“And what if I was?” I asked testingly. “What if I think we should turn back now?”
He mulled my words, subsiding back to earth. “Then we will. Turn back. It’s your decision.”
His voice was steady, and he’d said the right thing. But I didn’t believe him. Something in his face made me remember not everything was about me. Maybe Finch wasn’t trying to be the sidekick in my story. Maybe he was trying to start one of his own. The Hazel Wood isn’t yours, I wanted to say. The Hinterland neither. Maybe I should have. But he was standing between me and being utterly alone, so I didn’t.
Ella’s car was trapped in Harold’s garage, so Finch got us a rental, going through his dad’s office to work around the fact that we were both seventeen. We drove to Target first, stocked up on granola bars and water and canisters of pistachios. I bought cheap jeans, a pack of underwear, and a black sweatshirt, and pulled them on in the bathroom. My uniform I balled up and chucked in the trash. I had a feeling my Whitechapel days were done.
Finch was waiting for me outside the bathroom, where he presented me with cop-style aviators. “Road trip classic,” he said.
I slipped them on. They tinted the world a cool disco blue. “You gonna make me play car games, too?”
“Only if you’re lucky.”
I smiled at him but didn’t reply. The strange, rubber-band intensity he’d shown outside of Ness’s had abated, but I was still feeling cautious. I’m watching you, my eyes said when I looked at him.
Right back at you, his replied.
We sat in the Target food court while we planned our next move, eating oil-soaked triangles of grilled cheese dipped in ketchup.
“Anna’s heart would break if she could see this,” Finch said, staring at his greasy hands like they were covered in blood.
“Sorry it’s not Jonathan Finch–approved,” I said, reflexively.
At the sound of his father’s name, Finch’s head stayed down and his eyes went up, holding a black weight I’d never seen in them. For a moment I felt what it must be like for a stranger to lock eyes with me.
“Sorry,” I said quietly, brushing crumbs off my new jeans. “I’m just … we still don’t know where we’re even going.”
“Up north, five hours away, somewhere near a lake and a tiny town.” Finch recited details from the blog. “It worked for Ness.”
“Whatever happened to Ness did not work for Ness.”
“You know what I mean. Let’s just leave the city, drive north, look for signs.”
“Signs like ‘This Way to the Hazel Wood’?”
“Signs like a Polaroid stuck in a book. Or a crow delivering a letter. Unless you have a better plan?” He gave the patented weapons-down smile that shouldn’t have worked on me but kinda did. It almost made me forget that flash of black in his eyes.
Anyway, he was right. That was the best plan we had.
By the time we got on the road, evening was coming down. Sitting in the passenger seat looking out at a sea of brake lights on one side, headlights on the other, felt like an outtake from my life with Ella. We never left town at opportune times. It was always at odd moments, when Ella’s latest job opportunity melted away like fairy gold, or the bad luck threw us one curve too many. Before dinner on a Tuesday. In the middle of the night, after a cigarette Ella swore she’d tamped out ignited a motel-room fire. I propped my temple against the cool of the glass.
“So. Wanna play a car game?”
I snorted. Ella and I had exhausted every car game known to man, and invented a dozen more.
“What? Come on, humor a New York kid. Driving anywhere is like a weird vacation for me.”
He did hold the steering wheel funny, I’d noticed. At ten and two, but in this super-self-conscious way, like he was holding up a confusing shirt.
“Yeah, alright. What do you want to play?”
I expected him to say Geography or the license-plate alphabet game, but he didn’t.
“Let’s play Memory Palace.”
I looked at him. “You made that up.”
“No, my mom did. I’ll go first, so I can teach you.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, the first item in my memory palace is a … map of Amsterdam. Because Amsterdam is where I lost my, um, my virginity in a public park.” He laughed self-consciously, like he was already rethinking his brag. “So, A is for Amsterdam. Now you say mine, then do a B, with a memory attached.”
Did he do it on a bench? Under a bush? Just out in the middle of the grass? I bet it was in a gazebo. I’d pictured Finch having sex with some long-legged Dutch girl five different ways before I realized I was taking way too long to answer.
“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam, because that’s where you lost your v-card.” I put air quotes around the phrase with my voice. “And B is for … Beloved, because I read it when my mom and I lived in Vermont.”
“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam because that’s where I lost my … v-card, and I’m already regretting picking that one, B is for Beloved, because you read it when you lived in Vermont, and C is for, let’s see, C is for crickets, because they scared the shit out of me when I was little.”
I didn’t make fun of him for that. Crickets were creepy. I named the three items in our memory palace, and paused. “Okay, D is for driving, because that’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing.”
“Nope. Has to be a thing. Like an object you can pick up.”
“Fine,” I muttered. “D is for Dazed and Confused, because I watched it in a motel room once.”
“A movie? Because you remember watching it?”
“Yeah,” I said defensively. “It’s a thing, and I remember it.”
“Fine, fine.” After listing A through D, Finch smiled. “And E is for eggs benedict, because it’s what my mom makes me when I’m sick. Made.”
For a moment, we both held our breath. Then his eyes flicked to the neck of my sweatshirt, where the top of my tattoo crawled toward my collarbone. “You’re up for F. F is for flower, right? I’ve always wanted to ask about it.”
I touched the inked blossom self-consciously, remembering the look on Ella’s face when I came home with it. A lost look, an anger I couldn’t place. I’d felt ashamed without ever knowing why. “Yeah. Maybe when we get to T.”
I did F, H, and J (falafel because Ella liked it, honey because I liked it, Jane Eyre because I’d read it in Tempe). Finch did G, I, and K (gingerbread because his mom used to make gingerbread mansions, icicles because freshman year he wrote an entire fantasy novel about a warhorse named Icicle, and Kit Kats because once his family lived on them for a day, when their car broke down in a snowstorm).
It was my turn again. L. I rapped out everything in our memory palace, feeling a goofy sense of satisfaction when I got it right. “Okay. L. L is for…”
“Don’t say a food because you’ve eaten it or a book because you’ve read it,” Finch said. “Give me, like, a real memory.”
I felt a flush of irritation, colored with shame. “Are you saying I’m playing your car game wrong?”
“No! I just … I thought I could get to know you this way. Like maybe you’d share something about your past. Your family.”