You Are Here (21 page)

“Let me know if y’all need any help with anything,” he said, mostly to Emma, his eyes following her intently as she veered off toward the food aisle. Peter glared at him before hurrying to catch up with her.

“What a creep, huh?” he said as Emma thrust a bag of marshmallows at him. She scanned the rows of canned foods until she found the beans, then the packages of hot dogs and graham crackers, orange soda and dog biscuits, handing them over one by one until all of it was balanced in Peter’s scrawny arms. He glanced over to see that the guy was now leaning against the counter, his eyes still focused on Emma as he chewed a piece of gum with the slow rhythm of a cow, his jaw working in methodical circles.

“He keeps watching you,” Peter whispered, nearly bumping into Emma when she stopped before a rack of cheap-looking clothing. “It’s weird.”

She picked up a blue sweatshirt with a big red star on the front that read roanoke, virginia: star city. “Maybe he likes me,” she joked, and Peter snorted, a feeble attempt to illustrate just how far this was from his own mind. Emma raised her eyebrows, and he felt the heat spread from his neck up into his face. He twisted the bag of marshmallows hard in his fist, feeling them lose their shape between his fingers.

She grabbed another sweatshirt from the rack and shoved it at him. “Here,” she said. “One for each of us.”

Peter could nearly picture the lone five-dollar bill still tucked in his wallet. “Don’t you think we should save our money for something we actually need?”

“It’s a present,” she said, marching up to the register where the attendant was waiting, his ridiculously white teeth bared in a leering grin. “For our birthdays.”

Peter dumped the pile of food onto the counter, adding a blue lighter to the pile, then slid his sweatshirt beside hers, surprised that she’d remembered. He watched the guy ring them up, half wishing—despite the sweatshirt’s scratchy material and shoddy lettering—that he could put it on right away, though he at least had the good sense to be embarrassed by the significance he knew he’d attach to it because Emma had picked it out.

“This’ll look nice on you,” the guy said to Emma, folding the sweatshirt into a plastic bag alongside the can of beans. “Real pretty.”

“It’s a birthday present,” she told him. “To myself.”

“Happy birthday,” said the guy. “A real pretty shirt for a real pretty girl.”

Once they’d paid, they walked out of the store together, both struggling not to laugh until they were a safe distance away. Emma held up the sweatshirt and twirled in a circle.

“Real pretty,” Peter said in an exaggerated drawl.

“Aw,” she said, tossing his sweatshirt to him. “You’ll look real pretty in it too.”

“I think this is the first time you’ve ever gotten me a birthday present.”

Emma smiled. “If it makes you feel any better, I forget everybody else’s, too,” she told him. “I’m terrible about that stuff. I must’ve gotten at least some of the absentminded professor genes.”

“It’s okay,” Peter said with a grin, holding up his sweatshirt. “This top-quality half-polyester, half-cotton garment more than makes up for it.”

“Only the best for you,” she said as she opened the door and slipped into the car. Peter stood there a moment, not quite ready to be on the move again. The air had already lost the spongy quality from earlier in the day, shedding the mugginess of the city as they pushed farther into the mountains. There was a coolness here that pinched at his lungs and made his eyes water as he yawned and stretched and squinted out at the glancing sun and the needle-like pines. He felt suddenly happy, and he could tell Emma was too, as if the cure to the blues were always to be found here in this run-down husk of a gas station, and they only ever had to come here to discover it.

The dog was lying on his back in the car, blinking lazily up at the sun, and he scrambled to his feet with a little grunt as they rejoined him. Just beyond the mini-mart the road took an upward swing, and the car bucked and surged as Peter coaxed it along, winding through the dense woods and up toward the campground. Emma was holding her new sweatshirt in her lap, tracing a finger along the edges of the star, and Peter’s mind crept toward nightfall, nudging aside reality—against his better judgment—to consider the kinds of scenes found only in the movies: scenic overlooks and parked cars, a lanky teenager with his arm slung over some girl’s shoulders, the confidence of the lean-in, the big kiss backlit by the hazy white moon.

Whenever he imagined trying to kiss Emma, the idea seemed depressingly laughable; the sheer mechanics of the thing—the subtlety of reaching over, the complicated logistics of leaning and veering and lining things up—completely impossible. Peter had never kissed a girl before, and he had great admiration for those who did it so casually. To him it seemed a feat more difficult than jumping out of an airplane or sailing around the world. Those things required nerve and daring and perhaps a little bit of stupidity. But at least they didn’t involve the possibility of complete and utter rejection, or maybe even worse, a miscalculation of aim that could result in bumping heads or clinking teeth with the girl you were meant to be kissing.

He looked miserably over at Emma, who was busy sorting through the bag of provisions for the evening. The sky ahead of them was marbled with clouds, and the wind picked up as they neared the summit, passing scattered groups of picnic tables and fire pits set along the edges of the woods. To their left the city of Roanoke stretched out in a clumsy pattern of smokestacks and buildings, and Peter remembered the giant star that glowed out across it at night and felt suddenly hopeful. Maybe the answer to all of his problems was nothing more than a darkened sky and a glittering city, a lofty perch above the world below. It seemed entirely possible that it was all just a matter of setting and location, and Peter wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. After all, he understood better than anyone the importance of geography.

chapter nineteen

In the gray pocket of time between daylight and dusk they set off from the campsite to collect wood for the fire.

