After another hour, we pull over and switch, and Peter drives us across the Indiana border. It’s half past eight, and Harp’s still asleep in the backseat. I haven’t noticed her so much as stir since she lay down there, so now I am constantly turning in the passenger seat to put my index finger under her nose to make sure that she’s breathing. What do I do with the revelation that my best friend has gotten drunk on the sly today? Part of me says it’s just Harp being Harp, and another part of me is weirded out—as much as I realize that she and I are different people, it’s strange sometimes to recognize the things Harp does that I never would. She’s having a hard time right now, I think, the sixth or seventh time I turn with a vision in my head of her choking on her own vomit. But then I think, like Peter said—we all are.
Meanwhile, in the front seats, for those fifteen-minute periods when I can successfully shake all my anxiety about Harp away, Peter and I talk. We talk about books and movies and bands and his mom; we talk about what we’d be doing right now, if there’d never been any Pastor Beaton Frick. Peter can see himself at college in New York City, walking down a street of a million people, reading on the subway, lying in the grass in Central Park on a sunny day. I’d be getting ready for my junior prom right about now. I’d have gone dress-shopping with my mother, and split the cost of a limo with Lara and the others, and when Harp walked in, stumbling a little in high, high heels, wearing something slinky and slutty and sparkly, I’d have judged her. As penance for this alternate reality, I check Harp’s breathing, brush her hair back from her face.
She wakes when we park at a rest stop near South Bend; she sits up in the back and wipes the drool from her cheek. “Fuck,” she says, sounding dazed. “I need to pee.”
Before I can say anything, she’s out the door and on her way inside. While she was sleeping, Peter and I agreed we’d have to tread carefully from here to California. Believer culture seems to shift so quickly, from benign to terrifying and back again. We were planning, when Harp woke, to collaborate on personas to adopt in our interactions with strangers, characters that would lend us some level of protection—i.e., a Believer older brother shepherding his sinful sister and friend back into the fold. “It will be like a game,” Peter had said cheerfully, and he almost made me believe it. But now here’s Harp, running for the entrance without devoting even a shred of energy to wondering how much danger she faces.
Peter and I follow. “All these cars,” he says, and I notice for the first time that the parking lot is full. “What is everyone doing here on a Monday morning?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t tell if it makes me less nervous, or more.”
Inside, there are lots of people milling about: standing in line for fast food and coffee, or sitting with their families around tiny Formica tables, sharing little bottles of energy drinks. They’re dressed like normal people. They’re talking and laughing and their children are chasing each other in circles. The women don’t seem subservient to the men, and there might even be a gay couple here, happily sharing a soda—there are too many people to tell. Beside me, Peter exhales in relief, and we smile at each other, and I feel that rush of giddy energy I’m beginning to associate with proximity to him.
“You wanna grab some food and I’ll get some water?” he suggests. Then he clarifies, “Some actual water.”
We split up. Last night before we left her apartment, Harp and I divided all the cash she’d drained from her parents’ checking account into different purses and pockets and rolled-up pairs of socks. We don’t want to carry too much of it on ourselves at any given time, in case the worst-case scenario happens, and we’re separated. Even so, right now I have $338 on my person, stuffed into different pockets of my jeans and my coat and in the lining of my bag. It feels like a lot, until I think about how long this money has to last us. The sign outside says the gas at this stop is $9.82 per gallon—I have to believe this is an error in order to not start crying in front of a rest stop burger joint. And even if we scrimp and save for the next few days as we make our way across the country, we will still need money to live on when we end up wherever we end up.
I’m standing in front of the BurgerTime register, examining the menu options for which items will cost the least money and/or provide maximum nourishment over the highest amount of hours—fried grilled chicken? Cheesy cheeseburger salad?—when I hear a voice suddenly chirp, “Vivian? Vivian Apple?” I drop my eyes to the cashier. She’s my age, lit up under the fluorescents, wearing a red-striped visor and a white polo shirt to match the BurgerTime logo. Her black curls are twisted into a tight bun at the top of her head. I open my mouth to tell her, sorry, she has the wrong person—but she can’t have the wrong person, she’s said my name. And even though I can’t place her in my immediate memory, there’s something familiar about her sad eyes, her pleasant smile. I smile back at her, a little quizzically.
