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nose, out through the mouth.
“Who is hurt?!” Lacey shouts. She’s unbuckled herself from her sleeping
position and she’s leaning into the wayback. When I turn around, I can see that
the back door has popped open, and for a moment I think that Radar has been
thrown from the car, but then he sits up. He is running his hands over his face,
and he says, “I’m okay. I’m okay. Is everyone okay?”
Lacey doesn’t even respond; she just jumps forward, between Ben and me.
She is leaning over the apartment’s kitchen, and she looks at Ben. She says,
“Sweetie, where are you hurt?” Her eyes are overfull of water like a swimming
pool on a rainy day. And Ben says, “I’mfineI’mfineQisbleeding.”
She turns to me, and I shouldn’t cry but I do, not because it hurts, but
because I am scared, and I raised my hands, and Ben saved us, and now there is
this girl looking at me, and she looks at me kind of the way a mom does, and that
shouldn’t crack me open, but it does. I know the cut on my cheek isn’t bad, and
I’m trying to say so, but I keep crying. Lacey is pressing against the cut with her
fingers, thin and soft, and shouting at Ben for something to use as a bandage, and
then I’ve got a small swath of the Confederate flag pressed against my cheek just
to the right of my nose. She says, “Just hold it there tight; you’re fine does
anything else hurt?” and I say no. That’s when I realize that the car is still
running, and still in gear, stopped only because I’m still standing on the brakes. I
put it into park and turn it off. When I turn it off, I can hear liquid leaking—not
dripping so much as pouring.
“We should probably get out,” Radar says. I hold the Confederate flag to my
face. The sound of liquid pouring out of the car continues.
“It’s gas! It’s gonna blow!” Ben shouts. He throws open the passenger door
and takes off, running in a panic. He hurdles a split-rail fence and tears across a
hay field. I get out as well, but not in quite the same hurry. Radar is outside, too,
and as Ben hauls ass, Radar is laughing. “It’s the beer,” he says.
“What?”
“The beers all broke,” he says again, and nods toward the split-open cooler,
gallons of foamy liquid pouring out from inside it.

---

We try to call Ben but he can’t hear us because he’s too busy screaming,
“IT’S GONNA BLOW!” as he races across the field. His graduation robe flies
up in the gray dawn, his bony bare ass exposed.
I turn and look out at the highway as I hear a car coming. The white beast
and her spotted friend have successfully ambled to the safety of the opposite
shoulder, still impassive. Turning back, I realize the minivan is against the fence.
I’m assessing damage when Ben finally schleps back to the car. As we spun,
we must have grazed the fence, because there is a deep gouge on the sliding
door, deep enough that if you look closely, you can just see inside the van. But
other than that, it looks immaculate. No other dents. No windows broken. No flat
tires. I walk around to close the back door and appraise the 210 broken bottles of
beer, still bubbling. Lacey finds me and puts an arm around me. We are both
staring at the rivulet of foaming beer flowing into the drainage ditch beneath us.
“What happened?” she asks.
I tell her: we were dead, and then Ben managed to spin the car in just the
right way, like some kind of brilliant vehicular ballerina.
Ben and Radar have crawled underneath the minivan. Neither of them knows
shit about cars, but I suppose it makes them feel better. The hem of Ben’s robe
and his naked calves peek out.
“Dude,” Radar shouts. “It looks, like, fine.”
“Radar,” I say, “the car spun around like eight times. Surely it’s not fine.”
“Well it seems fine,” Radar says.
“Hey,” I say, grabbing at Ben’s New Balances. “Hey, come out here.” He
scoots his way out, and I offer him my hand and help him up. His hands are
black with car gunk. I grab him and hug him. If I had not ceded control of the
wheel, and if he had not assumed control of the vessel so deftly, I’m sure I’d be
dead. “Thank you,” I say, pounding his back probably too hard. “That was the
best damned passenger-seat driving I’ve ever seen in my life.”
He pats my uninjured cheek with a greasy hand. “I did it to save myself, not
you,” he says. “Believe me when I say that you did not once cross my mind.”
I laugh. “Nor you mine,” I say.
Ben looks at me, his mouth on the edge of smiling, and then says, “I mean,
that was a big damned cow. It wasn’t even a cow so much as it was a land
whale.” I laugh.
Radar scoots out then. “Dude, I really think it’s fine. I mean, we’ve only lost
like five minutes. We don’t even have to push up the cruising speed.”
Lacey is looking at the gouge in the minivan, her lips pursed. “What do you

---

think?” I ask her.
“Go,” she says.
“Go,” Radar votes.
Ben puffs out his cheeks and exhales. “Mostly because I’m prone to peer
pressure: go.”
“Go,” I say. “But I’m sure as hell not driving anymore.”
Ben takes the keys from me. We get into the minivan. Radar guides us up a
slow-sloping embankment and back onto the interstate. We’re 542 miles from
Agloe.