Chapter 17

I PEEK INTO the first washroom stall. The toilet is clogged with a nest of toilet paper. In the second stall, the ground is covered in a slime of toilet paper soaked in mystery liquid. Well. I guess it’s not that much of a mystery.

I go back to the first stall and flip the toilet lid down with the tip of my toe so I don’t have to look at it. But when I close the door and go to hang my backpack, I realize a second horrible thing. This stall doesn’t have a coat hook.

This has got to be the worst convenience store washroom I’ve been to. No, second worst. At least this one has locks that work.

“Zahira?” I say.

“What?” she says from the other side. Last I checked, she was touching up her eyebrows in the mirror.

I open the door. “Can you hold my backpack.”

She makes a short humming sound and reaches for it without turning away from the mirror, taking a few tries before successfully grabbing my backpack. I take out my new clothes and duck back into the stall. The top of the toilet paper dispenser looks clean enough. Still, I wipe it off before putting my stuff there.

It’s only when I take off my damp and starting-to-smell hoodie that I realize just how much my T-shirt reeks too. Of rainwater and sweat and greasy food.

I sniff my new hoodie. It smells like the thrift store, old and sweet. It smells clean. Suddenly I can’t bear the idea of putting it over my disgusting shirt.

“Zahira?”

“What?”

“There’s a shirt in my bag. Can you pass it to me?”

I hear her unzip my backpack and rustle through it. And then she pauses. “This ratty one?”

I wouldn’t call it that, but I say, “Yeah.”

“It’s falling apart.”

I scowl. It’s not like she hasn’t seen it before. I literally wore it last night. It’s been my sleeping shirt for two years. “It doesn’t matter. Just give it to me.”

“You don’t have any other tees?”

“No.”

She sighs, and I can practically hear her half-eyeroll. “Hang on.”

I hear her heading to the door, and I scowl again. “Where are you going?”

“Getting you a better shirt,” she calls, and then the door clamps shut.

I have to bite back from yelling I don’t need a better shirt. It would be annoying. And it would be a lie. I could use a better shirt. I hate admitting that.

Oh. And also, yelling would draw attention. Cardinal rule number four. Keep a low profile.

A few minutes later, Zahira comes back and waves a bunched-up shirt over the top of the door. “Shirt,” she says.

I take it. It’s an aqua tie-dye shirt with some kind of comic I don’t understand printed on the front. It’s ugly, so thank god it’ll be hidden under my hoodie.

“You can keep it,” she says. “I never wear that one.”

Yeah, I can tell from the heavy smell of closet coming from the shirt. It’s too big, but at least it’s not thin and unravelling and filled with little holes.

I take off my gross shirt and tug on Zahira’s. “Why do you just have a random shirt?”

“All my stuff is in my truck,” she says. And after a heavy sigh, “I got kicked out of my apartment.”

I remember hearing that. I don’t want her to get mad at me for eavesdropping though, so I keep my mouth shut.

I pull on my new hoodie, and then my new jacket, and then my grey jeans. I already have my new shoes on. It’s strange to feel so nice and warm after being cold and wet and miserable for so long. In a few days it won’t matter. But for now, I’ll take it.

I step out of the stall, and Zahira brightens. “Look at you! Those fit you well.”

“Thanks.” I give my new look a onceover in the mirror. Good. I don’t look suspicious. I take my backpack from Zahira and start for the door.

Her phone rings. No, just a chime. A text message. I can tell it’s from Aaron because Zahira takes one look at the screen and makes a face of absolute stink.

I stop at the door and watch her debate whether to reply or not. Another chime, and the stink turns into anger. She begins typing out a reply.

And keeps typing.

And keeps typing.

It’s like she doesn’t remember I’m standing right at the door, waiting for her to finish so we can leave this rancid little washroom. I try clearing my throat. I try opening and closing the door. Nothing.

“Zahira,” I say.

“Hm?”

She didn’t even look up. I cross my arms and give her the look. “Do you maybe want to save the lover’s spat for later? We’re kind of on a time crunch here.”

“Just…” She flips a hand, still typing away. “Go pick out what you want for lunch. I’ll find you later.”

I guess I haven’t really mastered the look yet. Clearly I’m not going to get her to unstick her eyes from her phone, so I kick the door open and trudge to the food section. Lunch? We haven’t even had breakfast yet.

I pick out my usual convenience store meal, which is a cold wrap and a bottle of generic orange juice. I stop in front of the iced coffee before remembering—remembering that I don’t know what coffee Zahira likes, or if she even likes coffee at all.

Speaking of Zahira, she still hasn’t come out of the washroom. What can she possibly be texting Aaron? I thought they broke up.

I snag a basket from beside the entrance and run my mental road trip checklist. Giant bottles of water. A few energy bars. Tissue paper and wet wipes and hand sanitizer. I don’t know if I need this much stuff. I don’t know how long it’ll take to get to Suddence.

