That’s so uncomfortably relatable that Simon’s at a loss about what to say.
“I swear to God,” Charlie says, “if you tell me I’m supposed to be emotionally honest with my friends—”
“Have youmetme? I’m on year six of a long con to convince Jamie I’m a functional human being.”
“Is it working?”
“He installed a meditation app on my phone, so I don’t think so.”
Charlie cackles, fully laughing at, not with, Simon, and for some stupid reason Simon isn’t mad about it.
Charlie calls his stepfather again and Simon pays attention tothe road. They keep passing signs for towns that don’t sound real. Bumble Bee. Flower Pot. The scenery is aggressively Old West, too green to be a desert but too brown to be chaparral. A range of mountains hovers in the distance, shadowy blue in the morning light, never seeming to get any closer.
“Are you going to Petra’s wedding?” Charlie asks.
“I’ll be in New York.” He would have gone if he’d been in town—he’d have brought Jamie, stayed for ninety minutes, and left before dinner. That’s how he deals with mostOut There–adjacent social events, and it works well enough. Most social events, period.
Charlie shifts in his seat and unlocks his phone, and Simon doesn’t think he can stand to hear another call go to voicemail.
“Put onA Scorched Land,” Simon suggests.
“Really?”
“Do I make a habit of suggesting things I dislike? Have I ever, once, in the entire time you’ve known me?” Simon asks, and it’s not technically a lie because it’s in the form of a question.
“I knew you’d like it.” Charlie sounds smug.
An hour later, Simon longs for the violent death of every single human character in this book, but he’s overinvested in the fate of that dragon. He says as much to Charlie, who pauses the audiobook. Simon can feel the heat of Charlie’s glare on the side of his face.
“That dragon is inlovewith the humans. Don’t you want him to be happy?”
Simon is slightly, regrettably, charmed that Charlie has embraced the most unhinged interpretation of this book. “He’d be happier if he fell in love with someone smarter.”
Charlie proceeds to tell him all the ways Simon’s wrong.
Simon’s heard Charlie charm people—hell, he’s spent half his career being annoyed by it. But having it turned on himself is like being hit with a fire hose. Simon’s physically incapable of doing anything other than driving and listening to Charlie. He doesn’t hate it.
“I always loved dragon stories,” Simon says. He wonders if he can convince Charlie to stop listening to this and put onTemeraireorDragonriders of Pern.
“Well, yeah,” Charlie says. “You were in a dragon show.”
Tree of the Godsdid, in fact, have a dragon subplot. Simon wasn’t in any of those scenes, but he guesses he was, technically, in a dragon show.
“I can’t believe that of all the space creatures I’ve had to pretend to fight on a green screen, we’ve never had a space dragon,” Charlie says.
“It could have even been a nice dragon. Remember the lobster things that turned out to be like... pacifists? Whatwerethey?”
“A fucking mistake,” Charlie says, and that’s the first time Simon’s ever heard him say a bad thing aboutOut There.
Heading north, the landscape gets greener and greener, pine trees on both sides of the road, until they’re finally in the mountains. Charlie pulls up the map on his phone and gives Simon the shittiest possible directions.
“Turn—no not yet,” Charlie says, after Simon already turned. “You’re gonna need to pull into a side street to turn the car around.”
“Gosh, wow, thanks for explaining how to make the car go in a different direction.”
“Maybe you can keep your mouth shut for two seconds and get back on the road,” Charlie says, but there’s barely any heat in it.
It’s still early—just past nine—but there are already plenty of people on the sidewalks of what turns out to be an alarmingly quaint town. Simon can’t imagine how Charlie expects to find one old white man in a town that currently has about ten old white men for every person in any other demographic. Simon is a little taken aback, and he grew up in a part of Connecticut that’s practically the old white man capital of the world.
