Page 65 of Wayfarers

“We should go there!”

“We need to get farther south first! But okay, wait, I was building to something. You’re this all-good person who only makes all-good decisions! But then, somewhere west of nowhere Texas: Del Taco! Your stomach is about to crawl out of your body, it’s mutinying, and your only option is Del Taco! So you plug your nose and pull in the drive-thru and order with your heart beating hard and then you just kill a bunch of Del Tacos. Beans all over your face. The whole enchilada. And now what? You can’t go back. You’re now a bad person who did a bad thing. Forever. And that’s just eating fast food. What happens when you truly screw up?

“Once you do something bad,” I tell him, “something really bad, something that was nowhere in the plan . . . it’s really hard to know what you are anymore. You’ve erased yourself.”

“But, Sylvie, forgiveness exists. I mean, there are whole religions that are built around the idea of forgiving yourself, or God forgiving you, for when you mess up—”

“I went to Catholic school, I know that stuff! What I’m saying is that I disagree with all that. Because the—the world is designed for us to mess up.” I’m saying it with a fervor I didn’t know I felt. “Everything is a little bit bad! It’s all just a matter of, like, scale. We mess up a million times every day in ways that we are going to feel forever. So like, eat your sandwich, clown sandwich, and enjoy it. You know?”

Knox Don’t Tell

I knew what Jimmy John’s was

the whole time. But I saw

a chance to make her

laugh and I love

her laugh.

Knox

“So what’s your biggest mess-up?” I ask.

Sylvie looks at me like I just asked her if she wanted a light sprinkling of baby spiders on her sandwich. “Dude.”

“What?”

“You don’t get to ask me that.”

“I don’t get to ask or I don’t get to know?”

“Well, both but definitely the not-getting-to-know part. That, for sure.”

“Okay, sorry. I didn’t know how far past small talk we’d moved.”

“I mean, turn it back on you: What’s your biggest mess-up?”

“Whoa, that’s a new one to me,” I say—genuinely not intending to avoid the question but also grateful for a plausible way to do just that—pointing. “And I’ve seen a lot of billboards in my life.”

“The Highway Psychic?! Next exit?” She immediately gets into the far right lane.

“No way. Really?”

“I am not merely passing by The Highway Psychic.”

“Don’t you think it’s a scam?”

Sylvie shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Because I’ve had some behind-the-scenes contact with ‘fortune tellers’ in my life and there was absolutely nothing gifted about them other than their ability to look someone in the eyes, tell them what they wanted to hear whether it was true or not, take their money for the privilege of being lied to, and sleep like babies at night.”

“Look at that billboard. Those can’t be cheap. The only people you see with those are ambulance chaser lawyers who get big settlements or realtors who look like they used to be Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.”

“And?”

“You gotta be a pretty successful psychic to run with that crowd, which means your predictions are coming true. Maybe you even won the lottery or something.”