“Fabulous,” Arden muttered.
“What if the whole thing is an elaborate ruse?” Lindsey went on. “Like ‘Peter’ is just a code name for a kidnapper or murderer who’s created this artsy, sensitive online persona so he can lure unsuspecting young girls into his clutches. And then he keeps them locked up in a penthouse somewhere. Where he forces them into lives of servitude. And drinks their blood.”
“You’re conflating approximately a dozen distinct paranoias there,” Arden told her. “Also, I think there has got to be a better way to kidnap girls than to create a fake online journal, update it every day for a year, and then wait for your readers to somehow piece together what bookstore you supposedly work at.”
“It’s not out of the question, though,” Lindsey said. “Admit that it’s not out of the question.”
“Do you want me to let you out right here?” Arden asked. “I’ll do it. You can hitchhike home.”
They drove past the turnoff for Hancock. Lindsey snorted. “What a dumb name for a town.”
“I assume it’s named after John Hancock,” Arden said. “You know? One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence? Famous old dude? Ring any bells?”
“It sounds like slang for something sexual. Like ‘hand cock.’” Lindsey made a jerk-off motion with her hand.
Arden rolled her eyes, then cracked up. “You have a filthy mind, Lindsey.”
Half an hour later, they stopped for gas. The Heart of Gold had been making a weird whump-whump-whump noise, so Arden walked around, inspecting it. She felt like a fraud, since she blatantly had no idea what she was looking for on her car, and she was still wearing her shimmery anniversary dress, which presumably was not what people wore when they were engaging in auto mechanics. She had considered changing back into her normal clothes while she was still at the hotel. But she had this dress. She had planned to wear it today, and she still wanted to wear it. And if Chris wasn’t going to appreciate it, maybe Peter would.
She didn’t even bother to ask Lindsey for her automotive insight, since Lindsey did not have her license, due to a combination of being young for her grade, never practicing, and knowing that she could rely on Arden to drive her everywhere.
Arden’s one course of action about the whump-whump-whumps would have been to call her father, but she didn’t know what he would have done about it, either, or how he would have reacted to the news that she’d gone sixty miles out of town without telling him. So she just got back into the driver’s seat and drove on, turning up the volume on the Heart of Gold’s crappy stereo to drown out the noises coming from under the hood. Arden watched the road and thought about Chris heading to his cool cast meeting, and she wanted to text him and say, I’m heading somewhere right now, too.
“I think I’m going to work on a farm this summer,” Lindsey announced in a break between songs. For miles, all they’d been able to see out the windows was farmland.
“Which farm?” Arden asked.
“I don’t know. I’m going to look at job postings and stuff online to see if anybody nearby needs extra farmhands. It’d be like when I was a kid, you know?”
“Then you’re going to have to get your license fast,” Arden advised her. “Because I am not driving you to a farm every morning. I know how early farmers have to wake up, and I want no part in that.”
“Hopefully I can find a place where I can live for the summer,” Lindsey said, resting her head against the window. “That way neither of us will have to worry about driving.”
Arden snuck a sidelong look at her. “You’d really live at a farm?”
“Sure, if I can.”
“Without me?”
“You could come, too, if you wanted.”
Arden did not want—unless there were zebras there, and possibly not even then. Zebras had lost some of their appeal over the past eight years.
“It’ll only be for the summer, anyway,” Lindsey went on.
Arden felt a twinge in her stomach. She thought about how much trouble Lindsey could get into when left to her own devices for ten minutes, and she shuddered to think what could happen if the two of them were separated for ten whole weeks.
A couple years ago, when Arden’s family went to Atlantic Beach for a grand total of eight days, Lindsey had decided it would be a good idea to dress up in a sheet and stand alongside the road in the nighttime, to make drivers think they’d seen a ghost. One driver panicked when he saw her, swerved, and crashed into a tree. Nobody got injured, but the car required thousands of dollars of repairs, which Lindsey was still paying off. This was the sort of thing that happened when Arden left Lindsey alone.
