Chapter Ten
Simon checks out while, across the hotel lobby, Charlie talks to an elderly couple. They’ve been chatting for five entire
minutes, and at one point Charlie’s mouth makes the shape California, so these people probably have no idea who he is and are just talking to him as fellow visitors. Charlie’s making friends
with random senior citizens. And now he’s bending over one of their phones, grinning at—Simon can only assume—photographs
of grandchildren or the Grand Canyon.
As soon as Charlie waves goodbye to the couple, the smile drops off his face. His brow furrows and his lips press together
in a tight line.
Simon knew that Charlie’s nonstop good humor was an act. He knew it, and he’s spent years wondering why nobody else could see through
it. But it turns out that what lies behind the screen of affability is just a little less—less sunshiny, less gregarious,
less charming. And also more—more thoughtful, more anxious. Nothing sinister.
They’re loading their suitcases into the car by six thirty, Charlie looking rougher around the edges than he did yesterday.
A few times last night, Simon woke to the sound of Charlie in the kitchen. He doubts Charlie got much in the way of sleep.
“Let me drive.” Simon positions himself between Charlie and the driver’s side door.
“I can—”
“Can you just for one minute remember the number of times that you’ve insisted on driving me home when I was in no shape to
get behind the wheel?”
They’re standing too close because they’ve been trying to maneuver one another away from the driver’s side door. Charlie’s
quiet, scanning Simon’s face. “You hate driving,” he says eventually.
Simon didn’t learn to drive until he moved to Los Angeles after college. It still doesn’t feel natural. But he does drive,
obviously. He doesn’t even talk about how much he hates it, because he’ll sound like the world’s biggest baby, and everyone
(Jamie) will yell at him to take more Lyfts.
“How do you even know that?” Simon asks, realizing too late that he could have just denied it.
Charlie shoves his hands in his pockets and looks up at the still-gray morning sky. “I noticed.”
“Well, right now I’d hate even more watching you try to stay awake.”
Charlie presses the key fob into Simon’s hand, his fingers warm when they brush Simon’s palm.
“You know what this means.” Simon settles into the driver’s seat. He taps the car’s touchscreen, connecting his phone to the
car’s Bluetooth.
“Fuck no,” Charlie says. “I’m not listening to your sad guitar music or whatever.”
“I can’t believe you think I’m emotionally stable enough to listen to sad music.”
“I’ll put on the same playlist as yesterday.”
Simon clicks his tongue. “I’m driving. I get to pick the music. It’s the law.”
“No way.”
“It’s in the constitution, Charlie.”
Charlie laughs, startled, almost a giggle, and Simon feels like he unlocked a door he wasn’t trying to open.
Simon doesn’t put on any music at all, because every few minutes, Charlie calls his stepfather. There’s a rhythm to it—unlock
the phone, tap the screen, listen to the call go straight to voicemail, end the call, sigh. Simon memorized it yesterday.
But today he notices that this is all Charlie’s doing with his phone.
“Why’s your phone so quiet?” Simon asks.
“I silenced notifications.”
“Why?” Simon wouldn’t have thought Charlie ever wanted to be left alone. Then again, he’d never have thought Charlie would
tell him about it, so who even knows anything anymore.
“I can’t fake normal right now.”
That’s so uncomfortably relatable that Simon’s at a loss about what to say.
“I swear to God,” Charlie says, “if you tell me I’m supposed to be emotionally honest with my friends—”
“Have you met me? I’m on year six of a long con to convince Jamie I’m a functional human being.”
“Is it working?”
“He installed a meditation app on my phone, so I don’t think so.”
Charlie cackles, fully laughing at, not with, Simon, and for some stupid reason Simon isn’t mad about it.
Charlie calls his stepfather again and Simon pays attention to the road.
They keep passing signs for towns that don’t sound real.
Bumble Bee. Flower Pot. The scenery is aggressively Old West, too green to be a desert but too brown to be chaparral.
A range of mountains hovers in the distance, shadowy blue in the morning light, never seeming to get any closer.
“Are you going to Petra’s wedding?” Charlie asks.
“I’ll be in New York.” He would have gone if he’d been in town—he’d have brought Jamie, stayed for ninety minutes, and left
before dinner. That’s how he deals with most Out There–adjacent social events, and it works well enough. Most social events, period.
Charlie shifts in his seat and unlocks his phone, and Simon doesn’t think he can stand to hear another call go to voicemail.
“Put on A Scorched Land,” Simon suggests.
“Really?”
