"Celeste. Celeste Baker."
"How did you know my name?"
The question made her self-conscious, and she was able to meet his eyes only briefly. Even in the dim backwash of light from the instrument panel, he could see that she was blushing.
"You never noticed me, I know."
He frowned. "Noticed you?"
"You were two years ahead of me at County High."
Joey shifted his attention from the dangerously slick roadway longer than he should have, mystified by what she'd said. "What're you talking about?"
Staring at the lighted face of the radio, she said, "I was a sophomore when you were a senior. I had a terrible crush on you. I was in despair when you graduated and went off to college."
He was barely able to look away from her.
Sweeping around a curve, the road passed an abandoned mine head and a broken-down tipple that loomed out of the darkness like the half-shattered skeleton of a prehistoric beast. Generations had toiled in its shadow to bring forth coal, but they were now gone to bones or to city work. As he followed the curve, Joey braked gently, slowing from fifty to forty, so badly rattled by what the girl had said that he no longer trusted himself to drive safely at the higher speed.
"We never spoke," she said. "I never could get up the nerve. I just… you know… admired you from afar. God. Sounds so stupid." She glanced at him from under her brow to see if, in fact, he was amused at her expense.
"You're not making any sense," he said.
"Me?"
"How old are you? Sixteen?"
"Seventeen, almost eighteen. My dad's Carl Baker, and being the principal's daughter makes everything worse. I'm a social outcast to begin with, so I have a hard time striking up a conversation with a boy who's even… well, who's even half as good-looking as you."
He felt as if he were in a chamber of fun-house mirrors where everything, including conversation, was distorted until nothing quite made sense. "What's the joke here?"
"Joke?"
He slowed to thirty miles an hour, then slowed further still, until he was not quite keeping pace with the racing water that nearly overflowed the wide drainage ditch along the right shoulder of the highway. The surging torrents cast back leaping silvery reflections of the headlights.
"Celeste, damn it, I'm forty years old. How could I be just two years ahead of you in high school"
Her expression was somewhere between astonishment and alarm, but then it swiftly gave way to anger. "Why're you being like this? Are you trying to spook me?"
"No, no. I just—"
"Trying to give the principal's kid a real scare, make a fool of her?"
"No, listen—"
"You've been away to college all this time, and you're still that immature? Maybe I should be glad I never had the guts to talk to you before."
Tears shimmered in her eyes.
Nonplussed, he returned his attention to the highway ahead — just as the Springsteen song ended.
The deejay said, "That's 'Thunder Road,' from Born to Run, the new album by Bruce Springsteen."
"New album?" Joey said.
The deejay said, "Is that hot or not? Man, that guy is gonna be huge."
"It's not a new album," Joey said.
Celeste was blotting her eyes with a Kleenex.
"Let's spin one more by the Boss," said the deejay. "Here's 'She's the One,' off the same album."
Pure, passionate, exhilarating rock-'n'-roll exploded from the radio. "She's the One" was as fresh, as powerful, as joyful as it had been when Joey had first heard it twenty years ago.
He said, "What's this guy talking about? It's not new. Born to Run is twenty years old."
"Stop it," she said in a voice colored half by anger and half by hurt. "Just stop it, okay?"
"It was all over the radio back then. He knocked the whole world on its ass. The real stuff. Born to Run."
"Give it up," she said fiercely. "You're not scaring me any more. You're not going to make the principal's nerdy kid cry."
She had fought back her tears. Her jaw was clenched, and her lips were tightly compressed.
"Born to Run," he insisted, "is twenty years old."
"Creep."
"Twenty years old."
Celeste huddled against the passenger door, pulling as far away from him as she could.
Springsteen rocked.
Joey's mind spun.
Answers occurred to him. He dared not consider them, for fear that they would be wrong and that his sudden rush of hope would prove unfounded.
They were traveling through a narrow passage carved from the mountain. Walls of rock crowded the blacktop and rose forty feet into the night, reducing their options to the road ahead and the road behind.
Barrages of cold rain snapped with bullet-hard ferocity against the Mustang.
The windshield wipers throbbed—lubdub, lubdub—as though the car were a great heart pumping time and fate instead of blood.
At last he dared to look at the rearview mirror.
In the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see little, but what little he could see was enough to fill him with wonder, with awe, with wild exhilaration, with fear and with delight simultaneously, with respect for just how very strange the night and the highway had become. In the mirror, his eyes were clear, and the whites of them were luminescent white: They were no longer bleary and bloodshot from twenty years of heavy drinking. Above his eyes, his brow was smooth and unlined, untouched by two decades of worry and bitterness and self-loathing.
He jammed his foot on the brake pedal, the tires shrieked, and the Mustang fishtailed.
Celeste squealed and put out her hands to brace herself against the dashboard. If they had been going fast, she wound have been thrown out of her seat.
The car skidded across the double yellow line into the other lane, coward the far rock wall, but then slid into a hundred-eighty-degree turn, back into the lane where they'd begun, and came to a stop on the roadway, facing the wrong direction.
Joey grabbed the rearview mirror, tilted it up to reveal a hairline that had not receded, tilted it down past his eyes, left, right.
"What are you doing?" she demanded.
Though his hand was shaking uncontrollably, he found the switch for the dome light.
"Joey, we could be hit head-on!" she said frantically, though there were no headlights approaching.
He leaned closer to the small mirror, turned it this way and that, craned his neck, trying to capture every possible aspect of his face in that narrow rectangle.
"Joey, damn it, we can't just sit here!"
"Oh, my God, my God."
"Are you crazy?"
"Am I crazy?" he asked his youthful reflection.
"Get us off the road!"
"What year is it?"
"Drop the stupid act, you moron."
"What year is it?"
"It isn't funny."
"What year is it?" he demanded.
She started to open her door.
"No," Joey said, "wait, wait, all right, you're right, got to get off the road, just wait."
He swung the Mustang around, back in the direction they had been heading before he'd slammed on the brakes, and he pulled to a stop on the side of the road.
Turning to her, pleading with her, he said, "Celeste, don't be angry with me, don't be afraid, be patient, just tell me what year it is. Please. Please. I need to hear you say it, then I'll know it's real. Tell me what year it is, and then I'll explain everything — as much as I can explain it."
Celeste's schoolgirl crush on him was still strong enough to overcome her fear and anger. Her expression softened.