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Hour Eleven
We hit the construction. The highway narrows to one lane, and we’re stuck
behind a tractor-trailer driving the precise roadwork speed limit of thirty-five
mph. Lacey is the right driver for the situation; I’d be pounding the steering
wheel, but she’s just amiably chatting with Ben until she turns half around and
says, “Q, I really need to go to the bathroom, and we’re losing time behind this
truck anyway.”
I just nod. I can’t blame her. I would have forced us to stop long ago had it
been impossible for me to pee in a bottle. It was heroic of her to make it as long
as she did.
She pulls into an all-night gas station, and I get out to stretch my rubbery
legs. When Lacey comes racing back to the minivan, I’m sitting in the driver’s
seat. I don’t even really know how I came to be sitting in the driver’s seat, why I
end up there and not Lacey. She comes around to the front door, and she sees me
there, and the window is open, and I say to her, “I can drive.” It’s my car, after
all, and my mission. And she says, “Really, you’re sure?” and I say, “Yeah, yeah,
I’m good to go,” and she just throws open the sliding door and lies down in the
first row.

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Hour Twelve
It is 2:40 in the morning. Lacey is sleeping. Radar is sleeping. I drive. The road
is deserted. Even most of the truck drivers have gone to bed. We go minutes
without seeing headlights coming in the opposite direction. Ben keeps me
awake, chattering next to me. We are talking about Margo.
“Have you given any thought to how we will actually, like, find Agloe?” he
asks me.
“Uh, I have an approximate idea of the intersection,” I say.
“And it’s nothing but an intersection.”
“And she’s just gonna be sitting at the corner on the trunk of her car, chin in
her hands, waiting for you?”
“That would certainly be helpful,” I answered.
“Bro, I gotta say I’m a little worried that you might, like—if it doesn’t go as
you’re planning it—you might be really disappointed.”
“I just want to find her,” I say, because I do. I want her to be safe, alive,
found. The string played out. The rest is secondary.
“Yeah, but— I don’t know,” Ben says. I can feel him looking over at me,
being Serious Ben. “Just— Just remember that sometimes, the way you think
about a person isn’t the way they actually are. Like, I always thought Lacey was
so hot and so awesome and so cool, but now when it actually comes to being
with her . . . it’s not the exact same. People are different when you can smell
them and see them up close, you know?”
“I know that,” I say. I know how long, and how badly, I wrongly imagined
her.
“I’m just saying that it was easy for me to like Lacey before. It’s easy to like
someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable
thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird
relationship with food and frequent crankiness who’s kinda bossy—then I had to
basically start liking a whole different person.”
I can feel my cheeks warming. “You’re saying I don’t really like Margo?
After all this—I’m twelve hours inside this car already and you don’t think I care
about her because I don’t— ” I cut myself off. “You think that since you have a
girlfriend you can stand atop the lofty mountain and lecture me? You can be such
a—”

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I stop talking because I see in the outer reaches of the headlights the thing that
will shortly kill me.
Two cows stand oblivious in the highway. They come into view all at once, a
spotted cow in the left lane, and in our lane an immense creature, the entire
width of our car, standing stock-still, her head turned back as she appraises us
with blank eyes. The cow is flawlessly white, a great white wall of cow that
cannot be climbed or ducked or dodged. It can only be hit. I know that Ben sees
it, too, because I hear his breath stop.
They say that your life flashes before your eyes, but for me that is not the
case. Nothing flashes before my eyes except this impossibly vast expanse of
snowy fur, now only a second from us. I don’t know what to do. No, that’s not
the problem. The problem is that there is nothing to do, except to hit this white
wall and kill it and us, both. I slam on the brakes, but out of habit not
expectation: there is absolutely no avoiding this. I raise my hands off the steering
wheel. I do not know why I am doing this, but I raise my hands up, as if I am
surrendering. I’m thinking the most banal thing in the world: I am thinking that I
don’t want this to happen. I don’t want to die. I don’t want my friends to die.
And to be honest, as the time slows down and my hands are in the air, I am
afforded the chance to think one more thought, and I think about her. I blame her
for this ridiculous, fatal chase—for putting us at risk, for making me into the
kind of jackass who would stay up all night and drive too fast. I would not be
dying were it not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed
home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have
always wanted to do, which is to grow up.
Having surrendered control of the vessel, I am surprised to see a hand on the
steering wheel. We are turning before I realize why we are turning, and then I
realize that Ben is pulling the wheel toward him, turning us in a hopeless attempt
to miss the cow, and then we are on the shoulder and then on the grass. I can
hear the tires spinning as Ben turns the wheel hard and fast in the opposite
direction. I stop watching. I don’t know if my eyes close or if they just cease to
see. My stomach and my lungs meet in the middle and crush each other.
Something sharp hits my cheek. We stop.
I don’t know why, but I touch my face. I pull my hand back and there is a
streak of blood. I touch my arms with my hands, hugging my arms to myself, but
I am only checking to make sure that they are there, and they are. I look at my
legs. They are there. There is some glass. I look around. Bottles are broken. Ben
is looking at me. Ben is touching his face. He looks okay. He holds himself as I

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held myself. His body still works. He is just looking at me. In the rearview
mirror, I can see the cow. And now, belatedly, Ben screams. He is staring at me
and screaming, his mouth all the way open, the scream low and guttural and
terrified. He stops screaming. Something is wrong with me. I feel faint. My chest
is burning. And then I gulp air. I had forgotten to breathe. I had been holding my
breath the whole time. I feel much better when I start up again. In through the