I find a heavy book of maps on the bottom shelf and flip through it, trying to find where we are. But then I hear the washroom door open, and Zahira finally comes out.

She takes one look in my basket and says, “Why do we need all that?”

I can tell from her crankiness that she didn’t make up with Aaron. Shocker.

I say, “How long does it take to get to Ornament?”

“Depends on traffic.” She sticks her hands in her pockets. “I’d say two days. Three days, tops.”

I think for a second and put back some of the energy bars and one big bottle of water. “That should be enough.”

“Sure,” she says. Flippantly, like she’s taking my word only because she doesn’t care.

Her phone rings. It’s a proper ring this time. She doesn’t even look at the screen. She just jams the decline button.

“Come on,” she grouses. I read that word in a book once. It’s not a word I think about a lot because it’s weird, and I’m pretty sure it’s also a bird. But there’s no other way to describe how Zahira sounds right now. “Let’s pay.”

I lug the basket to the register. Zahira snatches a bottle of soda and asks the cashier for one of the oily rolling hotdogs at the counter. I wrinkle my nose at her lunch. I thought grownups are supposed to be obsessed with healthy food.

“And also, forty dollars of gas for pump number…” She squints out the window. “…two, please.”

She pays, and we carry our stuff to her car in paper bags. Her phone rings again. This time she just lets it ring and ring until it stops.

I want to ask why she doesn’t just block his number, but she has the absolute air of don’t talk to me, so I bite the inside of my lips instead.

After we stuff the groceries into the car, Zahira goes to the gas pump, and I hang my feet out of the open passenger door and drum my heels on the bottom ledge of the car. The sun is peeking between the clouds, making the wet asphalt glitter. There’s no warmth in it, though, and my sigh comes out in a cloud of white.

Zahira’s phone rings again. This time she digs it out with a growl and flicks it open like a knife.

“You got something to say?” she snaps into it. “I’m all ears. Let’s hear it.”

Aaron’s tinny voice says, “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“Yeah? And why wouldn’t I be okay?” She stabs the pump into her car. I get the feeling she wishes she were stabbing something else.

“Look, I didn’t want this to happen,” Aaron says, and Zahira actually rolls her eyes this time. Not that half-roll I’ve seen her do. Her eyes go full white. “Those guys—I was just scared—”

“And you think I wasn’t scared?” Zahira exclaims.

“I didn’t—”

Zahira hangs up. And going by the extra buttons she’s pressing, she just blocked Aaron.

I climb to the driver’s side and roll down the window. “He sounds like a douchebag.”

She frowns at me. “Where’d you learn that word?”

From Marisa. But I say, “TV.”

“Don’t you know it’s a bad word?”

“What’s the deal with Aaron?”

She hawks a laugh and noticeably doesn’t answer.

“What did he do?” I lean farther out the window. A mistake, because it makes my side hurt, and it takes everything not to wince. I stick my hands in my pockets so I can press on my side without Zahira seeing. “Why were those two guys so mad at him?”

“Because…” She scrunches up her face. “You wouldn’t get it.”

“Why?”

“It’s grownup stuff.”

“I know grownup stuff.”

Clearly that isn’t good enough for her because she just keeps pumping gas.

But then she must have noticed me looking at her expectantly because she sighs and flips her eyes towards the sky.

“We met in school,” she says, and knocks the pump against the gas valve to get every last drop. “He was nice. Funny. We were both in med, and we were both broke, so he said we can figure it out together.” She bobs her head as she impersonates him, doing a voice that sounds nothing like the one I heard over her phone. “Except he didn’t do anything, and I was working all the time, and it still wasn’t enough, so I finally decided to drop out, and he—” She makes an impatient sound, like she really, really needs to bite something. “He had the glowing idea of borrowing from some guys on the street. And obviously he couldn’t pay them back, and—god, and he just left. If I ever see him again…”

She shoves the pump back into its socket. Her fist is clenched so tight around it her knuckles are shiny and white, and I get a picture of what she’ll do if she sees him again. It’s funny. She’s wearing pink-rimmed sunglasses on top of her head, and they’re heart-shaped, but she’s so very much not in love right now.

She gets in the car and polishes off half her hotdog before I can even get the plastic wrap off my lunch. She shoves the rest between her teeth and unearths an old permanent marker from the glove box.

“Pass me that,” she says through the hotdog, pointing at the book of maps. Road Atlas, it says.

I dig it out and pass it to her. She chows down on the rest of the hot dog until all that’s left is a smudge of grease beside her mouth. Then she scrubs her lips with the back of her hand, and then that’s gone, too.

She puts the atlas against the wheel and thumbs through it. “We are…here.” She marks a spot and flips a few pages. “Ornament is here. I’ve driven to the border before. It took…yeah, it took two days. Less, probably. Where exactly are you going again?”

“Give me the book,” I say, and take it from her. I scan the pages until I find it. Suddence. Smack in the middle of nowhere.

Zahira is busy taking big swigs of her soda. I point at the city nearest to Suddence and say, “Here.”

