Amy & Roger's Epic Detour (5 page)

California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot, if you ain’t got the do-re-mi.
—Woody Guthrie

I got into the passenger seat and slammed the door. Roger was already sitting in the driver’s seat, moving slowly up and down, then back and forth, as he played with the seat adjustment. He must have found the setting he liked, because he stopped moving and turned to me. “Ready?” he asked, drumming his hands on the wheel and smiling at me.

“Here,” I said, taking my mother’s itinerary out of my bag and thrusting it at him. It had the list of towns she’d chosen for us to stop in, MapQuest directions, and a list of hotel reservations—for two rooms in each place—along with the estimated driving time and mileage for each leg of the journey. And if she had tried really hard, she wouldn’t have been able to pick less interesting places to break up the trip: Gallup, New Mexico. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Terre Haute, Indiana. Akron, Ohio. “That’s what my mother mapped out,” I said, as I pulled on my seat belt and snapped it in, taking a deep breath and then letting it out. I could feel my heart hammering in my chest, and we weren’t even moving yet, which didn’t seem to me to be a good sign.

“Do you have GPS?” he asked, flipping through the pages. I saw his expression grow less cheerful as he did so, and I figured that he must have reached the part about Tulsa.

“No,” I said. We’d had it in the other car, but we no longer had the other car, and I didn’t really want to go into why. “But I’m a pretty good navigator,” I said, reaching around to the backseat and grabbing the road atlas. “And I think she printed out the directions for each location.”

“She did,” Roger said, still frowning down at the papers. “Do you know why she planned the trip this way?”

I shook my head. “I think she did it by mileage.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked through the pages again, at the maps and lists of hotel reservations, and seemed a little disappointed. “Well, that makes sense.”

“You know that I don’t …,” I started. I wanted to find out what he knew without actually telling him anything. I cleared my throat and started again. “You know I’m not driving, right?”

“That’s what my mother told me,” said Roger, putting the stack of paper on the console between us. “Do you not have your license?”

I look at him, shocked. I studied his expression for a moment, trying to figure out if he was asking this question genuinely. He seemed to be. I felt my heart start to beat a little faster, but with relief this time.
He didn’t know
. He hadn’t heard the details. He had no idea what I’d done. It felt freeing, like I could breathe just a little bit easier. “No,” I said slowly. “I have my license. I’m just not … driving right now.” Which was a terrible explanation, but it was all I could come up with on the spot.

“That’s too bad,” he said. “I love driving.”

I had once too. It had once been my favorite thing to do. Driving was when I organized my thoughts and listened to music, my therapy on wheels. It seemed wrong that in addition to all the things that had been taken from me, that had to go as well. I gave a shrug that I hoped seemed nonchalant. “I guess it’s just not my thing.”

“Well, okay,” Roger said, handing me the stack of papers. I flipped through to the first set of directions, which would take us to Gallup in approximately nine hours. “Ready?” he asked again, seeming much less enthusiastic now.

I nodded. “Let’s go.” I handed Roger the keys, and he started the car. I closed my eyes for a moment as the car moved forward, trying to tell myself that I was fine, that everything would be okay. I opened them in time to see the garage door closing, as Roger signaled to pull around the cul-de-sac. I took a last look at the house, realizing that the next time I saw it—if I ever saw it again—it wouldn’t be mine anymore.
WELCOME
HOME, the sign exclaimed, and it was the last thing I saw before the house disappeared from view.

I turned to face forward, reminding myself to keep breathing and taking in the neighborhood flashing past my window. I glanced over at Roger, feeling that the reality of this situation hadn’t hit me until now. I was going to be stuck sitting very close to a guy I didn’t know, constantly, for the next four days. A really cute guy I didn’t know. I looked out the window as Roger made his way toward downtown Raven Rock. It was the all-day-every-day aspect of this that was troubling me. I knew I could seem like I was actually doing okay, so long as you didn’t talk to me for too long. I wasn’t an actress for nothing. But I knew that if anyone looked too closely, they would see that I was so far from being okay that it was laughable. And I was just worried that so much time together would give Roger the opportunity to see that.

As we headed to the main street downtown, and Roger sped up to match the traffic, I found I couldn’t help wincing and pressing my foot down, hard, on the phantom brake every time it seemed like he got too close to the car in front of us. And the cars in the other lane and across the intersection were just flying by. Why did everyone have to go so
fast
?

The car behind us honked, loud, and I felt myself jump a little. I saw Roger glance over at me as he put his turn signal on to make the right onto Campus Drive. “You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said quickly, staring at the small green arrow blinking on and off, fighting down rising panic as I realized how he intended to get us to the freeway. “But you know, it’s faster if you take Alvarez.”

“Really?” he asked. “But we can just cut over to—”

“No,” I said, more loudly than I’d meant to. “If you just go straight here, you can get to the 2 that way. It’s faster.”

The light changed, and Roger paused for a moment before turning his signal off and going straight. “Sure,” he said.

I stared out the window, taking deep breaths and trying to calm myself down, trying not to think about how close I’d just come to seeing the intersection at University. I had no idea if the ribbons and signs were still there, or if they’d disappeared into recycling bins and birds’ nests. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get away from it as fast as possible.

