We drive and drive, new ideas of where we’ll go piling up, like fluffy clouds on the horizon. It’s the last week of June, so why not treat it like a vacation? The aquarium. Fenway Park. Carlos keeps checking his phone and looking up places to see. “There’s good pizza in Providence,” he’ll say, with a glance toward the back seat. Or “Maybe we should check out Legoland.”
“Legoland!” Kamal chimes.
I don’t know what I want to do, I just need to keep going. I don’t want to be reminded of who I was: that girl in her army jacket and black boots, so sure of herself, of her past and future. That’s the old Rania, like a deflated parade float, left on the pavement in a puddle of flattened rubber.
Everything a lie. This country a lie. Lidia’s right: In fifth grade we went to Ellis Island. I wore my hair in braided loops in those days. I was still only a year into this country and I was eager and everything excited me—the ferry we took, the nice teachers, the buttons we could press lighting up the big map where everyone came from, the echoing halls where they waited. I wrote a report about a girl like me who came with her parents and whose luggage with torn straps I saw on display. Now every house we skim past seems made of paper, transparent, ready to blow over. But I do have Kamal in the back, Carlos beside me.
Since we don’t have much in the way of clothes, we pull off when we see a mall and shop at TJ Maxx. I buy underwear, shorts, and a new pair of sneakers for Kamal, flip-flops and a straw hat for me. Carlos gets sunglasses and joggers, snapping off the labels as we walk back through the parking lot.
By late afternoon, we’re searching for a motel just outside Boston. At the first one I snap down my driver’s license, and the receptionist explains, “You can’t book a room because you’re under eighteen.”
I gulp. That again. We turn away when an elderly man, reading in a chair, gestures to us. “Up the road,” he says. “Pay cash.”
We drive a short way to find a low-slung, dirty-yellow motel, its sign missing letters, so it says, OTEL. ACANCIES.
“ ’Ello, you have ’ooms at the ’otel?” Carlos teases as we walk toward the front door.
Kamal giggles and they start a chiming game, leaving off the first letters.
The shower curtain shrieks on its metal loops, showing a permanently stained tub. Our room looks out on a pool drained of water and a DO NOT USE sign. We don’t care. We flop on the beds, arms out. The hours spread before us, delicious. No grown-ups. No one else. That’s all I want right now. To not think or worry or be angry or scared.
Carlos pushes back a strand of hair that’s fallen in front of my eyes. “You okay with all of this?” he asks.
I blush. “I think.”
We both jump up, suddenly awkward. He’s blushing too. The two double beds suddenly look different.
“Maybe we should wash up before dinner,” I suggest.
“Good idea.”
Our elbows bang. He springs back, gestures to the bathroom door. “You first.” Then he steps outside, sketchbook tucked under his arm.
Polite, I think, unzipping my bag. Ammi would approve.
We all wash and change, then cross the busy road and eat at a Houlihan’s, stuffing ourselves with fries and steak and chocolate cake. Groaning, we make our way back across, pausing on the meridian as the cars zip and hum past. I grab Kamal’s hand, tugging him closer to me, and hold Carlos’s arm, as if to brace myself against all this change and commotion.
“You okay?” Carlos asks.
A little jump in my throat, seeing his beautiful mouth, his eyes. In a strange way I’m better than ever, each of them by my side. I can smell pine trees. Even with the strip of pink pollution on the horizon, the stars stab through. I gulp the air, throw my head back. I have never felt so light.
We stay another day, mostly because we’re feeling lazy. I fish out another seventy dollars from the wad I got from Uncle and give it to the receptionist, who doesn’t even put it in a cash register but puts the folded bills into her pocket. I do the calculations: Carlos has about two hundred dollars on him. There’s my mother’s bank account—about three thousand—the cash from her bag and from Mr. Mehta—another twenty-one hundred. If we’re careful, we can keep going. Stay on the road.
