After the End

20 MILES

MY BRAIN HURTS. I AM SO FAR OUT OF MY COMFORT zone that I might as well be in the Amazon, swimming with piranhas. This girl somehow just broke my phone and now she’s telling me to drive her to Mount Rainier. And I’m actually arguing with her over directions, like we’re some geriatric married couple.

“You pointed south a minute ago. The mountain is due east,” I say, stopping the car at the edge of the parking lot. “You have no idea where you’re going, do you?”

She wraps her arms around her chest and says defiantly, “Actually, I pointed southeast. Our destination is in that direction.”

“And you know that because Crazy Frankie told you,” I state incredulously.

“I don’t think he’s actually crazy,” she says.

Oh my God, I’m driving a psychopath. “So if the wino told you to go southeast, why are we heading due east?”

“Because. As I said, we have to go to that mountain first,” she insists, nodding in the direction of Mount Rainier.

I just sit and stare at her for a minute until I remember how valuable this girl is to Dad and the fact that my name is, at this very moment, written in his bad books in bold capital letters. The last thing I want is for her to get out of my car and find someone else named Taxi or Greyhound Bus and ditch me.

“You are taking me,” she says, as if I have no choice in the matter. Man, does she have me pegged: I need her as much as she needs me.

“Seat belt,” I say. She looks confused. “If I’m taking you, you have to wear your seat belt.” Still no reaction. I yank on mine, demonstrating what a seat belt is, and she fiddles with hers until she finally gets it attached.

I mash my foot on the accelerator and go. We drive in silence for a few minutes, which is good, because I have to get my bearings. I search for road signs, finally see one for MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK, and follow it east out of town.

We drive over long bridges spanning large bodies of water, and past ugly urban sprawl until mountains appear in the distance, one capped with snow. We’ve been on the road a good twenty minutes before I notice that the girl is holding on to the dashboard with both hands.

“What?” I ask.

“What, what?” she responds.

“What are you doing? Why are you pushing on the dashboard like that?”

“You’re going kind of fast,” she says, in an accusatory voice.

“Fast? I’m only going fifty. That’s not even the speed limit!”

“It feels fast to me,” she mutters.

“Listen, if you’re going to criticize my driving,” I begin, and then I remember… I’m arguing with a crazy person. “Just stop doing that,” I say, glancing at her death grip on the glove compartment. “It’s making me nervous.”

She frowns and lets go, but moves her hands to the edges of the seat on either side of her legs and clutches tight. I decide to ignore her completely until I’m on the highway going out of town, at which point I speed up to sixty and relax. We pass a sign saying 54 MILES TO MOUNT RAINIER, and I see the girl’s eyes flick from the sign to the speedometer and back as she calculates how long it will take us to get there. She looks at the sun, or at least where the faint shape of the sun glows from underneath the rain clouds, and then at the dashboard clock, and finally lays her head back against the headrest and relaxes. And when I say relaxes, I only mean she doesn’t look like she’s going to explode or spontaneously leap out of the speeding car.

I wish she’d take off that contact lens. It freaks me out. One of the goth girls at school has scary yellow cat-eye lenses. Definitely not my scene—the artsy goth posers. And thinking of school reminds me that, however weird she is, Cat-eyes will be attending graduation next month, and I won’t. I step on the accelerator, and the engine roars as I take the car to ninety miles per hour. And when I see the girl’s fingers grip tightly around the edge of her seat, I smile.

We drive the next hour without speaking. As we approach the mountains, city-appropriate sedans are gradually replaced by massive pickup trucks and semis stacked with logs. One-story identical wooden houses are lined up side by side like a countrified version of Monopoly.

After a little while, I turn the radio on—my music is on my dead phone—and all I can find is country. I keep it on—it’s better than sitting in silence with the odd boy-girl.

I can’t help but glance at her every once in a while; she could be part Asian, with high cheekbones and thick black hair. Her clothes look straight from the men’s section of Old Navy. Her hairstyle is truly ugly: It looks like she got a bad crew cut, and now that it’s growing out, she’s spiking it to make herself look taller. Or fiercer.

She’s small. I’d say five-five was a pretty close estimate. When she’s quiet, she looks her size. But when she talks, she somehow gains a few inches… becomes bigger than herself. When she first got in the car, I thought, If she’s insane and freaks out in my car, I can take her, but now I’m not so sure. There’s this energy… and anger… jam-packed into every inch of her.

Dad said that calling her an industrial spy was “near enough to the truth.” When I first saw her, I couldn’t imagine her being involved in anything spy-related. But now she’s sitting inches away from me, I totally can. She seems dangerous.

As if reading my thoughts, she glances over at me, and when our eyes meet, she glowers. “Where are you from?” she asks.

I hesitate, and then decide it can’t hurt for her to know where I live. “L.A.,” I say.

She just stares at me. “Where is… Ellay?” she asks finally.

“Los Angeles. It’s in—” I say.

“Oh, yes. California,” she interrupts, and then to herself mumbles, “Most populous U.S. city after New York City; however, not the capital of California, which is”—she pauses and thinks a second—“Sacramento. Or at least, it was in 1983.”

Freak.

I turn off onto a two-lane road, and we pass a group of hunters dressed in brown camouflage, carrying guns. I hate guns. Dad tried to take me hunting once. I spent the whole time in the lodge playing video games, refusing to go out on the hunting range and embarrassing him in front of his friends.

