The next day, Ellie came over at noon and told me they were moving.
“Like, today,” she said. “They’ve been packing all night. They won’t tell me why, but Rick told me it was because your dad took the land back.”
“The township wrote us letters, I think. His hands were tied.”
“So it was him?”
“More like the township,” I said again. “Where are you going? Is it far?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Another commune, I think. We’re taking everything,” she said. “But not the chickens.” At this, she started to cry.
I went over and gave her a hug and she got snot all over my ear and I didn’t care. A week ago, she was treating her crabs in my barn. A week ago, we drank a bat and saw God. A week ago, we were God. Now we were mortal—swayed by the decisions our parents made.
“Will you take care of my birds for me?” she asked. “I have enough feed for a few months. Maybe you can sell the ducks back to where I got them. The chickens are good for fresh eggs.” Ellie babbled some more things about chickens and ducks. I didn’t hear all of what she said because I was trying to block out a feeling of deep guilt.
“Sure,” I said. “Of course I’ll take care of them.”
“I told my parents I wanted to stay. I can’t wait to get away from them all.”
Dad, who must have overheard all of this from the kitchen, came in and said, “Why don’t the two of you go for a drive?”
“A drive?” I asked. I was finally going to be free of Ellie, and now Dad wanted me to go for a drive?
Dad shrugged. “Maybe Ellie and you need a night to go and have fun somewhere. How about the shore? Your mothers used to love going to the beach together.”
“The shore?” Ellie asked. “We’re moving. I told you.”
He nodded. “You’ve got choices, right?”
Ellie and I looked at each other.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Want to try?”
Fifteen minutes later, we were driving down the highway. I felt free. Free of school. Free of regret. Free of Darla. Even free of Ellie, even though she was in my car. I looked at her, worried and nervous in the passenger’s seat, and saw that she was not free of anything—especially Jasmine Blue.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.
“Where will we go?”
“Anywhere we want. How about the beach, like my dad suggested? It’s only three hours away. Maybe we could just touch the ocean with our toes and come back. Just for fun,” I said.
“The beach sounds nice,” she said.
It did. It really did.
“Will you tell Markus Glenn what happened?” she asked. “When you see him? Tell him we moved away?” She started to cry then.
“Sure.”
“Don’t tell him I cried, though. He’ll just think I’m an emotional girl.”
“So? What’s wrong with being an emotional girl?”
“Guys hate that.”
“Who said?”
“Um. All guys.”
I laughed. “What do they know?”
“I guess.”
“Anyway, who cares what guys like? They don’t do stuff because of what we like, right?”
“Sure,” she said.
We stopped for a pee break an hour later at the New Jersey border rest stop. When I came out of the bathroom, I found Ellie standing there looking… sad? Lost?
We walked back to the car and it was clear that something was wrong.
“What if I never see them again?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What if they just move and leave me behind?”
“You always told me you’d get out as soon as you could.” I didn’t want to make her feel bad. But I didn’t want her to forget all the times she said she wanted out of there. “But I don’t think they’d just leave you behind, Ellie.”
“I know. But it’s—uh…”
“You want me to turn around?”
“Yeah,” she said, and started to cry again.
After a few minutes of her crying I said, “You can leave whenever you want. And you will, right? We saw it.”
She just shook her head yes and kept crying into a now-soggy tissue.
“You’re going to have a nice life. Kids. Two grandsons, remember?”
I took the next exit and turned around and went back west. I didn’t mind. I had plenty of stuff to do at home—like buying an oven and printing pictures and getting on with my life because I was not Darla.
“Can I use your phone?” she asked.
She called her house and when Jasmine finally answered on the third try, she hadn’t even noticed Ellie was gone with all the moving commotion at the commune. Most of the stuff was already en route.
“I’ll be home in about… an hour?” Ellie said.
I didn’t hear what Jasmine said, but it made Ellie say these things, in order.
“I’m an hour away. I can’t be there in ten minutes.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Yes. I’m with Markus.”
“No. Of course not.”
“An hour.”
“Fine. I’ll wait for Dad, then.”
She hung up.
“I guess today is our last day,” she said. “It’s been nice being your best friend.”
“Same here,” I said.
“Sorry for all the weird bullshit I must have pushed on you.”
“Nah.”
“Seriously. I told you your microwave was an atomic bomb.”
“Well, it kinda is.”
“Glory, your microwave oven is not an atomic bomb.”
“Okay. Apology accepted.”
“It’s messed up,” she said. “All of it.”
“Yep.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t know what she thought was messed up. What’s messed up when you drink a bat? What’s messed up when you see the history of the future? What’s messed up when your best friend is an accidental semi–cult member? A dead mother? A book?
The bat had a message. It was dead. It had a message from the other side. It was: Free yourself. Have the courage. Whatever it meant to each one of us, it meant something.