“Jesus.” I haven’t heard Harp sidle up beside me, but she’s there now, smelling vaguely of stale vodka and hand sanitizer. “Where the fuck are we? Why is Edie Trammell here?”
Of course it’s Edie Trammell. Why wouldn’t it be Edie Trammell?
Edie was in our class for years, a cheery presence on the yearbook staff, a decent softball player. But we haven’t seen her since her parents pulled her and her younger brother out of public school when we were in the sixth or seventh grade. A rumor went around that they’d done it for religious reasons—they objected to the books we were reading in English and the evolution we were starting to learn in science. This was just before Frick’s Rapture prediction, but as far as I know the Trammells weren’t early Believers—they belonged to some other church, but believed what they believed with a fury. At least, that’s the story that got spread around. It’s funny now to think that we were ever confused by extreme action taken in the name of God. Now Edie’s parents seem just like everyone else’s. This is the first I’ve seen of her since she left school. The last I remember hearing about her was from Lara Cochran, right before she converted—she’d been working afternoons in a gelato place in our neighborhood, and she told me Edie had come in with a much older man whom she claimed was her fiancé. Lara had been scandalized at the time, had wondered aloud in her prudish way whether this meant that Edie Trammell was Not a Virgin. But to my mind, none of this explains what Edie is doing here, by the side of a highway in Indiana, flipping burgers.
“I knew it was you!” Edie sings. “Vivian Apple! And Harp Janda—I’d know you anywhere! I can’t believe it!” She steps back from the cash register and comes around the counter to hug us, and that’s when I notice that she’s hugely pregnant. She leans across her swollen belly to hug me around my neck, and when she does the same to Harp, Harp looks at me over her shoulder with wide eyes.
“Edie,” I say. I’m still not sure what the right way to acknowledge a woman’s pregnancy is, even though I’ve watched a few girls my age go through it at this point. “It’s so … weird to see you. How did you end up here?”
But she doesn’t get a chance to answer, because a man with a walrus-y blonde moustache has stepped up to her place behind the counter. His hands are on his hips. “Edie? I’m sorry, am I interrupting your social hour?”
“Oh, gosh! Sorry, Mr. Knackstedt!” says Edie. “These are just some old friends of mine from home!”
“You know they don’t get free ValuMeals just for knowing you, right?” Mr. Knackstedt eyes Harp and me—and then Peter, who has wandered up behind us with a plastic bag full of water bottles—with total contempt.
Edie nods. “Of course, Mr. Knackstedt!” She turns to us, still smiling in genuine delight. “Okay, gals, I gotta get back. But I have a break in twenty minutes, so stick around, will you? And then we can catch up properly!” She plants a kiss on Harp’s cheek and then on mine, and flits as daintily as a very pregnant girl can back to the register.
We can’t handle the awkwardness of buying lunch from Edie, and we don’t want her to get in trouble from her manager. We buy three slices of greasy pizza (I picture in my head our total sum of money trickling down, down, down), and I watch Harp wolf down hers while I eat mine in slow, deliberate bites, thinking if I get full enough now, I might not have to buy dinner later. After a while, Edie comes shuffling up to us, tossing her visor down on the table.
“Hoo boy,” she says, dropping into the chair next to Peter. “What a day! I’ve been up since dawn, with no end in sight.”
“Edie,” I say, because I have dozens of questions to ask her and this one seems the most innocuous. “Is this place always so busy?”
“It has been, the last two weeks,” she explains, “but that’s only because most of these people come from a small town not too far off I-80. I guess the Church of America folks were making things a little unfriendly for all the Non-Believers—not saying that they meant to, of course—and so they’re living out of their cars right now, and spending most of the day here.”
