It’s night when we leave Salt Lake City. I offer to drive, as I’m the one depriving my friends of beds and pizza, but Harp won’t hear it; she opens the door to the backseat to let me in and moves her bottle of vodka to a spot where I can easily reach it, then gets behind the wheel. We can’t see much outside our windows, but after a while Peter, who’s been studying the map, says we’re in the salt flats—that all the land surrounding us is covered in salt, and if the sun were out, it would shine silver and white. It makes me want to come back here someday, if the world is still turning. I wish I could see these things, these things I’ve never seen before, without this mess of anger and anxiety clanging in the back of my head like a gong. Neither Harp nor Peter say anything to me, and I’m relieved about that. I wouldn’t know what to say back. I can’t even bring myself to tell them that it must have been Winnie, my half-sister, whose call I answered in New York City. That there’s probably some logical explanation for Peter’s mail, too. The trip can only end in ways that will hurt us. I know this now. But still I don’t tell them.
The one thing I do mention is Wambaugh. I explain to Harp the e-mail I sent her and her reply, and Harp is nice enough not to scoff when I tell her that Wambaugh recommended staying in South Dakota. “We can stop in Sacramento on the way,” Harp suggests brightly, and I know she’s just trying to make up for her attitude and my aunt’s bombshell, but I appreciate it anyway.
I drift in and out, aware of the increasingly rickety sound the engine makes now that we’ve pushed it so hard across the country. At points I hear Harp and Peter talking to each other in worried voices. “But what do we do when we get there?” I hear Harp say. Somewhere between awake and asleep, I mistake them for my parents—they are driving me home from a trip to the county fair, a movie that went on later than expected, and when we get there they will tuck me in to my bed, and I will hear their voices recede as they walk down the hallway to their bedroom. I will be so sleepy and safe then that I’ll forgive them. This betrayal will just melt away. It is an unbearable sadness, a kind of suffocation, to wake up and realize my mistake.
I’ve woken because the car has stopped and the passenger door has slammed. Outside the window I see a sign for a motel, and Peter walking towards the office. Behind him shines the blinking neon of a casino. “Sinners—If You’re Going to Hell, Don’t Go Broke.” Harp turns around in her seat, yawning. The radio clock reads 2:30 a.m.
“Sorry, dude,” she says. “I couldn’t drive anymore.”
“Where are we?”
“Winnemucca, Nevada.” Harp shrugs. “It seems decent. I mean, if Sinners Casino is still unscathed, we’ll probably be able to spend one safe night.”
I hate that I’ve led us all the way out here, to the middle of nowhere, based on the most dubious of hunches. I hate that my hunch has turned out to be wrong. I can’t let Harp go on thinking I believe it. “Listen—”
But she holds up her hand. “We should have a serious talk sometime soon, I agree. But for now let’s just acknow-ledge that we’re best friends forever, and I’m not just saying that because there’s a possibility forever’s only gonna get us to September. Okay?”
I nod at her. She grins and steps out of the car. Peter’s already back with the key, which he hands to Harp. He gets into the backseat beside me. Harp takes her suitcase from the trunk and walks backwards to the stairs, wagging her eyebrows suggestively at me. I look at Peter.
“Sorry,” he says. “I just wanted a chance to talk with you, alone.”
“Okay?” I don’t mean for the word to end in a question mark, but I’m instantly made nervous by his proximity, by the fact of being alone with him.
Peter looks cautious, concerned. “Are you alright?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“That was really messed up tonight,” Peter says. “And it’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it now, or ever. I just wanted to ask when Harp wasn’t around to make pithy comments. I just wanted to say, you know, that whatever you’re feeling is totally normal.”
“Yeah?” I’m immediately angry, not at him, just at everything. It’s so easy to slip into anger; it fits so much more comfortably than any of the other emotions I’m feeling. “That’s a relief. You know, I meant to Google ‘normal reactions to have at the discovery that your life has been a lie’ when I had the chance, but it totally slipped my mind.”
“Your life hasn’t been a lie,” he says softly.
“Yes, it has, Peter!” I cry. “It absolutely has! Since I was a kid, all they did was tell stories about how they met and where they had their first kiss and how easy it’s always been. It was always them, this invincible duo, and for a long time I felt like if I was good enough—like if I was really, really good enough—they’d let me into their club. But they never did, Peter. And now I know that they never even considered it. Because all I was to them was proof—proof that my mother had been reformed, that my father was the one who reformed her.”
I’m crying now, but Peter only gets closer. He holds my hand. “You were more than that to them, Viv. They loved you.”
“You don’t know that. You have literally no way of knowing that.”
“They had to have loved you,” he says firmly. “You’re Vivian fucking Apple.”
