“You know what I’m talking about. How privileged can you get?”
“Me, Ellery Djan-Finch-whatever? I’m privileged?”
“This isn’t about money!” he exploded. “You argued with a cop because you know you can. It’s so damned arrogant. Look at me.” He gestured at the obvious; he gestured at his skin. “What do you think would’ve happened if I’d been the one screaming at a cop? And he didn’t even give you a ticket!”
“Did you want him to give me a ticket?” I said, ignoring his point. “Should I go back and ask for one?”
He shook his head, staring out the window.
Nothing made me angrier than someone refusing to answer me. The edges of my vision fizzed into something humming and black, till I felt like I was looking at the road through a tunnel.
“Come on. Tell me what I should do. Tell me what I should’ve done.”
“Just stop,” he said tiredly. “Let’s go to the nearest motel, find a reroute tomorrow.”
I should’ve shut up, but I didn’t. “Hell no. You started a conversation, now let’s finish it.”
“God, let it rest! You shouldn’t have insulted a cop, okay? He could’ve dragged me out of the car because you were being an idiot. You think rich matters in this situation? You think a cop looks at me and sees rich? You’re pretending you don’t get it, but you do.”
I did get it, I did. And the shame of it boiled into something darker. Before my brain could catch up, I jerked the wheel and turned the car off the road, sending us rattling toward the trees.
“Alice!” Finch lunged across and grabbed at the wheel, but I held it fast. The world narrowed to an oak trunk looming in my sight. Till panic clawed its way over the tide of rage, making me yank the wheel hard to the left and swerve back onto the road. We rolled over something that made the body of the car jounce hard. My head smacked the roof, and the anger burned away.
Itchy regret took its place. I’d let myself drift too close to the dark continent at the core of me, a lawless place I tried never to visit. It had been a while, but it was as familiar as the taste of medicine.
Finch sat frozen in the passenger seat. I could feel his eyes on me. I drove faster, like I could leave what I did behind.
“What. The hell. Was that?”
“I’m sorry,” I croaked.
“I don’t care.” He said it again, sounding astonished. “I don’t care. What the hell were you—what am I supposed to think now? How are you gonna convince me you won’t try to kill us again?”
I clenched my fists around the wheel. “I won’t. I wasn’t. I get … I’m bad with people. It’s stupid. I was being stupid, talking to the cop like that. It’s just, disrespect makes me mad.”
“It makes me mad, too. But sometimes you have to swallow it the fuck down.”
“Stop,” I said, lifting a hand. “I’m serious. I know that was horrible. But I can’t tell you I won’t drive us off the road again if you don’t stop talking about it, so maybe you should take the wheel.”
He settled back against the window, arms folded tightly over his chest, and said nothing. So I drove. All the way to the gravel lot of the first motel I saw: the Starlite Inn, pushed right back up against the trees. Finch glanced at them, but said nothing.
We were checked in by a man who looked exactly how the guy checking you in at a cheap motel in the middle of the woods is supposed to. I’d assumed there’d be a guest book, where I could sign funny names and maybe get Finch to look at me again, but they must only have those in old movies.
He paid for just one room, and I was grateful. At this point I didn’t trust he wouldn’t disappear. Go back to New York, or try to, and take a wrong turn and end up in the Hinterland.
Clingy didn’t become me. I prided myself on not needing friends—I thought it meant I didn’t need anybody. Turned out it just meant I needed Ella terribly, too much. She was literally all I had.
Our room was the in-between color of despair, with a landscape painting behind each bed that was a Rorschach test for depression: if you saw a faded-out cornfield in a dusty blue frame, you were fine. But if all you could envision was whatever god-awful sweatshop must’ve produced it, the prognosis was not good.
“Stop staring at the ugly painting,” Finch said. “You’re weirding me out.” He flopped down face-first on one of the beds, then immediately rolled over. “This pillow smells like the time my bunkmate peed his bed at camp. And I’m too tired to care.”
I sat on the edge of the other bed. “I really am sorry.”
He winced. “Don’t say that.”
“What? Why not?”
He threw an arm over his eyes. “Just forget it. Look, what did you see on the road, behind the cop? Not an accident, right?”
With his eyes covered, he was easier to talk to. I lay back on my own pillow. “Not an accident. I don’t know why, but it felt kinda, you know. Hinterland-y. You saw the car with all its doors open?”
“I didn’t see anything. There was a cop in my face, I was too busy trying to look innocent.”
“You? Could you look anything but innocent?”
“Oh, yeah. I can be a real asshole.” His voice was drifting.
“I don’t buy it,” I said softly. “You seem like one of the good ones.”
“Shows what you know.”
There was something in his voice that made me wary, and I took too long to think of a response. His breathing turned steady and slow, a contagious sound that climbed into my limbs and made them heavy as sand. I could barely lift my arm to turn off the light.
After I did, I blinked up at the ceiling and smiled: it was covered in phosphorescent stars. I let my eyes close. The sound of Ellery Finch sleeping was almost as good as having someone to reach out for in the dark.
18
Finch was having a nightmare.
I heard him in the next bed, making small, sorry sounds. The light that came in around the curtains was the dusty yellow of streetlamps. I couldn’t tell what time it was, and my phone was plugged into Finch’s charger across the room.
“Finch. Ellery.”
He didn’t answer. When I switched on the bedside light he flinched but didn’t wake. Silently I sat up and swung my feet to the floor. I stopped there, waiting for his eyes to open.
They didn’t. My body felt gritty from the motel bed, like I was swimming in the dirt of other people’s bodies and just couldn’t see it. I rolled my neck and watched him.
His head was thrown back and his eyes were moving beneath their lids. Usually when I looked at people too long I started seeing them as component parts: Bony noses. Eyeballs in sockets. Odd cartilage curve of ears and fingers so strange and overevolved and makeup floating just over the skin and what the hell was with pants, and knees, and how did we walk around like all of this was normal?
But Finch stayed staunchly, solidly unified. He was a boy in a bed with his neck stretched long. His mouth shaped itself around words I couldn’t hear, then he moaned with such aching regret I was next to him with my hand on his shoulder before I could think.
“Hey. You’re having a bad dream.”
He sucked in hard through his nose. His eyes shuttered open and hooked on the ceiling, then my face. I watched the dream leave them and sense roll back in.