“How’d you get knocked up?” Harp asks abruptly, through a mouthful of crust.
Edie blushes. I want to give Harp a warning look, but I resist my instinct to mother her, which I’m positive she hates. “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to, Edie.”
“No, that’s alright! I don’t mind telling the story to old friends—or even new ones!” Edie smiles at Peter and it doesn’t seem worth reminding her that neither Harp nor I were ever really friends with her—she was just a girl we knew from school who was gone one day, who we never tried to find. “You might remember I started getting homeschooled towards the end of junior high? We belonged to a Baptist church at the time. Well, my parents still might—I don’t know!” She smiles as she speaks, but her left knee bounces wildly with nerves. “What happened was that—gosh, over a year ago now—one of the youth pastors in our church converted to the Church of America. We stayed in touch after he left and he kept trying to convert me, too—he gave me a nice copy of the Book of Frick, and he had me read a chapter every night. And then we’d discuss the things we found. You know,” she says, beginning to sound a little defensive, “I know how a lot of it must sound, to Non-Believers, but there’s a lot of good in there, too. The Church is very big on fostering community, supporting one another, protecting one another. I don’t think I’d have converted if it hadn’t been for all that. But,” Edie says, looking bashful, “it’s true that I wouldn’t have even considered it if I hadn’t liked Christopher so much.
“He was older than me; he would’ve been twenty-three just last week. He told me I had to be baptized secretly, so my parents wouldn’t try to stand in the way of my being saved, and so I told them I was going to Jubilee. That’s the big annual Christian Youth Festival over in Akron?” She looks at Harp and me like we’ll know it, but we both just shake our heads. “I had to beg their permission to go, but finally they said okay. They put me on the bus to Akron,” Edie’s voice wavers, “and that was the last time I saw them.”
“Did Christopher get Raptured?” Harp asks. Her voice is softer now, more sympathetic. It’s hard not to feel bad for Edie when she’s sitting in front of you, pregnant and on the verge of tears, wearing a BurgerTime nametag that says, in small print, Ask me about our hot dog fries!
“I’d imagine,” Edie says. “But I haven’t seen him in about six months.”
Peter inhales a sharp, angry breath, just as I say, “Oh, Edie!”
Edie laughs a little nervously. “I’m making it sound so much worse than it was. He did marry me, after all! The Church pastor who baptized me performed the marriage ceremony right afterwards, so that we could—”
Harp raises an eyebrow.
“So that we could be together as God intended,” Edie says. “Christopher said that being married would make my transgression against my parents moral in the eyes of the Church, which was important to me—I felt so bad about it. Well, anyway, then I was blessed with this pregnancy, and only two months after that was when he got transferred to a Church in St. Paul. I didn’t mind leaving Pittsburgh. The only thing I minded was we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my parents. I thought we’d be able to, but Christopher said there wasn’t enough time. We were driving to St. Paul, see. Christopher wanted me to see the country; he wanted to visit other parishes as the Rapture approached. He was so excited. I was—” Edie stops a moment and swallows. She smiles apologetically at us. “I was not so excited. I was scared about what would happen to us, and to my parents, and all my Non-Believer friends. Christopher tried to be patient with me, but I think my doubts were too much for him. They might have been testing his own faith. I don’t know. Anyway, one morning six months ago I woke up in a motel room just off the highway here, alone. He’d left me a note saying he’d had a vision that he was meant to continue on to St. Paul alone, but that it would be okay, because we’d see each other in heaven.”
“Did he leave you any money?” asks Harp.
Edie shakes her head. “He paid for the motel room, though, so that was good. And anyway, I didn’t think I’d need money—it was only four months until the Rapture. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be saved, especially since I was carrying an extra soul.” She rubs her pregnant belly mournfully. “So I walked back to this rest stop, and asked for a job, and waited. And the Rapture came and went and I’m still waiting.”
“Where are you living?” I ask, afraid of the answer.
