Page 25 of Queen of Nothing

Looking back on it, I guess I got in fake trouble. Father telling me off for frivolous spending was just an act, part of his role, and mine was to keep waving around the black card.

Because I know what it’s like now to be in real trouble with Father.

It’s terrifying enough that I’m choosing to get into this stale-smelling car and sit on the stained passenger seat, with Serena Vasile of all people settling into the driver’s seat.

All for what?

Just so I didn’t face Father’s wrath.

No, I had other reasons.

Good reasons to run.

I’m just having trouble remembering them in the harder moments of this journey.

It’ll get better. Easier. At least when we reach the shield witch.

That’s what I tell myself as I flip the grated apertures at the front of the car.

“What are these?” I ask, whacking it up and down, up and down. “Are they supposed to do something?”

“Vents,” Serena says, breathy, like she’s fighting of another bout of nausea. “For cool or hot air.”

“Oh, turn it on.” I tap the sliding buttons around it.

Serena reaches out and, without taking her eyes off the road, turns it on—and air whooshes out of the vent.

But the air isn’t cool.

“I don’t think it works,” she says, and the patience in her voice is sounding a lot like over-stretched violin strings ready to snap. “Leave it. Get the phone out of my bag. Text the number that we’re on our way. Just say that, ‘on our way’, nothing more.”

I reach over to the backseat. “What number?”

“It’s the only number in the contact list.”

I bring the whole bag onto my lap.

That new leather smell that once wisped through the dorm room from this very bag is gone now.

Now, the bags—and even we—smell like airports, travel, clammy sweat threaded through overworn clothes, cheap motel rooms, stale coffee, and fast food.

It permeates the old car, layered with a stale cigarette smell, as I fiddle with the phone.

And fiddle.

And fiddle.

I hit buttons and the pixelated green screen flickers onto something new. Emails, a blank screen, a screen with a scoreboard and a moving tail of pixels that I think is a game.

The truth is, I just don’t know how to use these things.

But I keep trying, hitting the up and down buttons with arrows printed onto them, the crooked arrow button that’s bigger than the rest, and the middle one, over and over, until—

I wince. “I think I called the number.”

Or deleted it.

Maybe both.