“So. Wanna play a car game?”
I snorted. Ella and I had exhausted every car game known to man, and invented a dozen more.
“What? Come on, humor a New York kid. Driving anywhere is like a weird vacation for me.”
He did hold the steering wheel funny, I’d noticed. At ten and two, but in this super-self-conscious way, like he was holding up a confusing shirt.
“Yeah, alright. What do you want to play?”
I expected him to say Geography or the license-plate alphabet game, but he didn’t.
“Let’s play Memory Palace.”
I looked at him. “You made that up.”
“No, my mom did. I’ll go first, so I can teach you.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, the first item in my memory palace is a … map of Amsterdam. Because Amsterdam is where I lost my, um, my virginity in a public park.” He laughed self-consciously, like he was already rethinking his brag. “So, A is for Amsterdam. Now you say mine, then do a B, with a memory attached.”
Did he do it on a bench? Under a bush? Just out in the middle of the grass? I bet it was in a gazebo. I’d pictured Finch having sex with some long-legged Dutch girl five different ways before I realized I was taking way too long to answer.
“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam, because that’s where you lost your v-card.” I put air quotes around the phrase with my voice. “And B is for … Beloved, because I read it when my mom and I lived in Vermont.”
“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam because that’s where I lost my … v-card, and I’m already regretting picking that one, B is for Beloved, because you read it when you lived in Vermont, and C is for, let’s see, C is for crickets, because they scared the shit out of me when I was little.”
I didn’t make fun of him for that. Crickets were creepy. I named the three items in our memory palace, and paused. “Okay, D is for driving, because that’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing.”
“Nope. Has to be a thing. Like an object you can pick up.”
“Fine,” I muttered. “D is for Dazed and Confused, because I watched it in a motel room once.”
“A movie? Because you remember watching it?”
“Yeah,” I said defensively. “It’s a thing, and I remember it.”
“Fine, fine.” After listing A through D, Finch smiled. “And E is for eggs benedict, because it’s what my mom makes me when I’m sick. Made.”
For a moment, we both held our breath. Then his eyes flicked to the neck of my sweatshirt, where the top of my tattoo crawled toward my collarbone. “You’re up for F. F is for flower, right? I’ve always wanted to ask about it.”
I touched the inked blossom self-consciously, remembering the look on Ella’s face when I came home with it. A lost look, an anger I couldn’t place. I’d felt ashamed without ever knowing why. “Yeah. Maybe when we get to T.”
I did F, H, and J (falafel because Ella liked it, honey because I liked it, Jane Eyre because I’d read it in Tempe). Finch did G, I, and K (gingerbread because his mom used to make gingerbread mansions, icicles because freshman year he wrote an entire fantasy novel about a warhorse named Icicle, and Kit Kats because once his family lived on them for a day, when their car broke down in a snowstorm).
It was my turn again. L. I rapped out everything in our memory palace, feeling a goofy sense of satisfaction when I got it right. “Okay. L. L is for…”
“Don’t say a food because you’ve eaten it or a book because you’ve read it,” Finch said. “Give me, like, a real memory.”
I felt a flush of irritation, colored with shame. “Are you saying I’m playing your car game wrong?”
“No! I just … I thought I could get to know you this way. Like maybe you’d share something about your past. Your family.”
He said it lightly, without emphasis, but I knew what he wanted.
“You remember I’ve never met her, right?” I asked hotly. “Like, ever? Althea figures not at all into my life, and my mom hasn’t talked to her in sixteen years.”
“What about when you were little? Where you grew up? What do you remember about that?”
His eyes were on the traffic ahead, but his voice held a sharp, acquisitive note. Like he was collecting findings on me for a book. It would’ve pissed me off anyway, but what made it worse was his certainty. That everyone’s mind was flush with memories they could toss off casually. Half the shit I thought had happened to me happened in books. Or to Ella, in one of her stories about her early single-mom days, trying to make ends meet.
“I don’t want to play your stupid game anymore,” I said, turning toward the window. “And who uses a car game as an excuse to brag about having sex with some bitch in a park?”
“Some bitch? She was my girlfriend for eight months. It’s so ugly when girls call each other that word.”
“Oh, my god, Finch, go get a liberal arts degree.”
In a perfect world I would’ve had headphones I could put on right then, and a cigarette I could smoke in his airspace, but this was not a perfect world. I settled for turning my head and staring out the window, letting all the little alphabetized memories fall from my brain like snow.
The silence in the car stretched, stretched, and finally slackened, when it became clear nobody was going to break it. Good.
I was staring into the scrub by the side of the road when traffic let up. Finch eased ahead at a steady clip, and the radio turned into a soothing drone as I drifted into the fugue state of the emotionally exhausted long-distance traveler. Without distraction, Ella’s absence was settling back into my bones. As long as we were moving, the panic abated. Every time I saw brake lights, it kicked back to life.
Scrub turned into trees turned into a thin woods. We veered off the main road and onto something two-lane and winding. Dimly I saw a wobbling light by the side of the road ahead of us, and squinted toward it. A headlamp, on a man in ridiculous bike pants. He was jogging in place, fingers on the pulse beneath his chin. It looked silly, I smiled. Then a dark-skinned woman in a snow-colored dress materialized beside him and put her mouth to his throat.
The car flew past, road and jogger and woman hurtling into blackness behind us. “Did you see that?” I screeched. Finch jumped, the car swerving to the right.
“What?”
“That jogger—that woman—” What exactly had I seen? “Are there vampires in the Hinterland?”
His hands tightened on the wheel. “Oh, my god. Not exactly.”
“Turn around.”
Finch slowed and pulled a U-turn. As we retraced our path, I strained for the sight of a headlamp, or the hump of two shapes in the dim. But there was nothing to see. After five minutes of slow driving, Finch turned us around again.
“You’re sure you saw something? You were kind of drifting off, right?”
I gave him a dirty look, though it was true. Had my overwhelmed mind cooked up some waking nightmare out of scary stories and the dark? I remembered the article I’d ripped out at Ness’s apartment—left behind, along with my school uniform, in the Target bathroom.
“Pull over quick.”
His eyes flicked to the trees, shuffling their leaves in the navy near-dark. “Wait. Let’s get farther away.” He drove ten more minutes, leaving the site of whatever I’d seen far behind us, then pulled the car onto the shoulder and brought his hand down on the power locks. The car ticked to quiet and night pressed close against the windows.