“You tell me.” He looks left and right, then pulls out, headlights swinging onto the tree-encroached road. “You’re here, too.”
Nelle pinches the tiny candy between her fingers. Holds it up to the moonlight. “I can’t imagine fucking the consequences will make them disappear.”
James blows air through his mouth. “You’re right. When she wakes up, my mom will call me to chew me out. Or at least I’ll get a victimized text. When she’sreallypissed she sends an angry emoji, no context.”
“What’s an emoji?”
“They’re like ... these little faces and pictures that convey emotion.”
“Artwork?”
“Not exactly. It can be hard to convey tone through words alone, so people use them to add context.”
“It’s not hard if you use the right words,” she says.
Nelle plops the candy on her tongue, shocked to find that it is coated inacid.
Her face twists up, and she spits the candy out before it can burn throughallher taste buds. It leaves a violet stain on her palm.
James cackles. “Too sour?”
Nelle puts the candy back in her mouth and forces herself to chew, considering the spike of sourness, the fruity flavor, the sweet tartness that follows.
“I can’t tell if it’s good”—she eats another, contemplating. Less startling this time—“or disgusting.”
For half a second, James’s eyes flicker from the road to her. And for half a second, the follicles of her scalp send shockwaves to her heart, her navel, her toes. She rubs down the hair on her arms.
“Are you nervous about leaving Lincoln?” James asks, his voice dry.
“Yeah.” She thinks about her rose wallpaper, her iron bed, her shelf of books, all sacrificed to fire and ash now. She thinks about the candy in her lap, the man beside her, the open road. Father was right about one thing. She is entirely unprepared for the world, and yet here she is, diving in headfirst. “I really am.”
James glances at her again. “Say the word and I’ll go back.”
Nelle can’t help but smirk. “No.”
She will never go back to Lincoln, where that man who called himself her father tormented her, where she had no autonomy, no friends, no life, no freedom. “I’d have to be dead to go back there.”
“How are you going to meet my family if you’re dead?” James quips.
Nelle lifts a brow. “Who says I’m meeting your family?”
“Just an idea.” He shrugs a shoulder. “We have a month of adventure ahead, and then, sadly, I’m shipping back off to school.”
Unanswerable thoughts claw up Nelle’s throat.Who is going to write for me when James goes to school? Maybe I should’ve stayed with Father. He was a monster, but at least he shouldered my burden.She shoves them to the recesses of her mind and tries to conceal her uncertainty.
“I’ll never go back to Lincoln for myself,” she says, “but if it’s foryou, I’ll make an amendment.”
They drive under the night sky. Fields stretch on either side, lined with forests. There are far fewer people than she thought there would be. She wasn’t sure what to expect. New faces lining every street? Certainly not a desolate countryside with more deer, cows, and chickens than humans.
Nelle picks up James’s phone from the cupholder. When she taps the screen, a photograph of a beach during sunset appears, the time hovering above it: 3:43 a.m. Straight out of a science fiction novel.
“I’ve never been to the ocean,” she says absently. The back of the phone is shattered glass, dicing up her reflection. She watches the movements of her facial muscles: mouth open, eyes widen, frown deepen. Kissy lips. “I’m glad I never had one of these. I would’ve wasted so much time staring at it.”
“Now that you’re a member of society, you don’t want a phone?”
“No.”
“You can do so much with it, though. You can take pictures, call whoever you want, watch movies, listen to music, ask it questions.”
