Dead Ends (24 page)

“Dane?”

“Mm?”

“Is it bigger than an elephant?”

“Dude, it's a bicycle.”

“Hey! You're not supposed to tell.” Billy crossed his arms and huffed.

“This is stupid. I'm bored.”

“
You're
stupid,” Billy muttered under his breath.

A sign loomed up ahead of us. 30 MILES TO ST. LOUIS. My stomach clenched. We hadn't seen a single cop car on the drive so far—only wide-open fields on either side of the road with nothing but clusters of cornstalks for police cruisers to hide behind. But I knew cops would be crawling all over the freeways around the city. If Billy's mom had reported her car stolen, this was where they'd catch us. Billy hadn't left his mom a note, like I had. I could only pray my mom had taken her note and marched it across the street to Mrs. Drum. They'd still be looking for us, but at least then I'd just be a runaway and not a thief and a kidnapper. If I had to see the inside of a squad car again, I'd rather do it as a delinquent riding home than a criminal riding down to the police station.

“Billy D.,” I began carefully, “there's still time to turn around. We can take this ride another day and—”

“No.”

Billy knew as well as I did that when we got home, we'd
both be locked up in our houses for life. Our moms probably wouldn't let us go to the park, let alone Kentucky. The fear of Mom's wrath made me push the accelerator, to put more distance between me and whatever lecture or punishment was waiting for me back home. But even though it
felt
like I was moving away from trouble, I knew I was actually driving deeper into it with every mile.

“What's our exit?” I asked.

Billy consulted the atlas and guided me to a bypass that took us south of the city. My knuckles were white on the wheel the entire trip around St. Louis. I jumped at every car that passed, sure it was a cop.

“It shouldn't be this hard, y'know,” I said to Billy as an actual police car cruised by us.

“What?”

“Finding a person. It shouldn't be this hard.”

“It's because our phones don't have the G … the GP … because our phones don't have the maps.” Billy swiveled his head toward me. “You said we couldn't turn our phones on anyway.”

“I don't mean finding a person on a map. I mean just figuring out where someone is. Like, you don't have family back in Oregon, right? We wouldn't be doing this if you had a grandma or someone who had your dad's number.”

Billy stared out the window.

“
Right?
” I pressed. “Because if there's someone you could have called this whole time—”

“No,” Billy said. “I had a grandma, but she died.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“And a grandpa. He lives in a smelly building with metal on the windows. Mom says he doesn't remember us. He calls me Edward.”

“And that's it?”

“And Aunt Jean. I don't know her number. Dad doesn't like her anyway 'cause she said he couldn't come to Christmas this one time, and Mom got really mad and said Aunt Jean doesn't have any company … or passion … or—”

“Compassion?”

“Yeah, that. So we don't ever see her now.” Billy propped his feet up on the dashboard and studied his shoes.

“At least you've got people,” I said. “Maybe they don't know you or like you or whatever, but at least they're out there. If I've got any of those people, I don't even think they know my name.”

“Why not?”

“I don't really know the whole story, but I don't think they liked it that my mom got knocked up in high school. All my baby pictures are, like, me and Mom and a bunch of her friends and her friends' families and stuff.”

Billy stayed silent, so I talked to fill the space.

“I think maybe they kicked her out—when she had me. She's always bragging about how she graduated high school even though she had a kid and a job, and how she did it all on her own.”

“You don't know who your dad is
and
you don't know who your grandma is. Or your grandpa. Or
anything
,” Billy said.

I kept my eyes focused on the road ahead. “Sounds pretty pathetic when you put it all together like that.”

“Maybe they all live on our street, and you don't know.”

I laughed, imagining our neighbors as my long-lost family. “Nah. No way I'm related to a prick like Mark. Anyway, if you ask my mom where they are, she'll say they're all behind bars or inside a bottle.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“It just means …” I wrapped my fingers tighter around the steering wheel, my laughter slipping away. “I don't know—that they're not worth finding.”

“Even if it means you'd find your dad?”

“Even then.”

A siren sliced through our conversation, and a flash of red and blue lit up the rearview mirror.

“Shit!” I hit the brakes on instinct, but a second later, my foot was on the gas again.

The cruiser was right on our tail, the wail of the siren filling the car.

“You're supposed to pull over,” Billy said, all calm, like we weren't about to get arrested.

“You're also supposed to not steal cars!” I snapped, but I eased up on the gas and flipped the turn signal. Better to just face the crimes I'd already committed than to add a high-speed chase to the list. I veered off to the shoulder, my heart pounding right through my chest.

Billy squirmed in the seat next to me. “Are we in trouble?”

Not we
, I thought.
Most likely just
me.

A hand rapped at the window, and I jumped.

“License,” the officer said as I rolled down the window. I fumbled for my wallet.

“We weren't speeding,” Billy said from the passenger seat.

I shot him a silencing look. No, we weren't speeding. Which meant we'd been pulled over for another reason—like driving a stolen car, or—

“Busted taillight,” the officer said, taking the license I handed him.

I would have breathed a sigh of relief, but I knew we were still on the brink. Even if Billy's mom hadn't reported the theft, the cop would ask for my registration next, and he'd realize I didn't belong in this car.

A radio clipped to the officer's shoulder squawked, and an urgent voice shouted a string of numbers and nonsense words through the speaker. The officer didn't respond, but he tossed my license back at me.

“See about getting that light fixed.”

An instant later, he was back in his cruiser, and the red-and-blue spinning lights were beside us instead of behind us. Then they were disappearing down the freeway ahead.

I stayed parked on the shoulder, momentarily paralyzed, my heart pounding.

“Why did he leave?” Billy asked.

I shook my head, almost laughing as I remembered something from studying Shakespeare last semester in English. “Because fortune favors fools.”