Sure enough, Edie waves a hand around, to indicate here. “There’s a break room upstairs with a couch they let me use. I keep it real nice,” she says to me, “so don’t look at me like that. And I can eat at BurgerTime for free, any time I want. There are a lot of people out there who have it worse than me, and I know it. Soon I’ll have a little guy to keep me company, and hopefully we’ll get swept up in that second Rapture they’re talking about.”
Suddenly Edie starts, and stands. She looks over at the BurgerTime station and gives a cheerful thumbs-up to Mr. Knackstedt, who pantomimes looking furiously at a watch.
“My break’s over,” she says. “Harp, Viv—it was so nice to see you. I’m sorry I’ve been chattering away this whole time and haven’t heard a word about what you’re up to. And—I never caught your name.”
“Peter.”
“Peter,” Edie says, sighing. “Now that’s a beautiful name. Peter, it was a pleasure to meet you. I hope I didn’t bore you too much. God bless you three.”
She picks up her visor from the table and waddles back to her register. Harp takes the pizza I’ve abandoned from my plate and bites into the rubbery cheese, stretching it into string.
“Well, that was depressing. Poor Edie. Fucking dudes, man. No offense,” Harp says to Peter. “But fucking dudes.”
I don’t say anything. I feel sick to my stomach. It’s hard to describe how I feel. I’m depressed by Edie’s story, by this big rest stop filled with displaced people. But I’m angry, too. I’m suddenly so angry that I feel like I need to stand up, kick, punch, run for hours and hours. I am full of energy right now. I want to destroy the Church of America. I look at Peter and find he’s looking back at me. He has no expression on his face but somehow I know exactly what he’s thinking, and I know he’s thinking what I’m thinking, even though I haven’t even articulated it yet to myself. Edie needs our help.
“It’s fine with me,” he says quietly.
I look at Harp.
“What’s fine with him?” she says, confused. And then it begins to dawn on her. “Wait. No. Please tell me no. Viv. That’s not our job. It’s not our responsibility. She’s fine. Viv!” she calls out to me, as I stride across the rest stop towards the register behind which Edie stands, glowing, waiting. “The car’s not that big!”
At first, Edie doesn’t understand. “You want me to come with you to Mount Rushmore?” she echoes. “For fun? Are you visiting the Sacred Sites?”
“Not exactly,” says Peter. He and I stand to the side of the register, trying to persuade her to join us in the gaps between customers. Harp is behind us, silent. Edie’s exuberant friendliness has worn off just slightly, and she glances around nervously for her manager as we speak. “We’re going to visit some friends of mine in the town there. Friends from … the internet.”
Peter shrugs at me, clearly realizing how weird this sounds. But I have the same instinct to keep our true mission hidden from Edie. She’s probably the most genuinely kind person in the entire ending world, but a Believer is a Believer.
“That sounds fun!” Edie says, after punching in an order from an elderly couple for two ValuMeals. “I think I’ll stay here, though. I appreciate the offer, but I can’t leave my job, not in my condition. Take a lot of pictures, though, and if you ever swing back this way …”
Mr. Knackstedt, standing at the stove in the back, puts a tray on the order window and peers out at us. His brow furrows. “Edie!” he shouts. “Do you know how many hungry teenagers would sell their grandmothers for this job? Look alive out there!”
“I’m sorry!” Edie says, taking the tray and handing it to the waiting customer. “I’m sorry! My friends were just leaving!”
I take a step forward. “Edie, listen—”
“That’s enough,” Mr. Knackstedt barks.
“We’ll be gone in a second, dude!” Harp yells at him, taking a step forward so that we’re shoulder-to-shoulder. “Chill!”
“Edie,” I say. “We’re going to Keystone to talk to the New Orphans. Do you know who they are? They’re an organization dedicated to bringing down the Church. We need information about where Beaton Frick’s private compound is located in California, and then we’re driving there to see if we can found out what exactly happened on Rapture Day.”
Edie’s eyes widen. “Oh.”
