“I don’t think you’re going to make it,” said Skylar.
“Yes, there’s plenty of—”
“No, there isn’t!”
“Jesus Christ, would you please—”
He interrupted himself by slamming on the brakes. A man, muscled arms raised, had emerged from behind the BMW and stepped directly into their path. His eyes were wild and panicked.
“Help!” he yelled. “Can you help us?”
“What’s the problem?” Thomas replied.
“We were on our way to Durant,” the man said, “when our car broke down.”
He gestured to his wife, a petite blonde who emerged slowly from behind the SUV.
“We tried to call Triple-A but our phones don’t work, either. What the hell is going on?”
“I’m not sure,” Thomas said, and gestured toward the new star. “But it probably has to do with that.”
“We live in Frisco,” the man said. “We have no way of getting back. It’s hot and my wife is pregnant and we need to get home. Will you take us?”
The man was moving slowly toward them and continued to block their path. His wife wasn’t following, though, and didn’t look very pregnant.
“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “We have an emergency. Frisco is the other way and we don’t have time to go back.”
“No one else has come along! You can’t leave us stranded here!”
“Everyone is in the same boat,” Thomas said, and made a sweeping gesture toward the road. “None of these cars are working.”
“Yours is! Why is yours working?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s old?”
“You’re going to help us,” the man said. His voice was so distraught it was nearly a moan. “Or I’m not letting you pass.”
“So you want me to run you over?”
“Kevin!” the wife said. “Get out of their way!”
“He won’t run me over. It would leave a big dent in his fancy car.”
“You’re right,” Thomas agreed. He reached beneath the seat and retrieved a handgun he’d stowed for this very reason. “I’ll shoot you instead.”
At the sight of the gun, Kevin’s face drained of color and his hands shot back into the air.
“Kevin!” the wife yelled. “For the love of god get out of their way!”
“All I want is a ride for my wife and you’d rather shoot me?”
“All we want is to be left alone,” Thomas replied.
Kevin stood there for a moment longer, his hands still in the air, and then moved aside.
“Farther,” Thomas said, and motioned with the gun. “Give us plenty of room to pass.”
Kevin obliged, and when he was a safe distance away, his wife rushed to his side and put her arms around him.
“You’re horrible!” Kevin yelled as they slid past. Despite Skylar’s prediction, they squeezed through the opening with several inches to spare.
“Just an awful human being! You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Thomas ignored this and pushed his car forward, climbing the long, curving entrance ramp toward Highway 75 and beyond.
The new road was many lanes wide and offered more room to steer between stalled vehicles, which meant Thomas could drive faster. Some of the cars were still occupied, but by now most people seemed to have given up hope of immediate rescue. The Mustang’s engine could surely be heard approaching from far away, and everyone watched them closely as they drove past. Thomas couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with anyone.
On the right, a single tower of black smoke leaned crookedly forward. Beyond it, even farther away, he thought he could see the faint outline of another plume of smoke. Looking into the rearview mirror was so awful he had given up doing it.
“So tell me about Natalie,” Skylar eventually said.
“We were friends in high school.”
“But not since?”
“Before our reunion, I hadn’t spoken to her in twenty years.”
“Wow. So why the hell would Seth send his suicide note to you?”
“At the reunion, Natalie got drunk and told me how Seth was cheating on her, how her marriages kept failing, how she was afraid she would never be happy.”
“Did you two date in high school?”
“No. Just friends. She would tell me about whatever guy she was with and all the things he was doing wrong.”
“Did you want to date her?”
“Every guy wanted to date Natalie Perkins.”
“So, at the reunion, you turned the tables on her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. You’re rich and handsome and wrote a movie everyone saw. She spills her guts to you about her terrible relationship, only this time you’ve got all the leverage. That had to feel good.”
They came upon a place in the road where all four lanes were occupied, and Thomas was forced to slow down and drive onto the inside shoulder. When he did, a couple of men yelled at them from the other side of the concrete median. They were wearing purple TCU T-shirts.
“Hey man, can we have a ride?”
“Sorry,” Thomas said. “We have an emergency.”
“So do we!” said the other guy. “We’re stuck out here!”
Thomas moved beyond the traffic pileup and accelerated again.
“Hey, man!” said the first guy. “What the hell?”
He kept driving and tried to forget the conversation he’d been having with Skylar. Because of course she was right about the reunion. The entire reason Thomas had bothered to attend was to close the door on childhood insecurity. He’d been a quiet student in high school, a kid who got lost exploring the terrain of his own mind, and the few people who knew him didn’t seem very impressed. Even as kind as Natalie had been, Thomas knew she’d never imagined him as a romantic interest. Which was why the selfish and immature side of him, mostly eradicated but never quite gone, wanted her and all of them to see how wrong they’d been, how he’d risen far above whatever uninspired goals the rest of them had hoped to achieve.
But the reality of the reunion had been different than he expected. The petty grievances and imagined rejections from his teenage years, he came to understand, had mainly been the product of his pubescent imagination. Everyone he spoke to was friendly and appeared to remember him fondly, even if they knew little about him. You were so quiet, more than one classmate explained. No one ever knew what you were thinking.
And then there was Natalie, object of his teenage fascination, who turned out to be less textured and interesting than he remembered. At the bar, late on Friday night, she had drunkenly revealed a callous and myopic point of view on almost every topic, complaining to him about universal health care and gun control and social justice warriors. She believed the world was on a hopeless downward spiral, or so she said, but on Saturday night she revealed the real source of her frustration: her husband.
Would it matter to Natalie if his behavior had been driven by a gambling addiction instead of infidelity? And what if Seth was still alive? Would he come clean with her? Would she even want to be rescued?
“So did it?” asked Skylar.
“Did it what?”
“Did it feel good to show up at the reunion as Mr. Hollywood so Natalie could see the mistake she made not marrying you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“For such a talented screenwriter you don’t tell a very good story. Why don’t you want to talk about this?”
“Because it makes me feel guilty. I did have a huge crush on her in high school, but at the reunion I could see she was a lot… smaller than I remembered. She hadn’t matured much and her grasp of the world was limited. It made me wonder what I’d ever seen in her.”
“It sounds like you challenged yourself and kept moving forward and maybe she didn’t.”