so without requiring any sort of explanation, without questioning her reasons for the trip. And while it was true that this was pretty much how things had always been between them—Emma distant and unbothered, Peter quietly eager—it felt different now.

  They’d known each other for eight whole years, had waved across their lawns and said good morning and occasionally walked to school together. They’d passed each other in the halls and nodded in the cafeteria and even once been lab partners in science class. Peter had eaten breakfast at their kitchen table more times than Emma could count, and while he talked with her parents, she’d passed him the butter and filled his water glass and teased him for getting jam on his face.

  But the truth was, they’d rarely talked beyond the barest skeleton of a conversation—the hellos and how-are-yous and good-byes that serve as the tent poles of common decency—and somehow that had never struck her as particularly odd. You wouldn’t be expected to tell your deepest secrets to the mailman, and you would never think to confide in the checkout guy at the grocery store. It was the same thing with Peter Finnegan. He was the guy next door. The nice-enough boy from her school. The smartest kid in her math class. Nothing more.

  But it was different now. At home the silence between them was comfortable, something worn and familiar. But here in the car there was a sharpness to it, as if the air itself had turned into something prickly. And for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Emma felt that this was somehow her fault.

  “Don’t you think this is sort of weird?” she asked abruptly, and she watched as his eyes flicked from the gauges to the gas pedal to the rearview mirror, the dog drooling in the backseat. When Peter seemed satisfied that there was nothing especially weird about any of these, he shrugged.

  “Weird how?”

  Emma shook her head, trying to ignore the dog panting heavily near her right ear. “Aren’t you wondering why I’m dragging you to North Carolina with me?”

  “You’re not dragging me,” he said simply. “I don’t mind.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “Don’t you want to know what we’re doing?”

  “I thought maybe you wanted to visit your brother.”

  “Yeah, but come on,” she said. “I could’ve taken a plane.”

  He pushed his glasses up farther on his nose. “Road trips are fun.”

  “Yeah, but by yourself?”

  “You don’t ever seem especially desperate for company,” he pointed out. “And anyway, now there’s two of us.”

  Emma relented, absently tapping he
r fingers on the windowsill. Maybe it was better this way, that she didn’t tell him about her brother. When she tried to imagine what she’d even say, it always came out sounding weirder than it was. Or maybe it was just that it was weird. Regardless, it seemed there was no good way to tell someone you were taking them to visit your dead brother’s grave.

  “Well,” she said after a moment, “aren’t you at least curious why I didn’t tell my parents?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged. “You didn’t ask why I didn’t tell my dad, either.”

  This was true, of course; she’d been too wrapped up in her own concerns to inquire after Peter’s. For all their differences Emma could see they were similar in many ways: self-sufficient, if lonely; independent, if a little lost. And though it seemed to her that the air was still thick with unasked questions, she gave in to the silence. It wouldn’t be the worst thing, she figured, getting through the trip in this way. Even two different trains on two different tracks could reach the same destination, as long as they kept moving.

  chapter ten

  Peter Finnegan didn’t have a whole lot of experience with being wrong. But as he drove along Route 194 toward Gettysburg, he was becoming increasingly aware that he’d been mistaken about at least one very important thing.

  Somewhere in the last hour or so he’d come to the conclusion—somewhat miserably—that he did, in fact, like Emma Healy.

  Quite a lot, as it turned out.

  She was sitting beside him with one knee propped against the door, her elbow resting on the windowsill, her long hair tied back into a messy ponytail. Every so often she slid her eyes in his direction and gave her head a meaningful little shake, and he knew she was puzzled by his silence on a growing number of topics.

  It wasn’t that Peter wasn’t curious. The truth was, he was dying to know the reasons behind her insistence on getting down to North Carolina, her strange determination to make this trip. But he also didn’t want to seem overeager; lately, when it came to Emma, he had a tendency of opening his mouth with the intention of saying something intelligent, only to find, at the very last minute, that it had turned into something outrageously stupid instead.

  He was already fairly certain that he’d had a sesame seed stuck in his teeth the whole time they’d been talking at the rest stop, and now he couldn’t help obsessively searching the inside of his mouth with his tongue, so he was sure he must look like an underfed camel. Even worse, it had taken him at least half an hour to wipe his nose and find that he had ketchup streaked across the back of his hand. He hoped Emma hadn’t noticed, but it was a bleak and unlikely hope; unless you were a clown or a highly unusual reindeer, it was hard not to stand out with a red nose.

  To add to all this the convertible had turned out to be moody and erratic, lurching this way and that like a skittish horse. Peter’s shoulders were tense and his neck was stiff from attempting to wrangle it into a generally forward-moving direction, the car wrenching testily beneath them every few miles. As they slowed at an exit, the brakes made a grinding noise, and a smell like rotten fruit or overripe socks drifted up from the backseat, where the dog—looking appropriately mortified—crawled to the other side to avoid his own stench. Peter glanced in the rearview, and Emma wrinkled her nose and laughed.

  “Jeez, Peter,” she joked. “At least warn me next time.”

  “Funny,” he said stiffly, too nervous to manage a laugh.

  Emma snaked an arm between the seats and plucked one of his maps from the floor in the back. It snapped in the wind as they sped up again, easing onto the expressway, and she examined it with a little frown of concentration. But just as quickly, she seemed to lose interest, and Peter gritted his teeth as he watched her attempt to refold it, making a mess of things as she crumpled the paper along the wrong lines.

