“So, you need an escape plan?” Uncle Ric spread his hands, indicating that the expanse of Classic Car World behind him was ours. “But bring the car back in one piece, sobrino, or I’ll kill you all over again.”
Uncle Ric had the only collection of classic cars in LA, most of which he had inherited from his father-in-law, who had bought the cars with drug money so the feds wouldn’t catch on. He had the super old stuff—1946 Buick, 1955 Porsche, 1957 Thunderbird—but more modern stuff too, like the 2025 BMW. Now that so few people in LA owned or drove cars, Uncle Ric’s business had spiked, with tourists from all over the world dying to see what amounted to one giant parking lot.
Maddy and I walked the aisles between the bumpers while Uncle Ric went back in the house to shower and prepare Aunt Sofia for the biggest shock of her life. Even though I’d been to Classic Car World a million times and even driven a few of them around Uncle Ric’s track after hours, a thrill ran through me when I thought about actually taking one of his babies out on the road. Sure, I was an art geek, but what was more artistic than the classic curve and vibrant color of a yellow Porsche 911?
“No. Definitely not. Oh no, that one can’t be safe. Nope,” Maddy commented as he looked at each model. Then he stopped at what looked like a small bus and read the description on the plaque at its concrete base: 1963 Volkswagen Bus. “I like this one.”
“A bus?” My voice went up an octave. “You have the choice between any of these cars—including, by the way, several Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bugattis—and you want the Volkswagen?”
“I like it,” he said, running a hand over the VW symbol like he was petting its silver nose and creamy face. “It’s… cute.”
“Cute?”
“Yes, Jesse, cute. And it reminds me of this book I read a while back—”
“Fine, fine, we’ll take the bus,” I grumbled, “just spare me the lecture, Professor Stone.”
“The old Jesse loved my lectures,” Maddy said as he opened the unlocked door and got in the driver’s side.
“I am the old Jesse. And no, he didn’t.”
Maddy put his hands on the wheel and closed his eyes. Even silent, his voice was in my head, telling me about Kerouac or Huck Finn or whoever the heck else this reminded him of. I swear, those characters were more alive to Maddy than I was, even before I was dead. It used to drive me nuts, the way he called authors by their first names or referred to characters like they were his neighbors, because it seemed like he spent most of his time thinking of them instead of me.
Then again, it’s what made him so completely Maddy that I could never love anyone else.
And I did love him.
Even when he did crazy things like lock himself in a VW Bus in the middle of Classic Car World so that I had to yell through the window that I didn’t mean that thing I’d said about the lecture. I tried running over to the passenger’s side, but too late, he’d locked that door too.
“Uncle Ric has the keys,” I said through the glass.
“So?”
“So why don’t you just tell me what’s bothering you?”
Maddy glared at me. His hands were still on the steering wheel, and now they gripped it like two pythons around the shaggy wheel cover.
“What’s wrong?” Oh, that mocking tone was not good. “I don’t know, let’s start with the whole ‘dead boyfriend coming back to life’ thing and go from there. Or the ‘my dad lied to me’ thing. Or the ‘I have a girlfriend and she’s going to worry if I disappear’ thing.”
As soon as the words were out, he clamped his hands over his mouth, but it was too late. A girlfriend. If those words were a color, they would be an ominous black or a lead gray, like a bullet coming right for my heart. Suddenly the car didn’t matter; nothing mattered. That gray cloud that always seemed to hover just outside the frame of my mind, tainting everything on the canvas, moved into view.
Maddy rolled down the window.
“I’m sorry, Jesse.”
“What for?” I tried desperately to cover the injured tone of my voice but failed. “I died. You moved on. Happens all the time. It’s not like you knew I was just going to show up at your hospital one day or anything.”
“I didn’t move on.” He let his hands drop from the wheel. “I just… moved. For a long time, I couldn’t do that. I sat in my room, staring at the wall, thinking about what had made you do it. If I could have saved you. I missed two months of school, Jesse. I stopped writing.”