“Why don’t you grab some of these little twigs?” Peter told her, snapping a branch with the heel of his shoe and holding it up for her to see. He squared his shoulders and puffed out his chest a bit. “I can handle the bigger ones.”

It took a lot for Emma to refrain from rolling her eyes as she watched him struggle with an enormous limb, half dragging it along the dirt path as the dog loped ahead. The woods smelled of pine needles and smoke, and they could hear other campers in the distance, the thin voices of a few girls singing, the beery sounds of men’s laughter. There was a thin haze that hung just above the ground, hugging the trunks of the trees and causing the dog to reappear every so often like an unbalanced ghost.

When Peter seemed satisfied with their haul, they carted the wood back toward the fire pit. The dog took off with one of the branches Emma dropped, and by the time they caught up, he’d reduced it to a neat pile of splinters. Peter returned to the car, which was parked just beyond a nearby picnic table, and rummaged through for some scrap paper, something to use as kindling to get the fire going. But when he couldn’t find anything, he returned with one of his maps instead, and Emma scrambled to her feet, gaping at him.

“You’re going to use
that
?” she asked, surprised that he’d be willing to part with it, though she hadn’t once seen him refer to any of them. He had both hands poised to rip it down the center, a half smile on his face, and when Emma looked closer, she realized it was a map of North Carolina. “That’s the only one we actually need!”

Peter shrugged. “I already know the way.”

“But what if we get lost?” she said. “Why not tear up Madagascar or something?”

But he was already shredding it into small pieces, tucking them between the twigs set up like teepees in the charred circle of ash: first Durham, then Wilmington, then Hendersonville, the little scraps of the towns straining in the wind as if reluctant to be sacrificed.

“Once you’ve been somewhere, you know it,” he said. “So you don’t need a map anymore.”

“That’s great,” Emma said. “Except we haven’t technically been there yet. We’re still a state short.”

“I know,” he said with a grin. “But it’s symbolic.”

Peter pulled the blue lighter out of his back pocket. “There are worse things than wandering.”

“Well, if we end up wandering around Virginia for the next few days …”

“Like getting lost?”

He shrugged, his face wide open and serious. “I felt a lot more lost at home than I do here. I just never realized it. But things seem different now, you know?”

Emma watched as he got the fire started, touching the lit state of North Carolina—which was quickly collapsing in on itself—from one branch to the next, coaxing the flames to life and blowing on the kindling until the whole thing began to burn in earnest. She was never sure how to respond to this kind of honesty, though she felt much the same way. All her life she’d been hiding or walking away, doing her best to fade into the background. But things
were
different now. She could feel it the same as Peter, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it just yet.

Peter stood back to admire his work, leaving a sooty handprint across the back of the white dog, who had ambled over to join him.

“‘It is not down in any map,’” he said grandly, taking a seat on one of the flattened logs that was angled toward the fire. “‘True places never are.’”

“Who said that?”

“Herman Melville,” he said. “
Moby Dick
.”

“My dad’s favorite.”

“Mine, too. After I read it for the first time, I asked my dad to throw me a whale-themed birthday party. I’ve never seen him so happy. He thought I’d finally gotten into fishing.”

“I don’t think I actually remember any of your birthday parties.”

“That’s because there weren’t any,” Peter said simply. “I always liked planning them out, but they never ended up happening. My dad isn’t great on follow-through. Not that anyone would’ve come, anyway.”

“I might have.”

Peter buried his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt and smiled. “It’s just as well. I’m not a big fan of birthday parties. It’s like anything where you have high expectations.” He raised his eyes to hers, giving her a long and searching look. “You’re just asking to be disappointed.”

Emma shifted around on the log, feeling suddenly too visible. The fire was spitting now, an orange glow pushing back the corners of darkness, and her cheeks burned from the heat. But it was more than that too. Peter was watching her with such undisguised longing, such wild hope, that it was all she could do not to bolt from the log.

It wasn’t like she was blind. She knew that he liked her, had known it since the moment he pulled up to the rest stop in the blue convertible and she realized just what she’d asked of him. She thought maybe she’d even known it before he did. But until now it had seemed more of an annoyance than anything else, an added complication to the million other complications on this trip, like a bug she was forced to continually swat away.

But lately the evidence had become increasingly hard to ignore: suspicious leaning and hand-brushing, awkwardness above and beyond the usual levels of stuttering and trailing off, of blushing and blustering. Whenever boys had liked her before, Emma had either ignored them or humored them, never quite letting herself care enough to find it anything more than amusing. She’d always felt a sort of detached interest in the process, a bemused fascination with the way these things played themselves out: waiting for James Nicholson to work up the courage to put an arm around her in the movie theater, or guessing how many days it would be until Gavin Sourgen tried to hold her hand on the walk home from school. It had never been much of a problem to faze them out when they got too attached; as with everything else in her life, Emma simply took a giant step backward.

But with Peter it was different.

Emma knew she could be distant and cagey and abrupt. She knew she was wired differently from most people, that she wasn’t often understood and was even less often inclined to try to understand others. But in spite of this she’d come to rely on Peter in a way she’d never allowed herself to do with anyone before. He was easy to talk to, hard to get rid of, and one of the few people who had the nerve to point out when she was being stupidly stubborn or just plain rude. Somehow he’d become the one constant in this whole uneven chapter of her life, and the idea that that could change was unsettling.