After the End

28 MILES

“GIVE ME BACK MY WATCH, YOU FLEA-RIDDEN winged rodent!” I am chasing a raven around a clearing in the woods in the middle of nowhere Oregon as a brainwashed teenage ex–cult member meditates by the campfire. It seems that crazy spreads, because I have finally lost it. I’m at the end of my rope.

“It’s shiny,” Juneau calls, shaking herself out of her trance. “Ravens like shiny things.”

“Why did you even let him out of the car if there’s a chance of him flying back to Whit?”

“He’s not acting paranoid anymore. Whit stopped trying to get him, so he’s safe now.”

I stop chasing the bird and walk over to stand in front of Juneau. “Where. Are. We. Going,” I say, my teeth clenched so tightly I have to bite the words out.

“Like I said, I’m trying to figure that out,” she says calmly.

I stare at her, my eyes wide. “Three days, Juneau. We’re on day three of our demented road trip now. If you don’t tell me right now where we’re going, then I am out of here. Gone. And I will leave you and the bird here and go back to California and you’ll have to find someone else to drive you. Someone who doesn’t mind sleeping on the ground and being forced to eat innocent wildlife on a daily basis by an insane hippie.”

“Innocent wildlife?” Juneau says, confused.

“The roasted lizard we ate last night. Which, along with the bunny we ate on the mountain, makes two innocent wild animals that I consumed within twenty-four hours. What next? Bambi? Why don’t we eat something non-innocent and annoying? In which case, I vote for the bird.”

“If you don’t want Poe to pick up your things, you shouldn’t leave them sitting out,” she rebuts.

“I didn’t! It was in my bag!” I growl, and spin to see my bag sitting on the ground beside the tent, its contents strewn all over the ground. “I’m going to kill you!” I yell, and make a lunge for the bird, who flaps away and alights on a branch too high for me to reach.

“Go ahead. Leave us, then,” Juneau calls. She turns and walks away from our campsite, out of the clearing onto the pebble beach lining the lakefront. Sitting down on a flat boulder, she pulls her knees to her chin and looks out across the water. I sigh, and my anger fizzles out when I remember what she looked like last night in the tent.

She looked her age—a rare occurrence. She looked defenseless, even though her hand stayed inches away from her loaded crossbow all night. She looked sad.

She spoke in her sleep again, but this time I think she was talking about me. “I know. I can’t trust him,” she said a couple of times. And then she whispered, “Who else have I got?”

Right then, for the first time, I felt bad about what I’m doing. I mean, now that it’s clear I can’t talk her into going to California with me, all I’m trying to do is stay with her long enough to get a phone call through to Dad. There’s no way I’m driving her on her crazy mission. I’ve decided that as soon as we get to a town, I’m making the call.

But she believes I’m going to help her. She believes her family has been kidnapped and that we’re on a quest to save them. She believes she has some kind of superpowers.

Okay, she’s not all there, but that doesn’t mean I have the right to trick her and pretend that I’m her friend when I’m just going to hand her over to Dad. Not that I have in any way pretended to be her friend, I think. To stay on the moral high ground of this situation, I just have to be careful not to befriend her. She knows I’m helping her for a reason—she said it herself. So there’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing unless I lie. Or trick her in any way. So far, so good.

But as for the imaginary superpowers: All day today, she’s been trying to do things. Talk to the bird. Press her necklace against the ground and talk to it. Skip rocks and watch the ripples on the surface of the water, lips moving as she does. Each experiment ends with her giving this frustrated, teeth-clenched growl before she goes off to try something else.

She didn’t even offer to make lunch today, so I heated up some pork and beans, which wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it would be. I left her a bowl of it, but she fed it to the bird. And now it’s almost night, and it doesn’t look like dinner’s going to happen unless I do something about it.

I hesitate for a moment, hoping she’ll spontaneously remember mealtime and fix us something from the supplies she bought. I concentrate really hard. Dinner, Juneau. Remember dinner. Hell, if she can read the raven’s brain, maybe she can read mine too.

Of course it doesn’t work. I settle for the direct approach and walk down to the waterfront and sit next to her on the rock. She doesn’t move, just stays still with her head resting on her knees, looking out over the water.

“You okay?” I ask after a minute.

“No,” she replies.

“Is it because I called you insane?”

She balances her chin on her knees and pivots her head back and forth to say no. “That’s nothing new. We had already established the fact that you think I’m unbalanced. Which, coming from you, I consider as a compliment.” Her mouth turns up slightly on one side.

Something about her expression makes my heart do a little surge of happiness. What’s wrong with me? I’m definitely catching her crazy.

She sighs and looks serious again. “I’m staying here until I get a sign telling me where to go next. But I’m not keeping you captive, you know. You can leave at any time.”

“Despite my threats, I wouldn’t leave you in the middle of the wilderness alone,” I protest.

“Because I wouldn’t make it out alive without your advanced survival skills,” she says, trying not to laugh. “Okay. Thanks for saying you won’t leave me stranded. But you could drop me off in the next town,” she continues.

I don’t say anything.

“Frankie was right. You need me, don’t you?” she asks. I feel cornered and shrug. She doesn’t press me on it and looks back at the water.

“If you didn’t like the lizards, why did you eat three of them?” she mumbles, and I can’t help but laugh. This wins me a small smile from her, and she rocks back and forth for a second before sighing and looking tired.

“You haven’t eaten,” I say. “And though you’ve hardly said a word to me all day, I can’t help but notice you’ve been carrying on full-fledged conversations with all sorts of inanimate objects. And when they don’t talk back, you look like you want to kick the shit out of them.”

“Sounds crazy, right?” she asks.

I nod.

“Sounds crazy… looks crazy. Why don’t you just settle for your insanity diagnosis and let me be?”

“Because you look like you’re having a meltdown. And friends don’t let friends do meltdowns.” I say it even though I know she won’t get the reference. She never does.

“So you’re my friend?” she says skeptically.

Oh, crap. What have I done? I shrug and look out at the water. “Well, I wouldn’t say best buds, exactly, but I don’t hate your guts. At least not at this precise moment.”

She almost cracks a smile, and there my heart goes again, turning a flip in my chest. No, Miles. Do not go there, I urge myself.

She’s talking. “Tell me something about you. It doesn’t have to be important.”

I lean over and pick up a stone from the ground beside the boulder. I roll it around in my fingers, feeling its smoothness, watching the colors change in its quartz-like interior as I turn it back and forth in the blue air of twilight. And then I throw it as far as I can into the water and wait for the plop before turning to her and saying, “I got kicked out of high school with just a couple months left until graduation.”

“For what?” she asks.

“Cheating on a test,” I say, “among other things.”

“What other things?”

“Bringing alcohol and pot to school.”

“Pot?”

“Drugs.”

“Oh.” She hesitates and then asks, “So why’d you cheat? Didn’t you study?”

“That’s the thing. I didn’t need to cheat. I had studied—I knew all the answers. I don’t know why I did it.” I try to remember and can’t. It was unimportant. Trivial. I’d done it a million times. “Probably just to see if I could get away with it. For the thrill.”

“And you think I’m weird?” she says. I shrug and pick up another stone.

Juneau rubs her hand over her spiky hair again. Then she exhales deeply, and her body looks like a balloon deflating. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I say, because you’re not going to believe it anyway.” She shuffles her body around so that she’s facing me. “In 1984, at the outset of World War III, my parents and some friends of theirs escaped from America to settle in the Alaskan wilderness.”

“There was no World War III,” I interject.

She gives me a frustrated look. “Are you going to listen or what?”

I lean back on my elbows and listen.