“We don’t know what we’re going to find,” I tell her. “And if you’d rather not be a part of it, that’s okay. We’ll take you somewhere else, anywhere you want to go, but—”
“Do you think there’s anything in the compound that would tell me why I was Left Behind?” she interrupts. “Because that’s the thing I just can’t quite figure out. Why, when I did everything right, did I get Left Behind?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
Edie is very still for a moment, and then she pulls the apron over her head and sets it down on the counter. “We will get a chance to visit Mount Rushmore, though, won’t we?” she says. “That seems like it would be something to see.”
We cover the whole of Illinois that evening. Somewhere along the way, we crossed whatever line we had to cross, and gained another hour. Harp insists on driving, because she’s not interested in sharing the backseat with Edie, who since we yanked her and her one small backpack of possessions out of South Bend has been alternately crying loudly in gratitude, praising Jesus, and trying to get updates on our old grade school classmates. She sits in the middle of the backseat, wedged between Peter’s guitar and me, and for the first hour I keep saying, “You’re welcome! No problem! We’re happy to have you!” but then I pretend to sleep so I don’t have to say it anymore. I don’t regret it, though—Edie’s so happy—and I know Harp doesn’t really regret it either, because it means she got to scream, “FUCK YOU, OLD MAN,” at Mr. Knackstedt as we walked out the door. I can see Peter’s face in the rearview mirror through my partially closed eyes; he’s got a smile on his face.
Peter and I had a moment in the rest stop where we read each other’s minds—it felt so nice. I can’t remember having that before. Part of the joy of being friends with Harp is that I never know what she’s thinking. There must have been a time with my parents, before the conversion, before we set ourselves in constant opposition to each other, that they knew me well and I knew them, too. But if there was, it never felt as easy, as secret, as special as that.
We follow the signs for a cheap motel outside of Des Moines and decide to stay there for the night. Peter and Edie book the room, pretending to be a married couple—after they’ve gotten the keys, Edie whispers prayers under her breath asking forgiveness for the lie. Peter says he can’t tell whether or not the proprietors are Believers. “There’s a cross over the reception desk and the woman who checked us in had her shirt buttoned to the neck,” he says, “but she also seemed as twitchy as we were.” Either way, we won’t risk letting them see Harp and me sneak in. If they’re not Believers, they might charge us more; if they are, they might suspect an orgy.
There’s only one bed in the room. We fight over who will take it—all of us suggest Edie, but Edie keeps claiming she’s fine with the small couch in the corner. Peter insists that he take the couch, and Harp keeps saying he and I should take the bed, over and over, more sweetly innocent each time, until finally I have to pinch her. In the middle of the discussion, though, we all go quiet—I feel like something invisible has passed under my feet, trying to unbalance me. Am I about to pass out? The desk lamp edges forward on its own accord, and tips off the table with a crash.
“Um,” says Harp, as Edie starts a solemn Hail Frick under her breath. “I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but … was that a ghost?”
But Peter shakes his head, looking mystified. “That was an earthquake,” he says.
Growing up in western Pennsylvania, I’ve never experienced an earthquake before. Mild as it was, it’s an awful feeling—like the ground itself is turning against us. Now nobody wants to sleep alone; we turn off the lights and the four of us lie horizontally across the bed, over the covers. We have to maneuver so that Edie’s not next to Peter—she is, as she reminds us, a married woman—or poised on the edge, where she might fall. I’m by the headboard and she’s beside me; Harp’s on the other side of Edie; Peter’s at the foot of the bed. “This is snug, isn’t it?” says Edie. I listen to her whispered prayers and then her steady breathing; I can hear Harp snoring as soon as her head hits the pillow. Peter, though—I can’t tell if he’s asleep or awake. I want to talk to him, to whisper jokes to him through the night. I want him to tell me stories about every single thing he’s ever done or seen. But he’s too far away. I take my right hand into my left and I squeeze it a couple times, pretending it’s his. At the ceiling, I mouth, “Goodnight.”