This time we go out for groceries—peanut butter and jam and bread, hard-boiled eggs, a bag of chips, and baby carrots. Carlos had the good sense to bring a soccer ball, and we also stop off at a dollar store and buy a Frisbee and a cheap plastic bat and balls. We find a small triangular park and play with Kamal, so he’s laughing and throwing himself on the ground each time he catches the Frisbee. We do this until the tree shadows lengthen on the grass and the rest of the families are picking up and leaving. This time we go to a Red Lobster, where they have an all-you-can-eat buffet, and we eat so much our stomachs ache and back at the motel, all we can do is moan happily on the beds. Already this feels like a real vacation, lazing through my limbs like thick honey.
Turning on my phone, I see a stream of messages and texts from Lidia. Status? You promised me. One day. Then I check my emails and see a message from Amirah, the bookstore manager. Just confirming you’ll be available for training later this summer?
I show Carlos the email. “What am I supposed to tell her? I didn’t even tell my mom about this job.”
“You didn’t want to, did you?”
I look at him in surprise. My cheeks go warm again. It’s as if Carlos were seeing right through me. How could he know me when he doesn’t know me? And yet there’s something old and familiar between us. I write her back, Will get back to you soon. I switch the phone off. Then I jump up, hoping he doesn’t notice that I’m blushing, and say sternly to Kamal, “Time for a bath.”
He jams his arms against his chest. “It’s ugly in there.”
“So are you,” I tease.
I go and run the water and even though he makes a wrinkly nose, he does take a bath. To my relief, Kamal hasn’t had any accidents since we got on the road. I’d been a little weirded out, sleeping next to him.
While Kamal is in the bathroom, Carlos and I sit on the floor, backs against the bed, and go back to flicking through the TV stations. The news is the same awful stuff: chaos at the border. Kids sobbing for their parents. Carlos looks drawn and tired, older.
“What about your aunt?” I ask. “Have you heard from her?”
“She’s back in Mexico. They put her on a plane.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Not sure. Someone told me Canada is better. I think I have a cousin there.”
We go back to watching. His body is solid next to mine. I almost reach for his hand. Then he snaps the news off.
Carlos has woken before us, showing up with a cardboard tray of juice and doughnuts. “Let’s go to a museum,” he says. “There are really good ones in Boston.”
Kamal groans into his pillow.
“This is an educational vacation, silly,” I say, and teasingly flick a finger on his nose.
My phone has a cache of new messages—everything I’ve been avoiding. Lidia is frantic. “You’re with your uncle? You need to get in touch ASAP. What about the form?” Then there’s one from Ammi, who sounds strangely heartened. “That’s my girl,” she says, laughing. “Smarter than those shelter people. I told Lidia not to worry. You would figure out what to do.” The last is from Fatima. “Please, Rania, tell me what’s going on. I’m scared.”
This cuts me, sharp. I text her: Promise. Will call soon. Will explain.
She texts back a sad-face emoji.
I’ve never gone so long without speaking to my best friend. But it’s different now. I think of our T-shirts, the road making everything smaller and smaller until it’s only a dot. That’s what I want: to disappear, to turn it into freedom. I shut the phone off. We’ll use Carlos’s phone to navigate. And we’ll just keep going, not looking back.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is beautiful, with a huge atrium and different galleries branching off. Kamal is glum at first—he’d hoped we’d do Legoland—but I let him use my phone for a game and even interest him in a painting or two.
Carlos is the one to lead. He’s clear on exactly what he wants to see. We wind up in front of a painting called Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia). It’s of two women, one in the front and the other just behind her, like two playing cards. Their hair is jet-black, pulled back sleekly with a part in the middle, their eyebrows thick brushes. The woman in the front has on a blue dress with a double-frill white yoke, gold hoops in her ears. Behind them is an olive-toned forest of leaves and fruit and butterflies. But the women are the most colorful things in the painting, their faces strong, their eyes gazing firmly. It makes me think of Ammi, her strength, and for an instant, I feel a wisp of sadness.
Then I realize this might be a mother and daughter. The woman in back wearing the yellow dress has an older face. It’s really the daughter who’s more vivid, her lips pink, her eyes hard black.
I am behind you always, Ammi used to say, especially when she was working extra Uber shifts and left us our dinner under damp towels. Even when I can’t be.
Maybe I don’t want Ammi behind me.