As we got closer to the freeway, it struck me—probably a little late—that this would be one of the last times I would see my town. Raven Rock wasn’t going to be my home anymore. And I’d never even really taken the time to think about it. It was just the place I’d always lived, kind of boring, kind of confining. But
mine
, with all my history, good and bad, wrapped up in it. I saw landmarks from my life passing the window at faster speeds than I was comfortable with. The Fosters Freeze where Charlie and I used to walk to get shakes, and the Jamba Juice where he deeply humiliated me when we were twelve. He told me that if you yelled out “JAMBA!” at full volume, all the employees would yell back “JUICE!” He lied.

I turned in my seat to try to see as much as I still could, but then Roger was turning onto the freeway’s on-ramp, and thankfully not saying anything about the fact that we’d taken the scenic route to get there. I looked in my side mirror to see Raven Rock getting farther away, turning into just another dot on a map, just another anonymous town to be driven past. And as I watched, it disappeared from view until all I could see behind me were the other cars on the freeway.

We drove for about twenty minutes in silence. Once we were out of Raven Rock and off the surface streets, being in a car was bothering me less. On the freeway, where there were no stoplights or people who ran them, I could feel myself relax a little bit.

And Roger seemed to be a good driver, much more comfortable in my mother’s car than I had expected him to be. I kept sneaking glances across the car at him. I had never realized just how small the front seats of cars were. We seemed to be in closer proximity to each other than I had anticipated. Every time he moved, it caught my attention, and I was sitting at the very edge of my seat, pressed practically into the door, so that we wouldn’t bump elbows on the console or anything. Roger just seemed to take up a lot of space, driving with the seat pushed far back, his long jeans-clad legs looking like they were almost fully extended. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the glass of the window. This hadn’t been my style—when I’d been driving I’d been a strictly ten-and-two girl. But he was in control of the car, not driving too fast, but fast enough to keep up in the carpool lane. Traffic was moving, thankfully, since on the other side of the freeway it was bumper-to-bumper—for no apparent reason, at noon on a Thursday.

“Hey,” Roger said, breaking the silence in the car. He tapped the glass on the driver’s side. I looked and saw a familiar yellow arrow and red sign across the freeway. “What do you think?” he asked. “You hungry?”

“I’m going to miss this,” Roger said, reaching into the white paper bag sitting between us and pulling out a french fry. “I love fast food in all its forms, but nothing really compares to In-N-Out.”

I took a careful bite of my burger and nodded in agreement. We were in the back of the Liberty, what Charlie and I had always called the way-back, the open space designed for storing things. The door was raised, and we were sitting with our legs dangling over the edge. The sun was getting strong, and the glare made it harder to look

directly at Roger. But my sunglasses had shattered three months ago, and I’d gotten used to squinting. The cars on the freeway rushed past to the right of the car, and to the left of us an In-N-Out employee seemed to be breaking up with her boyfriend—loudly—over the phone.

We’d taken the food to go, but when Roger struggled to take a bite of his burger while pulling out of the parking lot, it became clear that this was an eat, then drive situation, and he’d pulled back into the parking lot. I hadn’t realized until Roger told me, after we’d ordered, that In-N-Out was a West Coast–only burger chain. There was no In-N-Out in Connecticut, because clearly that state was an inhospitable wasteland.

“It’s annoying,” Roger said, shaking the paper sack. We’d long since finished our individual containers of fries, but apparently there were still a few stragglers rolling around the bottom. Sure enough, he pulled out a small handful. “Because I missed this all year while I was at school. The closest one to Colorado is in Utah, which is a little far to go for a burger. But it might have been doable. Except for the fact that I didn’t have a car.”

I took a sip of my milk shake to buy myself some time to think about a response. “Colorado?” I finally asked, remembering the bumper sticker. “That’s where you go?”

He nodded. “Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. It’s a good school. And I have a lot of great friends….” I thought I saw something pass over Roger’s face for a second when he said this, but then it was gone. “Anyway, I’d planned on being here all summer. But after finals, my father began insisting that I spend the summer with him in Philly.”

“That’s where your father lives?” I regretted the sentence as soon as I’d said it. First of all, he’d told me that back in the kitchen. Second of all, I’d already known it. Third of all, I had a feeling that it was going to be a very long four days unless I could stop acting like such a moron.

But if Roger noticed, he wasn’t letting on. “Yeah,” he said, shaking the bag again and coming up with more fries. “He lives there with his new wife and her son. He freaked out when he saw my grades and said he wanted me there so I can, and I quote, ‘learn some discipline.’ Which sounds like a great way to spend a summer. I don’t know anyone there. And what am I supposed to do in Philadelphia?”

“Eat cheesesteak?” I asked, on impulse.

Roger laughed for the first time, a loud, reverberating laugh that seemed to fill the whole space. “Right,” he said. “Cheesesteak and cream cheese.”

I guess neither of us could think of any more Philadelphia-related foods after that, because silence fell between us. I took another long sip of my milk shake and could feel Roger looking at me. I glanced over at him and saw that he was reading the back of my T-shirt, with the list of the cast members printed on it.