But Lindsey probably wouldn’t go through with it, anyway, Arden reassured herself. The number of plans like this that Lindsey had made over the years, only to abandon because they took too much effort or were replaced by new, more exciting ideas—they were countless. If Arden took every one of them seriously, she would never have time to do anything else but worry.
“Hey,” Arden said, pointing to a green road sign. “Shartlesville, Pennsylvania. The town you go to when you try to fart but you-know-what comes out instead.”
Lindsey guffawed and held up her hand. Arden smacked her a high five, swerving the whole car to the right. The truck behind her blared a long honk. “Arden Huntley,” said Lindsey, “you are a clever girl, you know that?” She picked up her phone again and dialed. “Hi, is Peter working tonight?”
She paused. Arden focused on the road before her.
“Teenage guy?” Lindsey said into the phone. “Goes to art school?” A moment of silence. “Cool, thanks. We’ll be there by ten.” She hung up.
“So,” Arden said, her heart fluttering.
“So,” Lindsey said. “I found him.”
The heart of the Heart of Gold is called into question
At six o’clock, they drove past the first road sign for New York.
“New York City, one hundred thirty-five miles,” Lindsey read aloud.
Arden felt suddenly gripped by the extraordinary potential of highway signs. They made the country seem deceptively small. The only thing that stood between her and New York City was the number 135. She could keep driving even farther and hit Connecticut, or Vermont—or Florida if she made a turn to the south—or she could turn around and drive through the night and the next day and the next night and the next day until she hit California and the Pacific Ocean. Highway signs made every place in America seem equally within reach, and even though Arden had been driving for hours now—even though her eyes were dry from watching the road continually unfurl before her like a never-ending ribbon—this first sign for New York City made her feel like she could keep going forever.
Twenty-five minutes later, her car broke down.
She was driving in the slow lane, as she had been for basically the entire trip, but then suddenly the Heart of Gold wouldn’t even keep up with the pace of the slow lane, and its muted whump-whump-whumps turned into a full-on whirring noise, and it started to smell bad, and … something was clearly wrong.
Arden coasted into the breakdown lane, stopped, and turned off the engine. She and Lindsey looked at each other. The traffic whizzed by them.
“What happened?” Lindsey asked.
“I don’t know.” Arden examined the lights and dials on her dashboard. The “check engine” light was lit up, but that was always lit up, so she didn’t put too much stock in it. She also noticed that the dial for the car’s temperature had gone up really, really high. Into the red zone. “Maybe the engine overheated,” she guessed.
“So what should we do?” Lindsey asked.
“I don’t know, Lindsey,” Arden snapped. “I am not a car expert. I have never driven farther than the Glockenspiel before. I don’t have access to any vehicular insider information here, okay? What do you think we should do?”
Lindsey was silent for a moment, slouched in her seat like a kicked puppy. At last she said, “We could hitchhike.”
“Gre
at plan. Let’s abandon my car here and get a ride from a total stranger for the next hundred and twenty miles. What a safe and wise course of action! And you thought Peter might be a murderer or a kidnapper?” Arden said. “Lindsey, you have no sense of self-preservation.”
The two girls glared at each other across giant cups, left over from a Dairy Queen stop much earlier in the state of Pennsylvania.
“It’s not my fault your car broke down,” Lindsey said finally.
This was true. Arden was frustrated, and she knew she was taking it out on Lindsey. It was Arden’s fault she’d bought a shitty car, Arden’s fault she never bothered to figure out why that “check engine” light was always lit, Arden’s fault she hadn’t learned the first thing about car mechanics, Arden’s fault they were on this highway on this wild goose chase in the first place.
But even though Lindsey wasn’t to blame for this situation, that didn’t stop Arden from wishing that Lindsey would at least try to help fix it.
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Arden. “We can’t sit on the side of the highway for the rest of our lives.”
