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Then he folded it again.

And again.

And again.

He kept folding until it was so small and so thick that he couldn’t make it bend anymore. Then he stepped over to a trash can beside a water fountain and carefully dropped it in, watching it fall.

“Win—,” I said.

He looked up at me. “We’ve got stuff to do, man,” he said. “Let’s get back to your place.”

Neither of us mentioned the check again. Though I wondered how much money Win had just thrown away, I didn’t wonder why he’d done it.

By the time we’d swung by the little bike shop back in St. Albans to grab extra tubes, things were beginning to feel normal again. After a run through Taco Bell before returning to my house, I’d convinced myself he’d forgotten about the whole thing. Now he was talking without making much sense and allowing me to do all the work. Both signs indicated that he’d returned to equilibrium.

“C’mon, man, be a pal,” Win said.

“No way,” I said. “My dad loves those pipes.”

“He’ll never miss it! He’s got, like, nine of the same corncob jobs here on the wall.” Win gestured toward a hanger on the Peg-Board above the bench, holding half a dozen of the pipes, all smelling faintly of cherry tobacco.

“You don’t even smoke,” I said, adding, “and it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to start when we’re trying to cover eighty miles a day.”

“I don’t want to smoke it, genius,” he said.

“Then, why take it? Every little bit of weight counts.”

“I’m not the one drilling holes in my toothbrush handle to save ounces,” he said.

“No, you’re the one wanting to take useless crap on the road. What do you want it for, anyway?”

He shrugged. “Reminds me of this place.”

Before I could ask why he needed to be reminded of my garage, my mom’s car pulled up in the driveway. She stopped short of her normal parking spot when she beheld our base camp.

“Don’t you think you and Win should work on your bikes in
the barn?” she asked/ordered as she climbed out of the car. There was no way she could fit her Honda into the garage. The slab floor was littered with our two bikes, the four sets of saddlebags, and an impossible amount of camping gear. We were two days away from departure, had graduation practice in a couple of hours, and had yet to load the bikes to get the weight balanced.

“Mrs. Collins, we would, but you know I have those nasty dust allergies,” said Win as he helped himself to another handful of the Spanish peanuts my father kept on his workbench. Win enjoyed needling my mother—probably because no matter what he did to his own, she barely reacted.

Mom wasn’t playing along today. “What’s this?” she demanded, picking up a jar of peanut butter and holding it like it was exhibit A in a bad TV courtroom drama.

“The number one brand that moms and kids all love,” Win deadpanned.

The vein on her temple began to pulse. “I mean, what’s it doing
here
? I bought this jar yesterday,” she said. “Isn’t the whole point of your little adventure to be independent?”

My mother ate nothing with any amount of fat in it, and my father had been having the same turkey sandwich for lunch every day for the past twenty years. I was the only one who ate peanut butter.

“I’ll pay you for it, if that’s what you want,” I offered, trying to sound patient.

“That’s not the point. If you’re so determined to live on your own for the next two months, maybe you need to buy your own groceries?”

This was not about peanut butter. Even so, I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice when I replied, “I know how to buy groceries, Mom.”

“And I make excellent lists,” Win piped in.

We both ignored him. “Seriously, Mom,” I said. “If it’s that big a deal, I’ll just use it now for the packing and put it back later.”

She shook her head, put the jar back on the pile next to my journal and compass, and turned to go.

“Keep it,” she said as she left the garage, half slamming the door behind her. The tools above the bench rattled against their hangers in the aftershock. I closed my eyes and tried to remind myself that this woman had a right to give me a hard time. A right to miss me before I’d even gone.

“You know—deep down—she must really like peanut butter,” Win said, grinning.

I grabbed a couple of tie-downs and started strapping my sleeping bag and pad to my rear rack, not replying.

“That or she’s still not super comfortable with the idea of her baby boy riding his bike in traffic for the next two months.”

Still I said nothing, yanking harder on the straps.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s got to be the peanut butter thing. She must sneak it after-hours, like those ladies in the Lifetime movies. Remember that one we saw—”

“Are you going to help me with this or not?” I asked. Win was still popping back peanuts, elbows perched on the bench.