After, as we’re sitting outside on a bench and eating our sandwiches, Carlos explains that the painting is by Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter whose husband was the famous muralist Diego Rivera. But it’s Kahlo’s work he’s always liked, how she often painted herself and turned her insides out for the world to see. He shows me a drawing he had been working on in his sketch pad using pastels: It’s a portrait of himself. He’s staring over his shoulder, and his two scars are carried up and over his head into a curved horn of birds and twisting branches and streaked sky. “Wow,” I say. He explains that in art class last year they had to do a series that drew inspiration from famous artists.
“Did you know she had, like, twenty-six operations and lived with a metal bar in her body?” He points, as if tracing the outline of the women. “She painted out all that pain and stuff that happened to her. She turned her scars into beauty.”
I want to fling my arms around Carlos’s neck. A ticklish warmth slides through me. He makes me look at things from the inside out, through his quiet gaze. I’m not sure what he is to me, to us, but I’ve never felt something like this. I want to protect him and be protected by him.
“One more round, hermanito. To look at a few things.”
Kamal stamps his foot, exasperated, points to the Frisbee. Carlos kneels down, puts his hand on Kamal’s shoulder, and says softly, “You don’t want to be a disappointment to me, do you?” I’m struck by how formal Carlos can be sometimes. Whenever I thank him for something small, like picking up a ball from the ground, he always answers, “My pleasure.” He sounds like a waiter or a butler in a movie. I even ribbed him about it once. “Is that cultural or something?” He just replied, “That’s the way I was taught.”
The way. What is Carlos’s way? He’s a mix between an old-school gentleman and a street-smart kid, maneuvering through so many harrowing situations. The few times I’ve dared touch him, his muscles were taut, corded with tension. He stands some distance away, keeping a space between himself and others.
Kamal bites his lower lip, and Carlos continues. “Then you’re going to hold my hand and we are going to walk quietly to the place that I want to go to. And you’re going to stay and look with me. And when we’re done—only then—we can go and get an ice cream and find a park and play, okay?”
“Okay!” Kamal grins.
We go to another gallery that has another artist he likes, Edward Hopper. “You’re seeing my whole art class.” Carlos laughs.
They are mostly drawings, a few paintings. Some feel lonely—a drawing of a house all by itself on a street. When I say this to Carlos, he agrees. “That’s what I like about his work. He shows me how lonely it can be here.”
A painting catches my eye, since it’s so familiar: a wall of windows with faded-green blinds, looking over the tops of low, redbrick buildings. There’s a woman with her back to us, sitting in a rocking chair, and a vase of flowers. Room in Brooklyn, it’s called. “Hey, Kamal, look,” I say. “Home.”
But he’s pulled close to some paintings of boats and white clapboard houses against a horizon, and a lighthouse on a bluff. “I want to go there,” he says. “I want to see that.”
Carlos and I look at each other. “Why not?” we both say.
Carlos finds another lighthouse on the internet, from a painting he remembers. We stop at a big supermarket and buy ourselves a Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice, and load up on food for the road—sliced meats and cheese, grapes and bananas. Carlos eats bananas like there’s no tomorrow. “I’m a growing boy,” he says, patting his stomach. I also get myself a phone card.
I realize I’ve got to do something fast about Lidia. So I sign the folded form with my uncle’s name, and fake the two witnesses—one of them Shaima, another a made-up person. I take a picture and text it to her along with: Pls send Ammi’s address PA. This buys me time, but not much. They’ll never know: Uncle is leaving soon enough. And I can feel Ammi egging me on, proud at how I’m outsmarting others. Run, she would say. Don’t let anyone hold you back.
Soon I get a message from Lidia. About time! OK for now. Uncle may need court appearance. A few minutes later she sends an address in Pennsylvania. Relief washes through me. We can keep going. For now.
While Carlos and Kamal go to the bathroom, I call Fatima with my phone card. She starts to cry and yell at me that her parents are furious, that her father doesn’t want her to have anything to do with me. “Where are you?”
I just listen. “I can’t tell you.”
“You don’t trust me.”
I consider this a moment. “It’s not that. What if Lidia or the shelter people call you and ask a lot of questions? All I can tell you is we’re traveling. On the road.”
“Like in the novel? With a boy? That should be me and you!”
“Fatima, this is different. It isn’t some joyride, okay? I don’t have a choice.”
“I just want to be with you.”
