Christina shut her laptop with a decisive snap that made Melissa wince. “Look.” Her finger swiped the empty air. A map blinked on in the middle of the car, bright and crisp in the dim light. Christina splayed her fingers to zoom in on their route. A blue line sliced through Kentucky, terminating in Nashville. “We’ll be there in four hours. Do you really want to take a detour to some Driverless facility? Do you want to go home?”
Melissa thought of the flagship Natasha Lynn Chao boutique in East Nashville, nestled among vegan restaurants and artisanal soap shops. Photos she’d seen of the trendy district gave her a familiar shiver, the sense of a future with a Melissa-size hole just waiting to be filled. She would become the kind of person who moved through a room like the lady across the avenue in her New York City apartment, with a divine sense of knowing how to occupy a space.
Plus she was dying to comparison-shop all those funky skirts and absorb the off-kilter genius of Natasha’s signature clashing plaids. Ripped flannels, the distressed nineties throwback stuff, sort of boggled her mind. And she wanted to try on one of those famous maxi dresses that transformed into a skirt courtesy of a single adaptable strap.
A selfie with a pile of Natasha Lynn Chao shopping bags was a guaranteed retweet from the designer herself.
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t want to go home.”
William slid a Twizzler under his nose as if he were sniffing a fine cigar. “Otto, just for the record, the answer is ‘occupants.’ You save the occupants.”
Melissa lost herself in the floating map’s crisscrossing highways. Back in the day it must have been easy to leave everything behind, arrive at college, and shed the baggage of high school. But since she’d been old enough to operate a phone, she’d been part of the web of experiences that united everyone for all time and ensured that no matter what happened with Daniel, she’d always know which Princeton dining halls had the best desserts and how tough his practices were.
Had the days of landlines and paper letters been liberating or lonely? When she pictured the world that way, it was barren and empty. Great yawning chasms filled with the husks of hometown friendships that had withered and died.
She felt the weight of Daniel’s head in her lap. He lay on his side, bent into a Z shape, and used her leg as a pillow. “Sleeeeepy,” he said, his breath on the bare skin of her thigh. She combed his hair with her fingers. He closed his eyes and snuggled closer. His body was always warm. They had a running joke about his furnace-chest heating a nineteenth-century tenement.
Sleepy Daniel was one of her favorite Daniels.
Her eyes traced the curve of I-65 while she caressed his head. She thought of the first time he’d ever stayed in her bed overnight, the summer before senior year. Her parents had gone to an orthodontics conference in Maryland.
You’re burning up!
I do tend to run hot.
She remembered waking to morning light coming through her balcony doors, and wallowing in the tingling unreal sensation that she’d just spent the night with Daniel Benson in the checkered sheets she’d had since sixth grade, before she’d ever kissed a boy. Moments stacked like panes of glass, Sixth-Grade Melissa with her new sheets, and Eleventh-Grade Melissa with her boyfriend in her bed, and College Melissa looking back on all of it from behind yet another pane to form the stained-glass puzzle of her life.
She picked up her phone and scrolled to the picture of Daniel, William, and Christina standing arm in arm beneath the Higginsburg Asylum sign. Then she flipped back to their group selfie with Patricia Ming-Waller. You dragged along the good, the bad, and the mundane. It didn’t matter whether you were an obsessive Facebook creeper or somebody who kept old yellowed photographs in a box.
Daniel’s feet hanging off the edge of her bed.
“Look what I found,” Christina said, dismissing the map with a wave of her hand. The Kentucky highway dissolved into radiant pinpoints that filled the car and drifted like dust through a sun patch. “Mood sprites.”
Flecks whirled dreamily around Melissa, passing through a spectrum of orange and deepening to autumnal brown. As they settled upon Daniel’s sleeping head, the sprites adopted the nameless colors of his dreams.
“Oh my God,” William said, putting his arm around Christina. “You’re seriously the best.” She put her head on his shoulder, and crimson snow fell thickly all around them.
Melissa had just started to drift off to sleep when her phone buzzed. Blearily, she checked
the screen. Epheme. She made sure to hold the phone directly above Daniel’s ear so he couldn’t see it if he happened to open his eyes.Ash:Can we talk?SewWhat:What’s up?Ash:I mean on the phone. I have some news.SewWhat:Not now. Tomorrow?Ash:Sure. Can’t wait to hear your voice.SewWhat:Is it good news at least?Ash:You’ll just have to wait and see.
After that, Melissa slept badly. Feverish thoughts came and went: Otto driving them into a lake, or running over pedestrians, or heading straight for an unfinished bridge. Somebody ought to keep watch, she’d bolt up in her seat and think. We shouldn’t let William fall asleep in the car. But then she’d reassure herself that they were driving safely down I-65, and drift away, until the staccato rhythm of waking and sleeping became her reality. Nashville arrived in disjointed impressions as dawn broke during their approach.
Glittering downtown skyline, dual-spired skyscraper capped with thin cones of white poking the bruise-colored sky.
Morning light skimming the Cumberland River, Otto rumbling across a bridge. Twin spikes looming, dimmed to fade into the day.
She came fully awake when Otto slowed to join the rush-hour hustle of downtown Nashville. The river was at their back. Horrible music was playing, some slapdash demo or bad joke. She blinked. Everyone else was awake. The music wasn’t coming from the speakers. William was perched on the edge of the bench, acoustic
