“I’m not talking to her, I’m driving! You talk to her,” Rachel says.
I hold the phone up to my ear. “Um, Rachel can’t come to the phone right now,” I say.
“Is this Steph?” Rachel’s mother asks.
“Yes, this is Steph.”
Her mom’s voice softens a little. “Oh, honey, are you okay? The rumors I’m hearing are just beyond belief. I heard you got kidnapped right out of the school by a team of men, and half the town thinks it’s a human trafficking ring—”
“What? That’s ridiculous. I mean, the kidnapping part isn’t totally ridiculous because I almost got kidnapped, but by my father. I don’t think he was going to sell me, but he’s super dangerous. Rachel helped me get away.”
“That’s not going to help,” Rachel hisses. “Tell her he’s not after us, or she’ll send the cops.”
“But, um, you know the guy who got hit by the self-driving car in Marshfield? That was him. Last I heard he was in the hospital.”
“I did hear about that.” Her voice sounds calmer. I can’t tell if that’s a good sign or a super bad sign. “Did the car accident have something to do with this?”
“Sort of.”
“You weren’t hit, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t. Have you heard anything about the guy, like how badly he was injured?”
“Just that he’s in the hospital.”
That sounded promising.
“Honey, Rachel needs to come home. Whatever’s going on, this is obviously not something the two of you can handle on your own.”
“I am following my bliss, Mom!” Rachel yells. “Like you always told me to do!”
“Your bliss was not supposed to involve an unauthorized road trip!” her mother yells back.
“Look,” I say. “Rachel saved my life twice yesterday. My mom can’t help me because she’s in the hospital. We’re on our way to meet up with some friends who are going to help me out from here. Can you please just let her keep helping me for a little longer?”
There’s a long pause. Then: “Does she have her phone charger, money for gas, and her AAA card?”
“Yes,” I say. I’m actually not 100 percent sure about the AAA card, but it seems likely.
“Here are my conditions,” her mother says. “Rachel needs to call every morning and evening, and she needs to uninstall that app on her phone that interferes with the tracking app. Yes, I know she’s installed one, because right now the tracking app says she’s at school.”
“Shit,” Rachel mutters. “Okay, Mom,” she says, loudly enough to be heard. “But not until I’m parked somewhere, because right now I’m driving.”
“Thank you,” I say.
Her mother lowers her voice and admits, “I don’t really see a good way to stop you.”
I decide not to point out that she could call the cops on us, because I definitely don’t want her to call the cops on us.
“Steph, you’d better make sure Rachel calls.”
“I will.”
“And call me if you get in any more trouble,” her mother says, and she hangs up.
Dairy farms give way to billboards advertising amusement parks, which give way to the outskirts of Madison. When we get to Illinois, Rachel says she doesn’t want to go through Chicago, so I have her get off I-90 and take a rural road directly south. “How wide of a berth do you want?” I ask as we get near I-88.
“I want to go all the way around,” Rachel says.
“Have you driven in a city before?” I ask.
“Well, I mean, Marshfield, obviously.”
“Okay.” I look down at the phone. “Keep heading south on this road.”
We pass through endless suburbs. I try to calculate how much time this is adding versus just going through Chicago, but a bunch of the roads in Chicago itself are red right now in the GPS app, so who even knows? Also, the answer would probably depress me.
We stop for gas and a bathroom break. Suburban gas stations have better snack options than the rural ones my mother usually stops at; this one has pizza slices and hot dogs and other fresh items, rather than just beef jerky and granola. It’s too cold to stand around outside, so Rachel pulls up to one of the parking spaces by the convenience store and we sit in the car with the heater on as we eat our pizza slices.
“Where do you think your mother is going to take you next?” Rachel asks.
“A long way, because Michael found us in Wisconsin. Maybe somewhere to the west. Montana or Idaho.” Not Utah. We’ve never been back to Utah. It’s like Mom is afraid I’ll run into Julie.
“Will you tell me where? So I can come visit you?”
Mom won’t want her to visit. Mom will say, She’s from New Coburg. Michael could be watching her. He might follow her and track her back to us. But maybe we can figure out somewhere to meet. “I’ll tell you where,” I say.
As the day goes on, Rachel takes more breaks. She has me rub her shoulders, which are aching and sore, and tries readjusting her seat, first closer to the wheel, then farther away. It’s early evening when we stop at an Indiana restaurant that looks kind of like a cheesy red barn. They have table service, an enormous laminated menu, and an all-day breakfast.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Rachel says as she eats her pancakes. “This is harder than I thought it would be. The farthest I’ve ever driven before was St. Paul, with my mom last summer, and that was only two hours, and she drove home. This is hard.”
“We can stop for the day,” I say.
“But we were going to try to do it in two days. We can’t possibly get all the way to Boston tomorrow.”
“Marvin’s family goes to California every Christmas, and he says they always promise it’ll take three days and it always takes four.”
“People were going to try to meet us.”
“I’ll tell them we’ll be an extra day.”
“But CheshireCat needs us…”
The waitress is by with a water pitcher and a slightly tight-lipped smile. “Can I bring you