I sigh. “I miss you too, Fa-Fa. But this is serious. We’re running for real.”
She is quiet. Then she whispers, “Ra-Ra, I’m scared. You don’t even know this boy.”
“He’s okay.”
“How do you know?”
I pause. How do I know? I think of the cinnamon bun with melting icing, the way he so naturally plays with the little kids. Or what he said when he showed me the painting. He saw right into me almost from the start. That ticklish feeling starts in my chest, spools outward, to all of me. He knows what it’s like to be unprotected. To always be on the run. There’s an understanding quiet between us.
“Carlos is chill,” I say softly. “He really is.”
“He better be. Or I’ll come and kick his ass.” I hear her sniffling on the other end. “Get me something cool? Wherever you are?”
“I promise, Fa-Fa,” I say.
Then we’re heading out of Boston, toward Cape Cod.
“This way you can see the very tippy tip of America,” Carlos explains to Kamal.
“What else can we do?”
“We can swim.”
“In the ocean?”
“Yes.”
His nose wrinkles. “Are there sharks?”
“Maybe. But that’s why you have to be a fast swimmer.”
“I need a floatie,” he says. “I can’t swim without a floatie!” Kamal is a cautious swimmer. We once took a few days off and Ammi drove us to a lake upstate; Kamal spent a lot of time on the beach, knees pressed together, not trusting the orange floaties on his arms.
I reach over and rub Kamal’s ankle. “Don’t worry. We’ll swim where there are no sharks. And we’ll get you a floatie.”
I’m already liking this trip: after about an hour we’re starting to pass buildings with cutouts of cheerful lobstermen in boats on the roofs, floats and blow-up rowboats swinging from the front porches. It feels like we’re heading into a real vacation. Once we’re crossing the Sagamore Bridge and see the glittering water, and then on Route 6, with its low shrubs and flat land, I open the windows to see if I can smell the sea, the way I did in Karachi, with Ammi and Abu.
Leaning over, Carlos tucks my hair back, which is flying into my eyes. “It never stays in place,” he murmurs.
My face tingles, feeling his fingers against my skin. Then I call out, “Route Six!”
“So?”
“That’s it! The whole way On the Road begins! He’s in search of Route Six, which goes clear across the continent. Road America!”
Carlos laughs. “Whatever.”
“Say it, both of you!”
Kamal makes a face and Carlos grumbles, but they chorus: “Road America!”
“Road America!” we all chant, happy.
Carlos keeps checking on Airbnb listings but there’s nothing we could afford, and anyway, we can’t trick the system into believing we’re the right age. So we start pulling into motels. “No vacancy,” a girl tells me and points to the sign out front. At a place with little cabins, the woman takes one look at my driver’s license and snaps it on the counter. “Sorry. Your parents need to be with you.”
We get in the car and keep going, down the long thin road, passing gray-shingle buildings selling lobster rolls and fried clams, miniature-golf places. The lighthouse we are aiming for is still miles ahead, in a town called Truro, but we figure any place to stay along the way will work.
As we’re slowing near what looks like a motel, without a sign, we see two young women close to our age walking on the side of the road, holding plastic bags.
“Hey,” Carlos calls. “Any room there?”
They look at each other. One has blond-streaked hair pulled into a ponytail; the other wears fringed denim shorts. “That’s for the people who work here. At the restaurant.” She has a thick accent—something European. She points to what looks like an old pancake house.
“Everyone?”
“If not there, they work the other restaurants.”
The blonde clomps toward us. She looks very cool: She’s wearing cowboy boots and shorts that sag at her hips. A tattoo flowers up her arm and around her shoulder. She too has an accent. “A girl who was supposed to come never made it.” She turns to her friend. “I heard Doris say she has to figure out what to do with the room.”
We find Doris pushing a rubber tub on wheels, spray cleaners hooked to the lip. Her face has a kind look, folding into a smile. “This place is meant for the kids who work around here,” she explains. “I can work,” Carlos says. “Delivery, busboy. Anything.”
She gives him a dubious look but I can see she likes his take-charge energy.
“I guess so. But this isn’t a Marriott or anything. Rooms are cleaned just once a week. You get new towels and that’s it. Laundry is around the back—get yourself lots of quarters. And pay me cash or Venmo. That’s better.”