The car is silent then, except for my sniffling. Peter holds out his arm and I look at him quizzically; he uses his sleeve to wipe my face. “Look,” he says. “You’re angry at them, and you should be. They lied. They told you about a made-up version of themselves, who did made-up things. They shouldn’t have done that. But Viv, if I’ve learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It’s that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can’t help themselves. They don’t trust the world around them—it’s too good for them, or not good enough—so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again. Your parents didn’t like their creation myth, that’s all—it had pain in it, and chaos, and their own parents were ashamed. So they told themselves a story that was at least partially true: about two good people who deserved happy lives. And probably at some point they started to believe the story.
“But the thing is, really,” Peter continues, “that it doesn’t matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn’t actually matter where we came from, or where we’re going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we’re here and how well we do it.”
The only light coming into the car is from Sinners Casino’s blinking sign, so the outline of Peter’s face appears and disappears, over and over again, as he speaks. I’m not crying anymore. I’m looking into his kind face as he gazes back at me.
“What do we have to do?” I ask.
He smiles a little. “Well, I don’t know, Viv,” he says. “Probably love each other.”
I move the inch or two of distance that still remains between us, and find his lips in the blinking dark. He kisses me back so softly that I wonder if this is his kind way of rejecting me, of easing me out of the embarrassing moment where I’ll have to pull away. But then he touches my hair, my neck. He runs his left hand up my bare right arm. Suddenly I am making out with Peter Ivey in the back of a stolen car in a motel parking lot in Winnemucca, Nevada, at nearly three o’clock in the morning, and the best part is that it’s so easy. My brain has gone silent—all the question and worry and fear that had been swirling around up there not a minute before is now just white noise. I laugh into Peter’s mouth.
“Cool!” he says, pulling back. “Laughter. Just what every guy wants to hear at this moment.”
“It’s just—this is fun.” I kiss the side of his mouth, his chin, his jawline. He puts his warm hand against my cheek.
“I agree.” He kisses me again. “But you know, just for the record? When I said we had to love each other, I didn’t necessarily mean right this second, in the parking lot.”
All we do is kiss. I have an urge to go further, to climb on top of him in this cramped backseat and see what happens, but I resist it. I don’t know if the urge comes from actual desire, or some instinct to self-destruct. To null the pain of this day with as much mindless joy as possible. As it stands, I leave the car, thirty minutes later, feeling pretty happy. He carries our bags up the stairs to the room, and at the door puts them down so he can take my face into his hands and kiss me again quietly. Harp has left the door unlocked and a light on. She’s lying in bed already. Peter motions for me to share it with her; there’s a couch by the window where he’ll sleep. I slip in beside her as he goes to brush his teeth.
Harp’s eyes flick immediately open. She has a badly concealed smile on her face. “Oh hey, Viv,” she whispers. “Your nose is a little red. How did that happen, I wonder?”
I touch it. It feels raw from rubbing against Peter’s little bit of beard. I don’t have to say anything to Harp; she’s giggling silently beside me. I grin at her and close my eyes.
When I wake up, the lights are off and it’s still dark outside. But there’s a pounding on the door, a furious and terrifying banging. I sit up in bed, startled. I can see Harp’s eyes wide open, shining in the bit of moonlight that peers in through the curtains. Peter is crouched by the door, listening. He holds a finger to the lips I’ve recently kissed.
“This is management,” shouts the male voice at the door. “Open up, now.”
The clock radio says it’s five in the morning. I don’t know what we’re going to do. Peter checked into the room by himself; if the manager finds Harp and me here and has even the slightest Believer sympathies, I don’t know how bad the outcome might be. We might be hurt. We might be killed. The man won’t stop knocking. Peter frantically waves at us to move, to hide, but where is there to go? It’s just a bedroom and a bathroom. Harp gets up silently and steps into the wardrobe; I rush to join her. Peter closes the door behind us, and then we hear the click of the bedside lamp and the opening of the door.
“Sorry,” we hear him yawn. “I was totally out. Is there a problem?”
“Are you alone in this room?” says the man’s voice.
“Of course,” says Peter, and even from inside the closet I know that he’s answered too quickly, too assuredly. I’m finding it hard to breathe. In the dark, Harp finds my hand with hers.
There’s a silence then, a couple moments in which we’re just waiting, waiting. When we next hear the man’s voice, it’s too close to us. I realize he has pushed past Peter to check the room. I squeeze Harp’s tiny hand so hard I worry her fingers will break.
“Sorry,” the man says, his voice slightly more relaxed. “We got a phone call from another guest, who said somebody was fornicating in here. Now, that might fly at other motels in Winnemucca, but the Shady Pines does not hold to that kind of behavior. Not now, not ever.”
“I understand,” Peter replies solemnly.