When there was a break in the traffic, she got out and popped open the hood of her car. This, at least, was something her dad had taught her how to do. She peered at the machinery inside, then dumped her water bottle onto what she thought was the engine, followed by the remnants of their Dairy Queen Blizzards for good measure. If the engine was overheated, then it stood to reason that it needed to be cooled down.
When Arden climbed back into the car, Lindsey had her phone out. Not making eye contact with Arden, Lindsey said, “I looked it up online, and apparently the closest train station is in Lancaster. It’s not too far from here. We could take a taxi there.”
“And then what?” Arden asked.
“Well, then there should be a train back to Cumberland at some point.”
“What point is that, exactly?” Arden asked. “It’s nearly seven o’clock. I doubt that any more trains are running from here to Cumberland tonight. And even if there are, what makes you think there would be seats left on them? And how much would those last-minute seats cost? And who exactly would be paying for those train tickets, not to mention this supposed taxi ride to get us there?”
Lindsey was silent, her hair hanging in front of her face like a curtain separating her from Arden.
“And what,” Arden added, hearing her voice crack, “would happen to the Heart of Gold?”
Arden thought again of that baby bird, slick with oil, trying to climb its way to fresh air, to freedom. It was fictional, of course. It was entirely made up. But did that even matter? Couldn’t it inspire her anyway?
One last time, Arden turned her key in the ignition. And the car came back to life.
Neither of the girls said a word, in case commenting on what was happening would jinx it. Arden just eased her way back into traffic, and they continued on toward New York.
Meeting Peter
The bookstore where Peter worked was called The Last Page. It was situated on a commercial street in Brooklyn, busier than almost every street in Cumberland, but calmer than most of the New York streets Arden had driven down to get there. She’d gotten honked at more times than she could count, and twice she had almost run over jaywalking pedestrians, one of whom was carrying a baby. Both times they yelled at her, which seemed unfair, since they were the ones walking against the traffic light, in the dark, wearing all black. Also, it was past nine o’clock, and she was no baby aficionado, but she thought that child should probably be in bed.
Once she’d found the store, she spent about ten minutes driving around, looking for a parking space she could pull into. When she realized no such parking spaces existed around here, she spent another five minutes trying to parallel park—a skill that she’d achieved competence at before her driving test and had not practiced once since then. For a while Lindsey offered up her opinions (“Maybe you should turn the wheel to the left. Maybe you should pull out and start over again”) until Arden snapped, “Do you want to drive?” at which point Lindsey shut up.
Finally, the car was parked. Arden took a deep breath, grabbed her tin of peanut butter brownies, and marched into the store. She didn’t know exactly what the brownies were for, but one thing her mother had taught her was that people tended to be nicer to you when you gave them baked goods.
The Last Page was surprisingly big, bigger than its storefront had led Arden to believe, and it was filled floor to ceiling with books: new titles displayed on the ground level and a basement jumbled with used ones. The girls started on the main level, walking through every aisle, sort of looking at the books, mostly staring at the people and trying to figure out whether they were customers or employees and, if the latter, whether they might be Peter. Arden didn’t know if it was a New York City thing or just an annoying thing that no one in this store was wearing even a name tag, let alone a uniform.
“We could just ask someone,” Lindsey suggested. “Like, ‘Hey, where’s Peter?’”
“Sure,” Arden said. “Go for it.”
Lindsey stuck closer to Arden and didn’t ask anyone.
Fortunately, there weren’t that many high school–age guys in the store. Saturday night was apparently not the most happening of times for their peers to be book shopping. On the first floor they saw one guy with a little girl who must have been his sister or babysitting charge or someone; either way, Peter wouldn’t be working with a kid by his side. In the back Arden saw another one who was also probably her age, with long, unwashed hair, pants falling halfway down his ass, in the process of picking his nose.
“That could be him,” Lindsey pointed out. “Do you think an employee would wipe his boogers on a book spine like that?”