“Do I make a habit of suggesting things I dislike? Have I ever, once, in the entire time you’ve known me?” Simon asks, and
it’s not technically a lie because it’s in the form of a question.
“I knew you’d like it.” Charlie sounds smug.
An hour later, Simon longs for the violent death of every single human character in this book, but he’s overinvested in the
fate of that dragon. He says as much to Charlie, who pauses the audiobook. Simon can feel the heat of Charlie’s glare on the
side of his face.
“That dragon is in love with the humans. Don’t you want him to be happy?”
Simon is slightly, regrettably, charmed that Charlie has embraced the most unhinged interpretation of this book. “He’d be
happier if he fell in love with someone smarter.”
Charlie proceeds to tell him all the ways Simon’s wrong.
Simon’s heard Charlie charm people—hell, he’s spent half his career being annoyed by it. But having it turned on himself is like being hit with a fire hose. Simon’s physically incapable of doing anything other than driving and listening to Charlie. He doesn’t hate it.
“I always loved dragon stories,” Simon says. He wonders if he can convince Charlie to stop listening to this and put on Temeraire or Dragonriders of Pern.
“Well, yeah,” Charlie says. “You were in a dragon show.”
Tree of the Gods did, in fact, have a dragon subplot. Simon wasn’t in any of those scenes, but he guesses he was, technically, in a dragon
show.
“I can’t believe that of all the space creatures I’ve had to pretend to fight on a green screen, we’ve never had a space dragon,”
Charlie says.
“It could have even been a nice dragon. Remember the lobster things that turned out to be like . . . pacifists? What were they?”
“A fucking mistake,” Charlie says, and that’s the first time Simon’s ever heard him say a bad thing about Out There.
Heading north, the landscape gets greener and greener, pine trees on both sides of the road, until they’re finally in the
mountains. Charlie pulls up the map on his phone and gives Simon the shittiest possible directions.
“Turn—no not yet,” Charlie says, after Simon already turned. “You’re gonna need to pull into a side street to turn the car
around.”
“Gosh, wow, thanks for explaining how to make the car go in a different direction.”
“Maybe you can keep your mouth shut for two seconds and get back on the road,” Charlie says, but there’s barely any heat in
it.
It’s still early—just past nine—but there are already plenty of people on the sidewalks of what turns out to be an alarmingly quaint town.
Simon can’t imagine how Charlie expects to find one old white man in a town that currently has about ten old white men for every person in any other demographic.
Simon is a little taken aback, and he grew up in a part of Connecticut that’s practically the old white man capital of the world.
He parks where Charlie tells him to, then ignores everything Charlie says until he’s standing in line at what looks like a
reputable coffee shop.
“Go walk around. I’ll get your coffee.” Simon waves Charlie off. “Go, go, go.”
A few minutes later, holding two coffees that cost enough to suggest that this cute little town does a brisk tourist trade,
Simon leans against the outside of the building. Old cars are parked along the streets for clusters of old white men to admire.
As Simon takes a sip of coffee, a car that looks like the Batmobile from the old Batman TV show drives past.
“It was a stupid idea,” Charlie says when he comes back. “I don’t know how I thought I’d find him.”
“Eat the banana bread.” Simon shoves the paper bag into Charlie’s chest. “We’ll walk around.”
The streets are lined with low-slung buildings, with lots of striped awnings and little American flags. Neon signs that straddle
the line between seedy and quaint say things like hotel and gifts. Somebody here discovered vintage fonts and just went for it. Even not counting the old cars, the whole place is a little
bit twee and one hundred percent camp, in a way Simon can respect.
“This town is what set designers are thinking of when they build generic main streets,” Simon says when he realizes why it seems familiar.
The design choices of a dozen movies suddenly make sense.
They walk past a sign for a gas station museum.
Simon would bet five hundred dollars they’re going to see a soda fountain within the next fifty yards.
“They can’t get enough of Route 66 here.
” He’s counted five signs in the past block.
“That’s because you’re standing on Route 66,” Charlie says.
Simon, like an idiot, looks down at his feet. Charlie starts laughing.
“That’s why they have the car show here.”
“Vintage car aesthetic? Americana vibes?” Simon suggests.
“Something like that. Also you’ve gotta stop saying vintage cars. Vintage cars are basically Model T era. Antique cars are
from before ’75, and classic cars are more than twenty-five years old, but people fight about that all the time. A ’98 Civic
is not a classic car, don’t embarrass yourself.”
“How do you know all that off the top of your head?”