Chapter 10
How strange it is to be watched all night by the moon.
From her bedroom window, Nelle could only see it for a handful of hours.
Now it follows her like a spotlight, glistening on the waxy leaves that dangle over the curvy road, white-tailed deer frolicking in and out of the headlights, the bowl of stars.
James taps the steering wheel, shattering her trance. “So . . . you’ve been quiet a while.”
“I think I’m hungry.”
“I can stop. A gas station’s coming up soon; hopefully they’re open.”
White lights glow over a hill. “They’ll have food?”
He frowns. “Food-adjacent.”
James parks beside a pump, and Nelle, still buckled in the car, squints through the glass at shelves full of food, candy, and drinks. She sleeve-wipes her breath off the car window.
“Want anything specific?” James opens the driver’s door and grabs his wallet.
Panic squeezes Nelle’s chest. “You’re leaving me?”
“Yeah. Is that okay?”
She imagines Father standing behind her shoulder, nestled in the shadows.
Following her. Waiting for the moment James leaves her alone to snatch her back.
Every drop of her ink should have burned in the fire, but what if Father has more stored somewhere?
He was always prepared. He is. Nelle hopes he burned alive, but there were windows in the study.
She would be naive to believe that he won’t be able to find her.
“I want to come with you.”
James rounds the car and opens her side. “C’mon then.”
“I can’t yet,” she says. “You have to . . .”
“Oh, right.” He opens the vial she refilled earlier, dabs the tip of his finger, and writes on his arm, Nelle goes into the gas station. “There you go.”
Inside she gawks at an aisle of neon candy packets and crackers and chips, overwhelming options that seem so sterile and plastic compared to her usual organic diet. Based on packaging alone, none of it remotely resembles food.
“Find what you want?” James comes up beside her, the bags under his eyes dark under the fluorescent lights. Behind the counter at the other end of the store, a man sits on a stool, his baseball cap hanging an umbral shadow over the top of his face.
“I don’t know.” She points to a jar of pickled eggs atop the shelf. “Maybe that?”
James makes a sour face. “Maybe not.”
There are at least twenty-five different chocolate bars, over forty bags of candy, a rainbow of gum packs, tins upon tins of mints, and—
“I can pick out some stuff to try.”
A minute later, she has a lime-green pack of candy, a bottle of black soda with a red label, and a crinkly bag of chips. James slaps a pocket-size yellow legal pad on the counter beside the snacks. The tattooed man scans each item.
“Do you have an ATM?” James passes over a stack of ones.
The man points to the far corner where a machine sits beneath a bug-plastered bulb.
Carrying their snacks in a translucent bag, Nelle watches the machine spit a stack of twenties into James’s palm. She pieces together that it is money from his bank account, but he is able to access it here.
“What does ATM stand for?” she asks.
“Automated teller machine.”
The twenties keep on coming.
“You don’t need to take it all out.”
“Don’t worry, this is just what I’ve been saving for pocket money this semester.” He folds the bills into his wallet. “My scholarship covers tuition, but even if it didn’t, I’d rather spend my money on this. On you. I can always get another job.”
With his back to the cashier, he uses his fingertip to scrawl a command in the new pad. Nelle walks to the car.
“What about your family?” They cross the empty parking lot. “Did you say goodbye to them?”
James sucks in a breath. “I left them a note.”
“Is that normal?”
“Is what normal?”
Nelle shuts the car door and locks in her seat belt. “For your family not to care what you do?”
“No. They care too much.” He cranks it, and the engine roars. “Ever since I went off to college, my mom’s had an issue with letting go. She and my dad have all these rules for my life, like they know what’s best for me. I want to make it clear to them that I’m an adult. That I can do what I want.”
“Leaving in the middle of the night without asking permission? I’d say that sends a glaring message.”
“Glaring, really?” James pales. He runs a hand over his face. “God, I know my mom will take it as a personal attack, but it’s not. I just, for once, want to make my own decisions and fuck the consequences.”
“And now that you’re fucking the consequences, how is it?” Nelle opens her bag of candy and picks out a purple one.
“You tell me.” He looks left and right, then pulls out, headlights swinging onto the tree-encroached road. “You’re here, too.”
Nelle pinches the tiny candy between her fingers. Holds it up to the moonlight. “I can’t imagine fucking the consequences will make them disappear.”
James blows air through his mouth. “You’re right. When she wakes up, my mom will call me to chew me out. Or at least I’ll get a victimized text. When she’s really pissed she sends an angry emoji, no context.”
“What’s an emoji?”
“They’re like . . . these little faces and pictures that convey emotion.”
“Artwork?”
“Not exactly. It can be hard to convey tone through words alone, so people use them to add context.”
“It’s not hard if you use the right words,” she says.
Nelle plops the candy on her tongue, shocked to find that it is coated in acid.
Her face twists up, and she spits the candy out before it can burn through all her taste buds. It leaves a violet stain on her palm.