  “I don’t need the maps,” he told her. “I know where we’re going.”

  “Then why do you have so many?”

  He opened his mouth to answer but had no idea how to explain. Emma tossed the one she was holding onto the floor, then twisted to grab another, tugging a European atlas from beneath the dog, who resettled himself unhappily on an underwater survey of the Pacific Ocean.

  “It’s really okay,” Peter said weakly. “I don’t need a navigator …”

  “I don’t mind,” she said, running a finger between Germany and France.

  Peter stifled a groan, turning his attention back to the road and hoping she couldn’t tell just how flustered he was, his mind crowded with worries. He wondered if the car smelled funny, or if the engine was supposed to sound like something was being chewed up inside of it. He wondered if policemen were able to send out nationwide alerts for wandering teens in stolen convertibles. He wondered if Emma was worried too.

  She hadn’t been acting any differently than she usually did around him, disinterested and then excited in turns, abruptly short with him and then a moment later charming and engaged. Half the time she was so exasperating that Peter wished the car had an ejection seat, and at other times he found himself sneaking sideways glances at her, devolving into sappy daydreams about what it might be like to sling an arm over her shoulder as they drove.

  When her phone began to ring again, Emma set the map down, and Peter tried not to wince as the edge caught the gearshift, neatly ripping Iceland in half. She bit her lip and studied the screen before once again deciding to ignore it, and Peter had a brief urge to reach over and answer it himself, not because he wanted the trip to end—not by a long shot—but because he felt a strange allegiance to the Healys. Somehow, this whole thing felt like more of a betrayal of them, who had always treated him like an adult, than his father, who had never failed to make Peter feel out of place.

  His own phone hadn’t made a sound since he’d set off from home earlier, and he wasn’t sure exactly how he felt about that. He wondered if his dad might have spoken to the Healys by now; though they weren’t much better off in the information category, they at least had somewhat of an idea of Emma’s whereabouts, based on the fact that she’d been with Patrick until this morning. Still, Peter didn’t like to imagine what might be going through Dad’s head right now. He wondered if it was an angry silence or a careless silence, this thing between them. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  But it was nearly dark now, the domed sky closing in all around them, and he had a foot on the gas pedal and two hands on the steering wheel, he had Emma Healy beside him and a strange dog in the backseat, and he was heading to Gettysburg, a place he’d been fascinated with since he was eight years old and was first told about the unfathomable tragedies of that long-ago war.

  Everything else was beginning to seem faraway and unimportant.

  The dog turned in three cramped circles in the backseat, then settled down with his nose tucked beneath a paw, and Peter felt a quick rush of affection for him, a fellow outcast, as unlikely a stowaway as himself on this trip that nobody really understood.

  Emma leaned forward to turn on the radio, then fiddled with the dial, landing on each station for a minute or so before flipping through to the next one. When she caught Peter looking at her with raised eyebrows, she shrugged and switched it off again.

  “Maybe we should play a car game or something,” she suggested.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. The license plate game?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You try to spot as many license plates from as many different states as you can,” she explained. “You’d probably love it. It’s very ‘fun with geography.’”

  “Sounds slow.”

  “So is geography.”

  He made a face at her. “What else you got?”

  “The animal game?”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “See how many animals you can spot?”

  Emma grinned. “Sheep are worth two points each.”

  “Thank God we’re not in Ireland,” he said. “Where do you come up with these anyway?”

  “They’re p
retty standard road trip games,” she said.

  “What happened, you were too busy with the atlas as a kid to have any fun in the car?”

  “Sitting in the backseat of a police car like a criminal isn’t exactly fun.”

  Emma laughed. “You could build up a lot of street cred that way.”

  “Yeah, I looked like a regular thug with my bowl haircut and glasses.”

  “Who would’ve thought you’d turn into an actual criminal all these years later?”

  He knew she was joking, but Peter felt suddenly nervous anyway, adjusting his hands on the wheel and glancing up at the rearview mirror as if he were expecting someone to be tailing them.

  Emma looked down at her lap. “My birthday’s next week, you know,” she said, and Peter glanced over at her, trying to compose his face in a way that might suggest that this was news to him, although he knew—had always known—just exactly when her birthday was, despite the fact that his was only a few days later and she unfailingly missed it every year.

  “I wanted it to be different this year.”

  “Different from what?”

  She shrugged. “My family’s not great with birthdays.”

  Peter thought of his past birthdays, the well-intentioned gifts his dad always gave him—baseball cards or action figures or a skateboard—which were always so perfectly and completely wrong, and no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, the day always left them both with a sour taste in their mouths.

  “My family’s just …,” Emma was saying, her face small and pale against the rest of the world as it scrolled past. “They just never manage to get things quite right, I guess.”

  “Most don’t,” Peter said shortly.

  “Yeah, but my family’s different.”

  He set his mouth in a thin line. “Most are.”

  They rode in silence for a few miles, easing off onto quieter roads, the car moving purposefully through the deepening dark. The barest sliver of a bone-white moon had already appeared low in the pale sky, and a fog hung at knee level in the fields. As they reached the top of a sloping hill, they could see the lights of the town of Gettysburg glowing white in the pocket of a valley. Emma leaned forward and blinked out at the town, but Peter was more interested in the shadowy areas that bordered it, the wheat fields and orchards and pastures that had once been the stage for so many important battles.