She pulls the book back and squints at the town, her cheeks puffed with soda. We did an experiment in school once where we soaked chicken bone in soda for a week. It was supposed to show how the sugar and caffeine eats your teeth away. But what it really did was make me wonder if fizzy chicken soup existed. I thought about telling her gargling on soda like mouthwash will ruin her teeth, but I get the feeling she doesn’t really care. About her teeth, and about what I say.

Finally she swallows the soda and says, “Okay. Ornament City. That’s not that far from the border.” She flips to a different page, a closer view of the town. “I can drop you off in the city center. Downtown. That alright?”

I nod, taking a small bite of my wrap.

Zahira draws a careful line through the book, following the roads and highways until the two locations are connected. She sits back with satisfaction. “There. We can cover most of it today, and the rest tomorrow morning. And we should have enough money for petrol and one night at a motel.”

I take a small sip of my orange juice and wish I got something warm instead. “Why can’t we drive through the night?”

She squints one eye. “Why would we?”

“No motel. Save money.”

“I’m not dropping you off in the middle of the night.” She actually sounds offended. “And news flash, I can’t drive for twelve hours straight. I need to rest.”

“Fine.” I sit back and sip on my juice.

“And I need to keep driving east after I drop you off, so I definitely need to sleep.”

That surprises me. Not the fact that she’s driving east. The fact that I never thought about what she’ll do after she drops me off. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” she says. I get mixed feelings from the way she says it, like home is a good place, but she doesn’t want to go there. “I was supposed to go back for the holidays, anyway.”

A car honks as it pulls into the gas station, wanting Zahira’s spot. Zahira does her half-eyeroll and tosses the atlas on my lap. “Keep me on track,” she says, and starts the car with that terrible coughing gurgle. I give her a pointy look. Her response is flicking her heart-shaped sunglasses down from the top of her head.

I roll my eyes, which I’m sure doesn’t look as impressive as hers, and kick off my new shoes so I can stretch out my toes. Once I navigate her to the highway, it’s back to having nothing to do, so I flip ahead to our destination. There’s only one road leading into Suddence, and it’s a long one. How long would it take to walk there? A few hours? My side is already throbbing in protest at the idea.

Suddence. I don’t know much about it, except that it’s a small town. My mind goes immediately to those little seaside villages with colourful wooden houses sitting on short cliffs against the cold, grey sea. But of course, Suddence isn’t by the sea. As far as I can tell, it isn’t even near a lake. A little town in the middle of nowhere. What would it look like?

“Owhhh,” Zahira suddenly says, her face all twisted up. At first I think she’s in pain, but then she says, “I hate this song.”

I haven’t been paying attention to the music. I’ve heard this song a few times before. Not enough to totally know the lyrics, but enough to know it’s a song about falling in love. Probably in a club.

“I like it,” I say.

“Really?” She leans an elbow on the door and rubs her forehead. “It just makes me think of my stupid summer job last year. Actual flashbacks.”

“Oh,” I say.

“I used to work in a pizza shop in the mall,” she says, even though I didn’t ask. “Metro Place. You ever been there? It’s like they only played the same five songs.”

I go back to imagining Suddence.

“Oh my god,” Zahira says out of nowhere. “Have you ever been to an arcade?”

I try to follow her path of thought but fail. “Huh?”

“The pizza shop. It was across from an arcade. I’ve been there a few times. I swear they rig all their machines. But have you, you know…”

She gives me a meaningful look through her pink-tinted sunglasses, and I get what she’s talking about. “I’ve thought about it,” I say. I really have. I’ve seen arcades on TV, and I fantasize a lot about how I would cheat the games with my sparks. It would be so easy. I would have enough tickets to trade for one of the big prizes. But I was never allowed to go, so I never got to try.

“There were these machines,” Zahira says. “These moving platforms full of tokens. The whole conceit is that you have to put your token in at the right time, and it’ll all get pushed off—hard to explain, but I bet you would do wonders at them. And the claw machines, you could just…” She flicks her fingers three times. “You wouldn’t even have to put tokens in.”

I press my lips against a smile. I’ve thought about that, too. “Yeah.”

“Or even Skee-Ball, or…or those basketball games! God, we could be a duo. We could make bank.” She leans back in her seat contently. “Maybe before I drop you off, I can take you to that arcade, and we can try it out, yeah? It’s only like, an hour away from Ornament City.”

She’s joking, but I can’t help my smile now as I imagine the two of us running through the arcade, trailing long strands of tickets behind us. It’s weird. I barely even know her. But maybe I do want to go with her. Maybe I do want to go to an arcade and cheat at every game.

But I can’t. Even if it’s only a few hours.

The thought stings. For a moment she almost convinced me it was a possibility. Like maybe we could just make a quick detour to her hometown before we part ways forever.

Too risky, says Marisa’s voice in my head. Too risky, and she’s right.

So before my imagination spirals out of control, I stamp it all out.