“But now that I’m here,” the man says, and his volume increases slightly; he’s taken another step towards the wardrobe, “I see you’re just a nice, normal, Christian young man. Aren’t you?”
“Yes. Naturally.”
“Yes,” says the man. “Naturally. Only one weird thing about you—you sure did bring a lot of luggage. Didn’t you?”
I can see them out there, in my head, at the foot of the bed. My suitcase, and Harp’s. Peter’s duffel bag. All Peter needs to do is come up with a plausible explanation for them, and quickly. All we’d need to do after that is wait for the manager to leave, find a way for the three of us to sneak out of the room and back into the car. I am thinking this is my fault, this is my fault, this is my fault, and straining so hard to hear Peter’s answer, that it takes me a second to register that the wardrobe door is being pulled open and the motel manager, a red-faced man with white-blonde hair, is yanking out a screaming Harp. I kick out at him when he reaches for me, but it’s useless; he grabs me by my hair, and my scalp screams with pain. No one has ever deliberately hurt me like this before; I’m so surprised I can’t even shout.
In an alternate universe, the scene is almost funny—the manager’s in some blue pin-striped pajamas with a nametag pinned hastily onto the pocket; his name is Chip. He holds a writhing Harp by the arm, and he pulls my hair harder every time she tries to kick him in the balls, which is again and again and again. Chip mutters Book of Frick verses under his breath; they seem to be all the ones that justify hurt. “Do not spare her the rod, lest she rise up to spite thee like the asp all thy life.” Peter runs at Chip, punching him the face, the neck, and Chip drops us. “If she profane herself by playing the whore, she shall be burnt with fire,” he says commandingly as he pushes Peter. Peter stumbles backwards over my suitcase handle and Chip advances. My skull is on fire. My eyes are filled with tears. We’re going to die here, I realize. We are going to die here, and we are going to die like Raj died, like Melodie Hopkirk died—violently, and afraid. I think I’m in shock. I can hear some voice inside me saying, Get up, Viv, get up, but when I try to stand my knees buckle. Then I realize it isn’t my brain speaking; it’s Harp. Harp is trying to support my body with her own; she’s half-dragging me to the door. Chip is distracted by Peter, who won’t stay on the ground. I see him hit Peter, once, twice, hard in the face. Peter sees me hesitate. “Go!” he shouts.
We run.
We clatter down the stairs to the parking lot and race to my grandparents’ car. Harp was the last to drive and she still has the keys; in the second it takes for her to fumble with them, I keep my eyes on the open door of our room. I can still hear Chip murmuring prayers, the sounds of a struggle; I can still see the shadow of movement on the doorframe. Harp has gotten into the car and turned on the ignition. She throws open the passenger door.
“Come on!” she shouts, but I can’t move. Not until I see his face. Suddenly Peter bolts from the room and takes the steps down two at a time. Chip plods behind him with surprising speed. I get in the car and Harp peels backwards, then races to the bottom of the stairs to meet Peter there. I reach behind me to open the passenger door for him, but we’re a second too late—Chip has caught up, and grabs Peter around the neck. He begins to drag him toward the office.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” Harp whispers, but she doesn’t slow down.
“Harp!”
“We can’t stay here, Viv! The longer we stay here, the more likely a mob of Believers will come out and lend a hand. We’ll get Peter back, I promise, but we need to figure out how first; we need to be careful!”
“I have a plan. Pull back around.”
Harp’s face stays pinched with worry; she acts as if she hasn’t heard me.
“Do it!” I shout.
She leaves the parking lot and loops back around through the entrance. Chip has dragged Peter to just about the office door, and though Peter is trying to fight him off, he’s losing. His right eye is pink and puffy; he has slick, red blood coursing out of his nose, all over Chip’s beefy arms, which are clamped around his neck. Without really thinking about what I’m going to do next, I leap out of the still-moving car, causing Harp to yelp behind me.
“Hey!” I shout. Chip stops dragging and Peter stops struggling. It’s hard to tell what sort of expression Peter’s actually making, with his face as swollen and bruised as it is, but I think I can detect an undercurrent of concern that I have gone completely insane.
Maybe I have. For a brief moment, I think of my sledgehammer, waiting in the trunk. I think about the gun Gallifrey gave us when we left the New Orphans compound. Peter had stashed it in the glove compartment, seeming embarrassed even to touch it. I could reach into the car and use that, hold it with some confidence and buy Peter the distraction he needs to travel the ten or fifteen feet to the backseat. But I can’t justify the act to myself, no matter how much I like making out with the boy I’d be trying to save. That would be playing by Believer rules: telling myself that violence and the threat of it is okay, if that’s what it takes to get you what you want. “For God so loved the world,” says the Book of Frick, “that he sent us guns with which to protect our homes and women.” The way Frick tells it, Eve—being weak—feared Adam’s spear and destroyed it, when God had fashioned it especially for him. The serpent was just the straw that broke the Creator’s back. No, I’m not going to pick up that gun. I’ll figure something else out as I go along. I wonder if this is what bravery is: adrenaline plus love plus absolute stupidity.
