yfriend, with school, with everything. I wanted to know it, even at the very moment it was happening.
But when she looked up and met my eyes, she gave me the hang-loose sign—thumb out, pinky up—and this seemed more right.
So I hang-loosed her back, like it was something I knew how to do, and let that be my good-bye.
In the car, Josh wouldn’t talk.
He gave me the keys and got in the passenger side, reclining the seat all the way back. I took a right back onto the dirt road and then the two lefts off of the property, heading toward the highway. Everything was still a little smoky, and hidden in the heat. I didn’t look in the rearview mirror or over toward Josh, even once. Meanwhile, the blinker—my broken blinker—was acting up again and nonstop blinking again and making me crazy.
“You want to turn that off?” he said, irritated.
“I am trying here,” I said, gripping the steering wheel more than a little too tight, making nothing happen.
The interstate was creeping up on our right. I was going to turn onto it. For better or worse, I was going to move us farther and farther away from this place. I was going to have to go home and promise our mother that I hadn’t let him do anything bad. I was going to have to take a shower. I kept waiting for Josh to stop me, to say something. But he didn’t. Once I merged on—once all that was ahead of us was interstate—I ended up being the one to break the silence.
“Did you have sex with her today?” I said.
“What?” He shook his head, disgusted. “What does that even have to do with anything, Emmy?”
“Well, I want to know, Josh,” I said. But the truth was, I didn’t want to know if that happened. Not really. It was just the only thing I could think of that was concrete, certain, that might give me a clue as to what he was going to do.
He kept his eyes window-side. “No.”
“No, you didn’t? Or no, you’re not going to answer me?”
“Emmy, I need a minute here, okay? I need like sixty seconds to pull myself together.”
I wanted to tell him he had 180 miles worth of seconds to do that, but then he’d be put in a position to answer much harsher critics than me. And, more importantly, if he didn’t talk to me now, he might not talk at all. He might just let this go, too, because there wouldn’t be enough time in his mind to do anything else.
“Look,” I said, “when this is all said and done, I’ll have driven eight hours with you today, and met two really interesting people, who obviously mean a great deal to you. Who seem to make you a different you, if that makes any sense. And now I have to go back to Scarsdale and deal with all of this, too, so I’d like it if you’d let me know where your head is at. Whenever you’re ready.”
“You don’t want to hear me right now,” he said. “You just want to be mad at whatever I say. And maybe you should be. Maybe it was wrong to ask you to come today. But can you please just focus on getting us home in time for tonight’s dinner?”
I started to ask him if he was still planning on going to tonight’s dinner—as if that cemented anything either way. But before I did, before we could get into it, one way or another, I saw police sirens flashing behind us. I looked back down at my dashboard. I was barely five miles over the speed limit. I was barely even three.
“That can’t be for us,” I said.
Only it was becoming more apparent that it was absolutely for us. The state trooper was on our tail, still flashing, the sirens making their noise now, waiting for us to respond.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me with this,” Josh said, looking in the rearview mirror.
Then he turned and shot me a dirty look.
“What?” I said, pulling over onto the divider. “This isn’t my fault.”
“Am I the one driving?” he said. “Am I?”
I shook my head, slowly rolling down my window. On the other side was one of the oldest police officers in the history of any police force, ever. He had a curled white mustache and was wearing a hearing aid and a police officer’s cap—not to mention a pair of old-school Ray-Ban sunglasses on a cord around his neck. He was a few ten-minute steps shy of a walker.
“I’m Officer Z,” he said, pointing at the nametag on his jacket that said OFFICER Z in block-brown letters. “I’m going to need all your information, miss.”
Josh leaned across me, handing my registration over. “Can you tell us why we were stopped, Officer?”
I gave him my license. I could see Z reading over it carefully, and I knew he was doing the math in his head. Was I even old enough to drive? Out here on the highway?
“Excuse me,” Z said, picking up his walkie-talkie, which had gone from full-fledged static to mumbled talking.
I took the opportunity of the distraction to turn toward Josh and say something to him. But he stopped me with his hand. “Just,” he said. “Don’t.”