“What is your whole name?” she asks, continuing her interrogation.

Uh-oh. Now we’re in tricky territory. Everyone’s heard of Blackwell Pharmaceutical. My last name is usually a status symbol, but right now it’s probably better not to flaunt it.

“Why would I tell you my last name when you haven’t even told me your first?” I lob back.

“My name is Juneau,” she says.

“Like the goddess… what, queen of Olympus?” I ask.

“No, like the capital of Alaska,” she responds.

Bingo! I think, remembering that Dad had mentioned that the girl was coming by boat from Anchorage.

Juneau points to a National Forest road map posted by the side of the road. “Stop here,” she says, and clicking off her seat belt, gets out of the car before I’ve come to a complete stop. She stumbles slightly as I slam on the brakes, and then, catching her balance, walks to the sign as normally as if she bails out of moving cars all the time.

The girl’s on drugs. That’s got to be it. Whatever secret drug Dad’s trying to get his hands on, she’s probably already taking it by the truckload. Unless it’s an antipsychotic pill, in which case she could use a few.

She studies the map for a few minutes, and then walks back to the car, gets in, and says, “Okay. Drive.” Like I’m her chauffeur or something.

“Would you mind telling me where we’re going?” I ask, masking my sarcasm to avoid another nasty scowl. The girl—Juneau—scares me, and it’s just not worth getting her riled up.

“Up there,” she says, pointing halfway up the mountainside.

I can’t help it. I begin speaking to her as if she were a toddler. Or deranged, which she is. “As you can see, it is now seven p.m.,” I say, gesturing to the dashboard clock as if I were a game show host and it was a brand-new car. “There are no restaurants anywhere nearby. And the sign for ‘accommodation’ was back a ways, pointing in another direction. So if we want to, say, eat dinner—or sleep anywhere besides here in this car—we have to turn around and go somewhere else.”

“That way.” She points up the mountain.

I squeeze my hands into fists. But I think of the look on Dad’s face if I manage to get her back to L.A., and ask with clenched teeth, “Would you like to close the car door then so I can drive?”

“Oh yeah,” she says, as if it hadn’t occurred to her. She leans over and slams the door shut, and we’re off.

I’m lying here in a tent, pretending to be asleep but actually fearing for my life as I watch a bunny murderer have a conversation with our campfire.

Here’s how it went down. Halfway up Mt. Rainier, Juneau orders me to go off-road down this dirt track. Once we’re way past where anyone—say, rescuers—could actually find us, she tells me to stop. It’s getting dark, and it’s like we’re in a scene from one of those documentaries where oblivious backpackers set up camp near a bear cave or a wolf den or on top of a killer scorpion nest and are taught their lesson for thoughtlessly encroaching upon nature. And just when I’m thinking this, Juneau gets her pack out of the backseat, pulls a nylon bag out, and starts setting up a freaking tent.

“What are you doing?” My voice shoots up an octave, like I’ve been breathing helium.

She looks over at me and says simply, “What’s it look like?”

“We’re not sleeping here tonight! This isn’t even a legal campsite!” I squeak.

“We have to. I wasn’t able to Read nature in Seattle. The city made me too anxious. I saw a postcard of this mountain and knew it would be the perfect place to Read. It kind of looks like home,” she responds. And just like that, she goes back to unwrapping the nylon tent and sticking folding metal poles through it. I stand like an idiot while she brushes twigs and rocks away from a flat bit of ground and then pulls the tent over to it and starts banging pins into the earth to anchor it.

She turns to me. “If you want to help, you can get a fire going before it’s too dark to see.”

“A fire? I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in the middle of a national park. And why do we need a fire?” I ask. “It’s not even cold out.”

“For dinner,” she says, and out of her pack she takes two carved and painted dowel-looking things, clicks them into grooves to fit together, and grabs a bundle of little pointed arrow-stick thingies, and I’ll be damned if she’s not walking off into the forest holding a mini-crossbow.

I don’t even try to make a fire. I go back to the car and for a half hour I fiddle with my iPhone, trying to turn it back on, but it’s completely shot. I’m wondering what she could have done to break it when I look up and see Juneau stride into the clearing, holding a dead rabbit by the hind legs.

Not even looking my way, she sits down and takes a huge bowie knife out of her pack and starts peeling the fur off. I can’t watch. I feel sick.

By the time I turn back around, she’s made a fire and has set up a kind of makeshift spit by driving two branches into the ground on either side of the flames. Then, ever so casually, as if she were tying her shoes or something, she shoves a third stick through the raw, red-skinned rabbit’s mouth and out its other end, and I have to walk off into the woods by myself because I think I’m going to puke.

By the time I get back, the thing on the spit actually looks like meat and smells appetizing enough to make my mouth water. I stand there and watch her as she roasts some mushrooms and leaves in a little pan over the flames, using the juice dripping from the meat to cook them.

“I get it that foraging is the hip new thing for you back-to-nature types, but you do realize there is a McDonald’s about a half hour down the road?”

For a moment it looks like she doesn’t recognize me. Then she nonchalantly cuts a sliver of cooked leg off something that was cute and fluffy and hopping around about an hour ago. She holds it grimly up on the end of the knife, like a dare. I shudder, but pick the meat off the knifepoint and pop it in my mouth. Oh my God, it’s really good.

She sees my expression and smiles. “Saw the McDonald’s sign on the way. But I tried it in Seattle, and frankly, that stuff’s nasty.”