“Are you serious, little girl?” Chip says, laughing. He’s beaten Peter bloody but he hasn’t even broken a sweat. “You’ve got what we call a reprieve. Take it.”
“The Book of Frick, Verse 78, Line 22,” I call out to him. “‘And Thomas Jefferson laid his hands on Frick’s brow. And he said: No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights on another. This is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.’”
There’s a sudden flicker in Chip’s eyes—discomfort or disbelief, I can’t tell. He says nothing. He doesn’t let go. In the car, I hear Harp’s breathless “Whoa.”
“You’ve read the Book all the way through,” I say, “haven’t you?”
“Of course I’ve read the damn book!” Chip snaps, and then he quickly makes the sign of the cross in the air with his free hand. “You’re taking that out of context!”
“Am I?” I ask him. Of course I am. It’s been months since I skimmed the Book of Frick my parents gave me, and all I remember is the really absurd stuff and the one or two passages that actually made sense. But I have a feeling Chip doesn’t know it. “Let’s hope you’re right, Chip, because what do you think the Prophet Jefferson would say, if he looked down here and saw you doing what you’re doing? Right as the list for the Second Boat is being compiled?”
Chip loosens his grip just a fraction. Peter, no longer choking, gasps for breath, wipes the blood from his face with his sleeve. “What about, though,” Chip asks, almost thoughtfully, “what about, ‘The road to heaven is narrow, and overcrowded with the damned’? That’s in there, too.”
Without thinking, I recite the next relevant quote that comes to mind. “‘But I say to you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute you.”
As soon as I’ve said it, I know it’s wrong. Nothing in the Book of Frick is as reasonable as that. Chip’s face clouds over. “That’s not Frick,” he says. “Frick didn’t say that.”
He pushes Peter out by his shoulders and brings one knee up, hard, into his spine. I hear Harp cry out behind me, and my own voice shouting, “No!” I turn to the car without thinking, the image of the gun in the glove compartment burning in my brain like a brand, but then I hear Peter’s voice, barely audible.
“My wallet,” he says.
Chip shakes his head, knees Peter in the back again. “I don’t want your money,” he spits.
“No.” Peter shakes his head. “My dad. Give me my wallet. My back pocket. My dad.”
I don’t know what Peter’s plan is. I want to take out the gun and point it at Chip until Peter is safely in the backseat. I want to protect him, this kind boy, this boy I could love someday; I want to hurt every single person who’s ever hurt him. Chip, intrigued in spite of himself, pulls Peter’s wallet out of his back pocket and opens it with one hand. He examines something in it, and then lets go of Peter abruptly, like Peter’s skin has burned his own. Peter drops to his knees.
“That’s not the name you signed in under,” Chip says in a quavering voice.
Peter nods. He takes the wallet from Chip and pulls out a folded piece of paper, no bigger than a business card. He hands it over. Chip unfolds it and I watch his eyes widen. He holds whatever it is against his heart.
“Son,” Chip says, his voice suddenly low and oily with respect, “can I just say how sorry I am for the baseless assumptions I made about you—”
“Forget it,” Peter says, fighting to stand.
“You can understand my concern!” Chip moves forward to help him, but hesitates—he seems frightened of Peter now, of what Peter’s going to do next. “These are dangerous times, as you well know. I hope that you’ll keep me in your prayers.”
Peter is on his feet now, wincing, holding his side. He starts to hobble to the car, but stops to look at me. He looks like he’s going to be sick.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly.
“Your father was a great man!” Chip calls after him, but Peter ignores him, opening the door to the backseat of the car and climbing gingerly in. “He was a patriot! Ma’am,” he says more quietly after Peter’s shut the door behind him, “do you think he’d mind if I kept this?”
He takes a step forward and shows me what Peter handed him. It’s a small, wallet-sized photo, creased and uncreased many times, stuffed in wallets and pockets and in between the pages of books for who knows how many years. It’s a close-up of a man holding a little boy. The boy is all big blue eyes and delight; the man is thick dark blonde hair and crinkled eyes, thin smiling lips. The picture is old, but still I feel my blood go cold when I recognize Peter’s father. Adam Taggart. The Church of America spokesman. The Enforcer. There’s no reconciling that man with the one I kissed in my grandparents’ car tonight. There’s no making sense of it. The sun is rising over Winnemucca and Harp honks the horn; I turn and find that Peter has slipped down, out of sight. Eight years he’s been carrying this picture around with him. And this is the first time it’s done him any good.
“It’s all yours,” I tell Chip.