“I
am
helping,” he said. “I’m providing much-needed clarity into the messy domestic situations of your troubled household.”

“Don’t do that.” “That” was Win’s favorite pastime of channeling the therapists his parents had been sending him to for the last six years. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with their kid, but wouldn’t bother to talk to him when they could pay someone else to. I was the only one who knew about these sessions, and thus the only one who got subjected to his recycled brand of psychobabble. Win wasn’t disturbed. He was just a jackass. And a little bored.

He pushed away from the bench and picked up the West Virginia/Ohio map. “You’re better at all that, dude. Figure out how to load it best, and I’ll learn to repack,” he said, unfolding the map and looking at the line I’d highlighted across Highway 60. “Don’t your grandparents live in Ohio?”

“Yeah. Free food and a place to crash.”

“Works for me,” he said, wadding the map back into something like its original shape. I resisted the urge to snatch it from his hands and fold it properly. Years of Win’s secondhand therapy had taught me a thing or two about enabling. I’d just fix it after he’d gone.

“Get your money yet?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I swear.”

I rolled my eyes. Win’s dad was worth roughly the gross domestic product of a small island nation, and his mom routinely chucked handfuls of guilt money at my friend. Still, he had a nasty habit of not paying his way. “I’m not letting you bum off me for the next sixty days, Win.”

He shook his head sadly. “This from the man who steals Jif from his own, sweet mother.”

“Screw you,” I said, smiling, as Win tossed a peanut into his mouth, only to have it ricochet off his front tooth.

“Blah, blah, blah, best days of our lives, oh the places we’ll go, don’t ever change,” mumbled Tracy Finn in a parody of the valedictory address that she would deliver tomorrow night. We sat under a giant plastic tent on the football field at the school, grateful for a chance to sit after an hour of marching practice in which even the school band seemed to grow bored.

“Why are we practicing graduation?” Win asked.

“Because apparently marching is
really
hard. And they don’t want anybody looking stupid,” I said.

“A little redundant, don’t you think? Most of us are pretty practiced up on the not falling down and making asses of ourselves. You don’t survive this place otherwise,” he said.

Win sat beside me. For the last nine years he’d been sitting beside me. In third grade, when his family moved to West Virginia from New York, the teacher labeled our desks in alphabetical order, placing Coggans next to Collins. And things sort of took, because we’d been inseparable right up through senior year. Best friends by default. Tomorrow night I’d follow him as we marched in, follow him as we walked up to get our diplomas. I just hoped I could lead once in a while out on the road.

“Did you get the water filter?” he asked me.

I nodded. “And the iodine tablets.”

“Good Eagle,” Win said soothingly. Three months ago I’d earned my Eagle Scout rank. Win quit Scouts in eighth grade, but since then he had been mildly harassing me about the fact that I
had stayed in. It was one of the items on a long list of things that had started to get old in our friendship.

Down front the guidance counselor took control of the microphone. “Now, don’t forget to forget the following items for tomorrow’s evening of pomp and circumstance: beach balls, Silly String, air horns, fireworks …”

“Well, we don’t know how far we’ll go between water sources. Some days it might be sixty or seventy miles,” I said.

“Stop trying to scare me, Eagle,” Win began before Alicia Bivins, who was seated in front of us, text-messaging someone on her cell phone, whirled around to face us.

“You guys are really going to do that bike-ride thingie?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure what to say. In fact, I was shocked she’d noticed at all. Alicia—whose looks virtually guaranteed her a spot as the token hot girl on some future reality show—ran in circles decidedly above Chrisandwin.

Win sat up a little straighter. “Hell, yeah.”

“No way! So, like, where are you gonna live?”

It was weird that Alicia, who had once publicly humiliated Win in seventh grade when he asked her to the May Day Dance, had deigned us worthy of her attentions.

“Camping in a tent, under the stars, wherever,” Win said, sounding cavalier.

“That’s so cool,” Alicia said. “Wish I could do that.”

“Come with us,” Win said.