“We don’t need to talk about th—”
“Yes. We do. Remember when we read Romeo and Juliet in tenth grade, and no one could understand how they both ended up dead? Well, I could. I understood that when you really love someone, living in a world where they don’t exist is like being dead already. And that’s what I wanted to be after I found you: dead.”
Instantly I felt horrible. Not just black-cloud horrible, but guilty horrible—for what had happened, sure, but also for my desire to have it happen, still, even right then, as I hovered just inches from him and resisted the urge to take his hand and tell him it was going to be okay. How could I say that, when I had no idea if it would be?
“It helped me understand you, in a weird way,” he said, his voice finally losing its calm, calculated tone. I wanted him to be honest with me; I wanted to believe I still deserved that. “If I felt that urge all the time, I wouldn’t have been able to stand it either. And when I realized that, I just… started moving again. I made new friends. I found a volunteer project.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind. The worst thing.
“Do I know her?”
“No.” His voice went calm again, which meant Maddy was retreating into himself, like a book closing its cover. “She’s a freshman at ULA. An English major.”
“Of course she is.” What are you doing? Stop talking, you idiot. You killed yourself, remember? You don’t get to play jealous ex now.
But I couldn’t help it. The thought of my Maddy touching another person, of them touching him… I could have killed whoever it was, or at least gotten my Uncle Ric to kill them for me.
Luckily, Uncle Ric and Aunt Sofia interrupted us before I could dig a hole I couldn’t climb out of. Aunt Sofia launched herself at me the way I’d imagined Maddy would, laughing and crying and covering my face with wet kisses.
“Sobrino, what a milagro! I thought that you might be an angel sent to your tío, but no, you’re actually here. Right here.” More kisses, and then giant breasts pushing into my chest as she grabbed me and spun me around. “A milagro, I tell you, sent straight from God. Let me pinch you. Are you sure you’re real?”
“I’m real, Aunt Sofia,” I said as I struggled out of her grasp. “But I won’t be for much longer if we don’t get out of here. You know my mom… she can sniff me out like a….”
“Coonhound?” Maddy volunteered, probably thinking back to one of his British hunting tales. There hadn’t been a domestic pet in LA since the cat flu outbreak of 2050. Now no one had extra food to give a cat, or the space to walk a dog.
“Exactly.”
“You’re right, Jesse. She’ll be here by morning. I already unlocked the vault, so better to get the keys and take off while our backs are turned, and don’t tell us where you’re going.”
Uncle Ric and Aunt Sofia gave me a final hug while Maddy retrieved the key from the vault. I tried to hold on to their scents, the car-oil greasiness of Uncle Ric and the sunscreen smell of Aunt Sofia, but when we drove away later, I would not be able to recall those sensory details, as Maddy called them. Instead, my last memory would be the picture of Uncle Ric and Aunt Sofia holding hands and walking back to the house with their backs turned, never pivoting to wave goodbye or looking at me one last time.
Treating me as if I was already dead again.
Chapter Five
Maddy
THE OLD Jesse had always been moody, even when he wasn’t depressed, but this new Jesse was even worse. For the firs
t thirty minutes as we drove out of the city in our new VW, big and white as a tugboat, he didn’t say a word. His eyes were trained on the road ahead, as though he was looking for something in the distance. The only sound was the three red gas cans Uncle Ric had given us, which sloshed around in the back.
Why did I mention Georgia? I wondered as we slid into the empty desert that surrounded the LA suburbs, while behind us in the rearview mirror, LA’s wall of gray on gray got just a tiny bit smaller. Jesse used to get upset when I so much as talked to another person, so the idea of my dating someone would probably send him over the edge.
And now that I’d thought of her, I had to face an even greater question: was I ready to give her up? Because that’s what I was doing, wasn’t it? Letting my ex-boyfriend’s clone drive me away from LA, no plans to return?