James cackles. “Too sour?”
Nelle puts the candy back in her mouth and forces herself to chew, considering the spike of sourness, the fruity flavor, the sweet tartness that follows.
“I can’t tell if it’s good”—she eats another, contemplating. Less startling this time—“or disgusting.”
For half a second, James’s eyes flicker from the road to her. And for half a second, the follicles of her scalp send shockwaves to her heart, her navel, her toes. She rubs down the hair on her arms.
“Are you nervous about leaving Lincoln?” James asks, his voice dry.
“Yeah.” She thinks about her rose wallpaper, her iron bed, her shelf of books, all sacrificed to fire and ash now.
She thinks about the candy in her lap, the man beside her, the open road.
Father was right about one thing. She is entirely unprepared for the world, and yet here she is, diving in headfirst. “I really am.”
James glances at her again. “Say the word and I’ll go back.”
Nelle can’t help but smirk. “No.”
She will never go back to Lincoln, where that man who called himself her father tormented her, where she had no autonomy, no friends, no life, no freedom. “I’d have to be dead to go back there.”
“How are you going to meet my family if you’re dead?” James quips.
Nelle lifts a brow. “Who says I’m meeting your family?”
“Just an idea.” He shrugs a shoulder. “We have a month of adventure ahead, and then, sadly, I’m shipping back off to school.”
Unanswerable thoughts claw up Nelle’s throat. Who is going to write for me when James goes to school? Maybe I should’ve stayed with Father. He was a monster, but at least he shouldered my burden. She shoves them to the recesses of her mind and tries to conceal her uncertainty.
“I’ll never go back to Lincoln for myself,” she says, “but if it’s for you, I’ll make an amendment.”
They drive under the night sky. Fields stretch on either side, lined with forests. There are far fewer people than she thought there would be. She wasn’t sure what to expect. New faces lining every street? Certainly not a desolate countryside with more deer, cows, and chickens than humans.
Nelle picks up James’s phone from the cupholder. When she taps the screen, a photograph of a beach during sunset appears, the time hovering above it: 3:43 a.m. Straight out of a science fiction novel.
“I’ve never been to the ocean,” she says absently.
The back of the phone is shattered glass, dicing up her reflection.
She watches the movements of her facial muscles: mouth open, eyes widen, frown deepen.
Kissy lips. “I’m glad I never had one of these.
I would’ve wasted so much time staring at it. ”
“Now that you’re a member of society, you don’t want a phone?”
“No.”
“You can do so much with it, though. You can take pictures, call whoever you want, watch movies, listen to music, ask it questions.”
“For some reason, I get the feeling that I’m better off without having constant access to . . . all of that.”
Nelle feels a buzz. A notification covers the beach photograph.
“I believe Midi is trying to contact you,” she says, holding the phone out to James.
“I can’t answer while I’m driving. Can you open it?”
“Open the phone? Like a box?”
“No, no, no,” he says. “Tap the button at the bottom. See?”
She presses a smooth circle at the bottom of the phone, and the screen turns on. A keypad pops up.
“Now press one, one, one, one.”
“Cool password.”
He glares. “Click the green icon that says Messages.”
“What’s an icon?”
“You’re like a little old lady,” he says. “Those floating squares. Click that green one there.”
Nelle taps it, and words stream across the screen. “What is this?”
He glances down. “Those are my messages. Click on the top one, and read the last message in the gray bubble.”
Nelle squints and reads out loud, “‘Hey, dickhead, did you take my clothes?’”
“Huh,” James says. “Yeah, don’t respond to that.”
Nelle tucks the phone back in the cupholder, her baby-blue sweater sleeve sliding up an inch. Midi’s sweater. Guilt bubbles up in her at the realization of everything James abandoned in Lincoln. His job, his family, his savings. And didn’t she con him into it all?
No, he made his own choice. To write for her. To free her.
James started the timer that blew up their lives. Nelle just planted the bomb.
Yet she is the one who told Quill to burn it.
“Did you steal her clothes for me?”
James’s dimple creases. “Maybe.”
Nelle eats a yellow candy, her tongue raw from the sour powder. For a while, they sit in silence, listening to the rumble of tires on unkept roads.
Then James says, “You know what? I’ll take you to see the ocean. And when we get there, I’m gonna throw my phone in it.”
“What?” Nelle chokes on a sip of soda.
“You’ve convinced me,” James says. “Life without a phone is better. I’m getting rid of it.”
She imagines the ocean, what it will smell like, whether the sand will be soft or rough under her toes, whether there will be seagulls.
“That’s very brave of you,” she says. “But is this just a ploy to avoid responding to your sister?”
“You know what?” James sits higher in his seat, boyishly energetic. “I can’t wait. I kind of want to chuck it out the window right now.”
Nelle grabs his arm. He shoots her a worried look, then relaxes his grip on the wheel.
“Wait for the right moment,” she says. “Trust me.”