“Thank you!” I exclaim.
“Don’t thank me,” she says. “Thank the girl who never showed.”
She pushes off, the spray canisters jiggling on the side of her tub.
Everyone who lives here is in their twenties. They come from places like Bulgaria and the Czech Republic and Macedonia and Poland to work the summer season. It’s a special program where they get a temporary visa. A whole group of them work at the next-door restaurant, which is no longer a pancake house but serves a huge buffet. I hear them early in the morning—marching across the gravel driveway, then later their accented voices—“More scrambled eggs! Out of muffins! Someone take out the garbage!” By midday they return, limp and greasy, their showers throbbing through the thin walls. After, they sit out around the small swimming pool on the folding chairs and gossip, the girls with the insides of their pale arms turned up, faces tilted to the sun. All of them adore Kamal.
“He’s so cute!” the girl in the fringed denim shorts squeals.
“I want those curls,” her blond friend adds.
They bring us the food that isn’t taken, so we eat well—cold eggs and quiche and sausages and muffins. They give us a map too, showing what beaches we can use, and if we can fork over the money, Doris will give us a piece of paper to get our beach and pond stickers too.
On our third day on the Cape, we drive to the lighthouse. Carlos brings his sketch pad and Kamal bounds ahead. We pay for our tickets and climb up the twisting steps until we’re at the very top, gazing out over scrub brush and a rolling golf course and beyond, the Atlantic Ocean, flat and shiny blue, surrounding us. Then I remember staring at the Google map, how Cape Cod curls around like a great arm, jutting out into the water but somehow embracing too.
Kamal leans into me. I put my arm around him, pull him close. “I want to stay,” he whispers.
Stay. It sinks into me, this new pebble-word.
“It’s perfect,” Carlos says. “We’re, like, at the end of the earth. No one’s going to find us here. We can hide out.”
He shuts his eyes, and I notice the fringe of his lashes, golden brown.
Another word: hide.
Carlos talks to Dimitri, our neighbor in the next room, who’s a cook at the restaurant and plays guitar in the evenings on the concrete patio. He sets Carlos up with busing and working the kitchen. “There’s also delivery,” he says. “You got a car.” Carlos wakes early, like the others, and is part of the crunching footsteps in the morning, returning with more leftovers than we can stuff into ourselves. Since we have a car, unlike everyone else, our neighbors ask us to take them to the supermarket or the pharmacy, and they pay us five bucks for the gas or buy some extra PowerBars and snacks for us. And Carlos does a few deliveries, so he brings in a hundred bucks a day, which we store in an old mayonnaise jar. Not bad. There’s still our tucked-away cash and Ammi’s small savings account.
I drive into town and buy another phone card. Then I get nervous: If I speak to Ammi, might she ask to speak to Salim Uncle? I decide to get a postcard, something super-generic, so they won’t guess where we are. I find one with sailboats in a harbor and write: Dear Ammi, we are having a great time. Thank you for telling us to go to Uncle and Auntie. They are very nice. They say maybe we can take some trips together here in New England. I hope you are well. I know you will get out soon. Lidia is working on it. Kamal sends his love. Rania. But then I realize I can’t send it—what if she notices the Wellfleet stamp? Will she wonder? I shove everything into the bottom of my bag.
The next day, Doris knocks on my door. “Honey, I need to see your license if you’re going to keep on here.”
I go to the bureau and slowly hand the license to her, sucking in my breath while she peers at it. Her usually friendly expression creases for a moment. I get the prickly feeling all over my skin, and my stomach turns to jelly.
“Please,” I beg.
Her eyes are sharp—sharper than I’ve ever seen. “You’re not in trouble, are you?”
“No,” I say. “We’re just waiting. For my mom. Then we’ll all be together.” It’s a lame way of putting it, but I had to think quickly.
“That Carlos boy, he’s a good kid. I hear he’s a hard worker.”
“I can work too,” I put in.
Here she gets alert. “You don’t mind cleaning toilets?”
I do, but I say, “My mom says I made ours shine like a jewel.”
“Thatta girl. You come with me on Thursday and I’ll show you what to do.”
Once I started cleaning, I knew we could stay.