“Where are we going?” I asked to break the silence.
Nothing. Just those staring eyes, that blank expression I wanted to shake off his face.
See, this was what I hadn’t missed. Georgia believed in talking through your problems, even when you didn’t want to, and we rarely had any problems to talk about in the first place. Dating her was like living in a Jane Austen novel, or at least the dystopian version of one: jaunts around LA, salons of young English majors from ULA, sneaking thermoses of homemade blueberry wine into the screenings of old movies on vintage screens.
If Jesse had painted the world in black, Georgia painted it in a soft blue, like the sky used to be. Even the thought of her long red hair and loose white peasant dresses sent thrills of happiness through me. Then again, to be fair to Jesse, as the wealthy daughter of the CEO of my dad’s company, HORUS, Georgia’s world was made up of different stuff entirely.
To break the silence, I turned on the car radio. Static. Radio stations had been gone for decades, and of course this car wasn’t equipped with internet radio. Desperate, I pulled my PTV from my pocket, but before I could find a good electro rock station, Jesse grabbed my PTV with one hand and threw it out his open window.
“What the hell?” I yelled as I looked back and watched my PTV roll a few feet and then lie dead on the highway.
He didn’t explain himself, just took my wrist with his right hand and, without taking his eyes off the road, managed to unbuckle my smart watch and chuck that out the window too.
“Do you know how expensive those things were? My mom and dad are going to….” I trailed off. “Oh. Right. The tracking devices.”
“We have to think like one of those spies in your novels. You know… by… uh… what’s his name?”
“John le Carré?”
“Right. Him. We need to be ten steps ahead of our parents if we’re going to pull this off, and we need to get as far as possible from them too.” At least he was animated again, amped up by whatever noble mission he thought we were on.
“Then we should take all the money out of my account at the next ATM.” I didn’t mention his account; we both knew there was nothing in there. “Then we head to your forest, wherever that may be.”
Jesse eased back into the seat, and when his back relaxed, mine did too.
“If you don’t like the forest idea, then what do you propose, encyclopedia?” he asked. His voice had gone back to its nonchalant, almost teasing tone. “Where can we go where we can live on almost no money, no one will recognize us, and we can stay long enough to make a better plan?”
I thought for a minute. We were already on I-10, making our way east. Soon we would hit Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, then all the way to—
“Florida.” The word left my lips before I could think the idea through, but once I said it, it felt right.
“Okay, but why Florida?”
“My great-aunt has an apartment in Miami,” I lied. “Besides, with the monthly hurricanes coming through, the place will be deserted all summer long.”
“Sounds perfect. My parents will never think about looking there, since all of our relatives are in LA, New York, and DC. ‘Pay is shitty outside the city,’ my mom used to always tell me.”
“She was right,” I said, thinking back to the previous year, when I’d slogged through my AP Economics textbook. “Every year, the per capita income in the city goes up, and every year, more and more people starve in the country. Did you know Miami was a big city too, once upon a time, before the hurricanes became… you know?” It was hard to express the strange, swirling monsters that ravaged that side of the country, while our side burned incessantly from their fiery siblings.
“Is it safe enough, do you think?”
“No.” I put my feet up on the dashboard and imagined my mom’s voice in my head, telling me to put your feet down, young man. I ignored her. “But the less safe it is, the less likely anyone will find us there.”
“Good point.”
Without taking his eyes off the road, Jesse rustled around in the pocket behind his seat with his right hand. Eventually, he found what he was looking for: a CD, dusty and a little scratched but otherwise fine. Road Trip 2005, the CD said in permanent marker.
“How did you know that was there?” I asked.
“I didn’t. I just hoped it would be.”
“It’s like finding a postcard or a to-do list in a book,” I said as I took the CD in my hand. “This is a playlist that someone put together over one hundred fifty years ago. Isn’t that insane?”
“Insane.” Jesse took the CD back and popped it into the player.
