Page 104 of Wayfarers

“Other than talking in your sleep, a perfect lil’ lady.”

“Shut up, I don’t talk in my sleep.”

“Hey, no more than Winslow usually does.”

“What did I say in my sleep?”

“You said ‘Cal’ something. Something about Cal.”

Sylvie

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Not that it’s a big deal or anything.”

I’m not sure I want to do this. “Sure I said ‘Cal’? Not, like, ‘can’? For all you know I was dreaming about dancing the cancan.”

“You weren’t wiggling enough for that.”

“The cancan is a wiggle, huh?”

“I honestly have no idea what a cancan looks like.”

“That’s why God created YouTube. Add it to the list.”

“What list?” Knox asks.

“The list of things we need to look up when we’re not driving. Here, you can start a note in my Notes app.” I tell him how to do it. “What else should be on there? Maybe you need to see the Avatar sequels. Oh! Have you ever played Pac-Man? Maybe we can find an arcade!”

He’s quiet for a minute. “You don’t want to talk about it, huh.”

“What?”

“Cal.”

I try not to squirm. “Knox, I say this with a lot of love in my heart—”

“It’s usually not a good sign when people start sentences like that.”

“—but it’s sort of weird that you think you get to have an opinion on my not telling you things about my life. Because you’ve been Houdini-ing your way out of every attempt I’ve made to ask about yours.” I stare doggedly ahead. The highway’s gone to six lanes across, and every one of those six lanes is lousy with semitrucks. I-90 is hell.

“Okay. That’s fair.”

“So basically, I think we have three options here.”

“Lay ’em out.”

“The first option is that you and I can go on keeping our secrets behind lock and key for the next however many days until we get you to North Carolina, and in the meantime we talk about oatmeal, and The Kite Runner, and we make dad jokes, and you—you sleep in your tent wherever we end up camping and if you do get that phone you probably don’t text me a whole bunch after you get to your grandma’s unless it’s, like, to tell me you’ve finally seen a bad movie I mentioned in passing.”

Knox lets the silence stretch out, and I refuse to let it make me nervous. Not when all I’m doing is making the subtext into text. And maybe it’s a test I’m giving him. Maybe I’m waiting to see if he reacts the way Cal would to something like that—well I think it’s unfair that you think you have the right to dictate the terms of our relationship—essentially railroading me until I cave and let him take control instead.

My hands tense on the wheel. Am I a terrible person for thinking like this about the dead? No question.

“The second option,” I say, making myself continue, “is that I tell you everything about Cal and everything about why I was in, like, a nonfunctional state when I met you, and you tell me everything about this ‘unschooling’ thing that sounds like a cover for either a fundamentalist log-cabin cult or, like, something Manson Family–ish but without all the murders—I mean, I hope without all the murders—and then after all our cards are on the table, we can go ahead and have a healthy rela—friendship.

“But we’re not going to do that.”

“We’re not?” When I glance over at Knox, he’s trying to hide a smile.