Not that I actually believed that Alicia was any more interested in camping than she was in, well,
us
, but Win’s open invite freaked me out a little. Chrisandwinandalicia? Not a chance.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “My parents would kill me. Plus, I haven’t ridden a bike since, like, middle school.” She uttered the last sentence without trying to hide her disgust.

At that moment Dave Anders, who was sitting another row ahead, turned around in his metal folding chair. “Ten bucks says they don’t make the state line, Alicia.”

I shot him the same dirty look I’d been sending his way since eighth grade. That’s when he’d developed to his freakish size and decided it was his birthright to lord it over the rest of us who were actually normal. He was a football player and going on a scholarship to some backwater division-three school in Florida. That’s not to say he wasn’t smart. He was actually one of only five of us who’d opted to take AP physics during senior year. Win and I were also in there. Me because I was already thinking that the more AP credits I could score, the less my parents would have to shell out for tuition if I decided to go to college. Win because his parents made him.

But since there were only five of us, they couldn’t actually give us a teacher, so Mr. Booker had us meet in the supply closet attached to his classroom for the entire year. He’d come in once or twice a week for a few minutes when he could get away from the class of regular kids he had at the same time, but we were mostly on our own. Win was way more intent on trying to get Dave to punch him, so any studying we did was punctuated by Win making comments about Dave’s mom, or Dave’s beloved Dodge pickup, or phony theorems about the density of Dave’s skull after all those hits he’d taken on the football field. I admit it was pretty entertaining for a while, watching Win yank Dave’s chain, but after we bombed a couple of practice tests, it became clear that Win’s idea of fun was
costing us a lot more than we expected. Most days when we should have been working, I was listening to Dave and Win tear into each other, wondering whom I should be rooting for. Sometimes I wished Dave would just break Win’s jaw so we could do whatever problems we were supposed to be working on.

In the end none of us even signed up for the exam.

“We’re going the whole distance, Dave,” Win said coolly.

Dave snorted. “You don’t have it in you. Don’t have that killer instinct … the drive,” he said, sounding eerily like the future physical-education teacher he was destined to become.

“How would you know?” I asked.

“’Cause guys like you just don’t,” he said.

Guys like us? What was that supposed to mean?

“And what are you doing this summer?” Win asked him.

Dave was quiet a moment. “Working,” he said finally. Alicia was watching us all with interest.

“Working?” Win’s voice sounded playful. “That sounds exciting—mature, even. And where will you be
working
?” he asked, stressing the last word, like the concept was completely alien to him. For a guy who’d never so much as taken out the trash, it sort of was.

Dave shifted back in his seat, pretended to listen to the vice principal’s threats of Breathalyzers tomorrow night. “My grandparents’ farm. Setting tobacco, mostly … it’s good conditioning for football next fall,” he added, but the swagger had gone out of his voice.

“Well,” Win said, “good luck with that, Davey. I hope you find it very fulfilling.
Guys like us
, however”—he hooked a thumb at me—“well, we’re just not cut out for that kind of summer.”

But Dave retained a shred of that idiot obstinacy—the same quality that allowed him to think of football as the only real sport. “You’ll never make it.”

“I’ll take that bet,” Alicia said.

Something in the universe of high school life was shifting. Maybe Alicia was on our side only to make a buck. Maybe only because she was as bored with Dave’s routine as the rest of us. Maybe she actually wanted us to make it. At any rate, it was a first.

“You won’t be sorry,” Win said as the band fired up again with the alma mater and we all rose for the mandatory sing-along.

“Sorry, I couldn’t call sooner, Mom, I left my phone in the room by mistake. Just got in.”

“Christopher?” My mother sounded as panicked as I knew she would. My roommate appeared to be studying—though since classes didn’t start until Monday, I couldn’t be sure what.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said.

“We got you that phone so we could stay in touch. It doesn’t do anyone any good if we can’t contact you,” my mother said. My parents had broken down and added me to the cell phone plan before I left for school. I think Win’s disappearance had Mom spooked, but Dad said it would just be cheaper than paying long-distance charges anyway. But I knew it was a sacrifice on top of so many more they’d made for me to be here.