“It probably won’t work—”
The sound of a happy guitar melody filled the VW. Before the man even started singing, Jesse had already called out “‘Send Me on My Way’ by Rusted Root!” as though he was a contestant on one of the old game-show reruns. I had never heard it, but as I listened to the penny whistle solo, I couldn’t help moving my shoulders a little.
“Are you dancing?” Jesse stared at me with his mouth open.
“What? I dance sometimes,” I send defensively.
“No, you don’t.”
“I do!”
He let it drop, and I didn’t say just not with you, which is what I’d wanted to say. Georgia and her friends had an electronic drum circle every Sunday morning, and after we’d all taken about five happy pills, we would parade around the park like wild things until the sun went down and the ecstasy wore off. I loved the way those drugs made me feel—when the nervous energy went away, and my fears disappeared, and I slipped into the deepest, most intense connection to everything around me—but I hated how I felt when they wore off. I wished it worked like a switch, and I could just set myself “on” and stay that way forever.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Liar.”
I’d forgotten what it was like to be around someone who was never “okay,” or who never just believed me when I said I was. In truth, it was a little bit unsettling.
“Just wrapped up in the music,” I lied as I shimmied my shoulders.
Jesse imitated my moves with his body and one free hand, and before long we were in an all-out dance battle, complete with rave hands and Madonna poses. He forgot all about asking me about my feelings, and by the time we pulled into the first rest stop and AFGE station, or automatic fill gas/electric station, in fifty miles to ask about an ATM, I forgot all about lying to him.
Then, while he was inside buying supplies, I made the call on my spare smart watch.
Chapter Six
Jesse
I KNEW Maddy wasn’t telling me the truth about a lot of things, but I didn’t push him. He had always been that way—I’ll tell you when I’m ready, and not a minute before—so I let it go, at least for now. We needed to get to a lodging place far enough away from the last AFGE station that his parents couldn’t find us, and we needed to look totally different when we left.
“Dye my hair?” Maddy asked as he stared, skeptically, at the box of hair dye I shoved in his hands, along with a green hat and aviator sunglasses.
“Person recognition,” I explained. “Same
reason you couldn’t go in there to take the money out. They use hair color and skin tone too, so we need to get you looking as different as we can, and we’ll change the structure of your face with makeup. Don’t worry, it washes out as soon as you take a shower.”
“But what about you? Shouldn’t you turn your hair purple or something?”
“I’m not in the system,” I explained. “I’m dead, remember?”
“Right.”
Can he see through me? I wondered as he turned the box over and started reading the instructions. Did he notice the shade is exactly the same as his old one, or that the glasses are almost identical to the ones he wore on our first real date?
If he noticed, he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t ask any more questions about why a dead kid would be deleted from the database. We drove a few more miles on a side road, and miraculously, we hit a motel with the words “Cash Accepted” in big red letters. In the city, no one carried cash and none of the stores accepted it—too easy to steal, unlike the cards that required fingerprints to work—but around here, they still made the occasional exception in order to get by. I hadn’t even seen a twenty-dollar bill in years, but now I handed five over to a middle-aged woman named Dolores who ran the motel.
“You kids old enough to be on your own?” Dolores asked as she stared at us over her mashed potatoes, beef, and peas. She had been eating, mouth open, while reading a romance novel that was older and yellower than she was, when we walked in.
“Yes,” Maddy said. “We’re eighteen.”
Dolores squinted up at us. “I don’t know….”
“How are you enjoying Danielle Steel?” Maddy asked, deploying his favorite distraction tactic.
“You know Danielle Steel?” Now Dolores was smiling gleefully. “She’s my favorite author. No one reads her anymore, but—”
“—she was the bestselling author alive,” Maddy finished.
“Exactly. My, you are a smart cookie.” Dolores looked around her, as though trying to remember what she’d been looking for before she got distracted. “Did I hand you the key yet?”
Jesse 2.0 Page 3