Arden paused. “That seems like customer behavior to me. Let’s come back to him.”
She pushed back a niggling worry that maybe the Last Page wasn’t even Peter’s bookstore. Maybe there was some other adolescent bookshop employee with the same name. New York was a big city; it was possible. Or maybe this was Peter’s store and he’d left already. There were so many reasons for him not to be here, and she didn’t want to think about any of them.
Downstairs they saw a guy who definitely did work at the store, because he was helping an old woman find a book, and at first it seemed like he could have been in high school, but then Arden noticed the wedding band on his ring finger.
That left one teenage-looking guy in the store. The one behind the checkout counter downstairs. The one standing behind the computer, his elbows propped up on the counter in front of him, holding a copy of Dante’s Inferno.
“That’s him,” Arden said to Lindsey. “That’s him.”
Arden pretended to be interested in the books on the nearest display table, but really she was just sneaking peeks at Peter. She hadn’t consciously known what she’d expected him to look like, but seeing him now, she realized that she’d pictured him looking like … well, like Chris.
He didn’t. For one thing, he was Asian. Arden had just assumed he would be white, like she was, like almost everyone in Cumberland was. She felt immediately guilty for expecting, however subconsciously, that everyone she met would look like her. Peter was shorter than she’d anticipated, too, and he was wearing glasses, which she hadn’t pictured but which seemed just right on him. Yet he was still immediately, self-evidently Peter.
“He’s hot,” Arden whispered to Lindsey. “Right? He’s so hot.”
“I don’t know,” Lindsey whispered back. “Dudes aren’t hot to me.”
“Bullshit,” Arden hissed. “Even though I don’t want to make out with girls, I can still tell whether they’re hot. You’re gay, Lindsey, not blind.”
“Okay, I think he’s probably hot,” she whispered.
Arden checked her watch. Almost ten. Peter was going to get off work at any minute. She needed to approach him now. While he was still working and she was a customer and he would be required to talk to her.
&nbs
p; Her hands felt clammy, and she wished she and Lindsey had taken their role-playing of this scene a little more seriously.
Seeing the book in his hands gave her a flash of inspiration. Without saying a word to Lindsey, Arden ran back to the poetry section and scanned the shelf desperately.
There it was.
She grabbed a book, bypassed Lindsey, and headed straight for Peter.
Her heart was pounding.
She stood right in front of him.
She set the book down on the counter.
Peter put down his copy of the Inferno and gave Arden a polite smile. “Will that be all today?” he asked.
She nodded mutely.
He took her book and moved to scan it, but then—because he was Peter, and she knew he couldn’t work cash registers without commenting on a customer’s purchase, he never managed to stop that, no matter how many book buyers he offended—he smiled and blurted out, “Sonnets from the Portuguese. Good choice. I love Elizabeth Barrett Browning. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways—’”
“‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach,’” Arden finished.
They looked at each other. He raised an approving eyebrow. “You know it.”
Only because of you, she thought.
He scanned the bar code and bagged the book. Arden watched him carefully, but he didn’t write a note to her on the receipt, he didn’t stick his phone number in there. She supposed that was a one-time trick, and it didn’t end so well the last time.
“Enjoy,” he said. Then he stretched. “And I’m done! You’re my last customer of the day.”
“I know,” Arden said.
He cocked his head. “You know?”
She felt shaky and focused, like she was about to dive off the end of a very high diving board. Though she’d never done that before, actually. When she was a kid, every time her mom took her to the YMCA, she would climb all the way up, and she would walk to the edge of the board, and she would stand there and stand there, feeling this same feeling she had right now in her heart and her throat and all the way down to her fingers and toes. Then she would turn around and retreat back down the ladder, to the poolside. She did this dozens of times. Eventually she just stopped climbing up there. The outcome was the same either way, and at least when she stayed at ground level, she never felt like she was failing at anything.