“What's that mean?”

I pulled back into traffic. “It means we're going to Monkey's Eyebrow.”

The road got darker as we drove south. The open fields fell into thick shadows that crowded our car. All of Missouri was
falling asleep, and we were still tearing through the night. Billy had started snoring in the seat next to me, and I felt my own eyelids slip down once or twice.

I flicked Billy in the ear.

“Ow, Dane!”

“Wake up.”

“I am.” His eyes were still closed and his speech slurred by sleep.

I gave his shoulder a rough shake. “Seriously, come on.”

Billy stretched, sticking one arm right in front of my face. “Where are we?” He yawned.

“You tell me. We left St. Louis, like, an hour ago.”

“How far is that?”

“I don't know. It's sixty minutes. Just check the map.”

“The map is in
miles
, not minutes,” Billy huffed. He rubbed his eyes and squinted at the atlas. “We have to take the Seventy-Four road thing over the river.”

“Seventy-Four road thing? Thanks, that's helpful.”

“It's at Cape Girar … Girar …”

“Girardeau?”

“Yeah.” Billy smiled.

“Damn it.” I pounded the steering wheel.

Billy shrank. “What?”

“We just passed it.”

“Did it say Seventy-Four?”

“I don't know. I was too busy trying to understand your directions.”

“I bet it said Seventy-Four.”

We argued all the way down the freeway, through the turnaround, and all the way back to the missed exit.

I slowed down in Cape Girardeau, looking for hotels along the highway. The town was all single-story buildings separated by big stretches of untended grass. Here and there, a stream crossed a lawn, and I could tell we were about to run out of town and into a river.

Billy pouted about my hotel hunt, wanting to push through the night.

“But we're almost there,” he whined. “I'll stay awake, I promise.”

“No way, man. If we keep driving, I'm going to drive us right off the road.”

“Just one more town.”

“Why? Where's the next town?”

Billy closed the atlas as if I was trying to peek.

“Billy D.?”

He picked at the corner of the book.

“There is no other town, is there?”

“There's a town.”

“Where?”

Billy stared out the window.

“That's what I thought. Dude, I'm not trying to be a dick. I'm just trying not to kill us here.”

But the truth was, I didn't really want to stop in a city like Cape Girardeau. I felt uneasy being anywhere with cops close at hand, so I pushed through, hoping Billy was right about there being hotels across the river.

“It's good Seely didn't come with us,” Billy said.

“Why's that?”

“Because she couldn't stay in our hotel room.”

“Why not?”

“We can't stay in the same room with a
girl
.” Billy looked thoroughly grossed out.

“That's bull.” I laughed. “I wouldn't mind sharing a room with Seely. She could sleep in my bed—no problem.”

Billy caught my drift.

“Whooo!” he sang. “You
looove
her.”

“Shut up.” I gave his head a playful push toward the window, but he only bounced back, singing for real this time.

“Dane and Seely, sitting in a tree! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

“Billy D.” I shook my head. “That song dies in fourth grade.”

“Why?”

“Because if anyone hears you singing it after that—well, let's just say that's a good way to get your ass kicked.”

“You'd beat someone up for singing a song?”

“If it got on my nerves, maybe. If they were trying to annoy me on purpose, then definitely, yeah.”

Billy fell quiet, thinking.

“You smell that?” I asked.

Billy D. rolled down his window and sniffed.

“That's the river,” I told him. I couldn't see a bridge yet, but the city lights were becoming fewer and farther between, and the sweet stink of muddy water told me we were close.

“Not just a river,” Billy said. “The
Mississippi
.”

He opened his atlas and ran a finger up and down the thick waterway.

“You see one river, you've seen 'em all,” I said.

“How can you see them all if you just see one?”

“It's just a … it means … never mind. I'm too tired to explain. There better be a hotel on the other side of this damn river.”

The moonlight that slammed into the Mississippi and shot back up again, turning everything silver, plunged into utter darkness on the other side. There was barely an outhouse, let alone a building suitable for sleeping. Billy was quiet as we weaved down narrow roads and through trees crowding close over the car.

He could tell I was pissed—pissed about being stranded without a bed in the middle of the night—pissed about not taking time to make a better plan—pissed about coming on this whole damn trip.

“Maybe there will be a hotel in the next town,” he tried once.

I shut him down with a glare.

There was no hotel. There wasn't one in the sleepy river
town of East Cape Girardeau and there wasn't one in the even sleepier towns after that. We were traveling a smaller, darker path now, and the sleepiest place of all was inside my head. I had to close my eyes, even if it was just for a minute. Finding a hotel wasn't even an option anymore. I just had to stop moving.

Long stretches of forest rose up on either side of the road between towns, the thick trees broken up here and there by a dirt or gravel road. I hit the brakes at the next one I saw and turned into it.

Billy grabbed the dash to brace himself against the sudden motion. “Where are you going?”

“To sleep.”

He cowered a little at the edge in my voice.

I only went as far down the bumpy road as my heavy eyelids would allow, then pulled the car into a grassy area right off the side. A little more tree cover would have been nice, but anything was better than crashing
into
a tree, which was the only other option at this point. My eyes were closing before I'd even turned off the car.

“We're sleeping here?” Billy asked.

“Yep.”

“Cool. It's like camping.”

“Sure.”

It wasn't like any camping trip I'd ever been on, but at least he wasn't complaining. I opened my eyes in the dark as a realization struck me: I'd never been camping at all.

We pushed our seats back and zipped up our jackets against the cold.

“Hey, Billy?” I asked quietly.

“Yeah?” He yawned.

“Did your dad take you camping?”

“Yeah, one time. We saw pine trees and mountains and fish and spiders and—”

“That's cool.”