I’d never been on a highway before, but there was no point in me saying that out loud. Of course Kipps already knew I’d only driven in the Home Depot parking lot, just like he knew about the hamsters I had when I was seven, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the time I cried in the gym storage closet because Ben Taylor said my eyes were too far apart.
I still really hated Ben Taylor.
Kipps must’ve known about all of it: the time my mom bought my first tampons, and then my dad mentioned it and I screamed for an hour, because why on earth would she share that with him? Kipps knew I had loved, or at least thought I’d loved, Tyler. He’d probably seen that footage of us from Jen’s party. Every time I thought of something to say I realized it had probably already been told to him, that he knew things he couldn’t unknow, even if I wanted him to. I was overcome with that horrible, sinking feeling I’d had when my diary went missing in eighth grade. It had fallen behind my bed but for that hour I was so sick I’d nearly thrown up. I kept imagining walking into homeroom and everyone laughing at me, or Chris Arnold reciting passages to our math class.
My secrets and hopes and quirks had been out there for over a decade, for everyone to consume whenever they’d wanted, as cheap and filling as popcorn. They’d made hats and tote bags and lava lamps, monetizing every part of it, but I’d left the set with nothing. My mom had this huge home décor empire and my dad had written books and I’d never even gotten an allowance. I was supposed to work at the Swickley YMCA this year, for the second summer in a row, making five fifteen an hour.
“Could you maybe slow down?” Kipps gripped the handle above the door. “You’re not a great driver. No offense.”
“Should’ve taken the wheel when you had the chance.”
I checked the rearview, then the side mirrors, which felt like a responsible thing to do. The other vehicles on the highway gave us a wide berth. Every now and then the car made this beeping sound when I drifted over the dotted white line.
Kipps double-checked that his seatbelt was buckled. It was the third time he’d done that in the last twenty minutes. “I don’t want to risk the self-driving setting. It’s not worth it. Seriously, we’ll be lucky if there isn’t a tracking device in this thing.”
“You think they’re tracking us?”
I could barely get the words out.
“Maybe, maybe not. It’s hard to know. Some of the newer models had tracking devices, but then there was this whole uproar over privacy, and so they made it opt-in. But it’s possible the showroom models have it switched on. Let’s just take it as far as we can.”
“This is nerve-wracking.”
“Which part? Being chased by security people who want to drag us back into a set where we’re filmed twenty-four seven and have, oh, zero freedom?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Maybe we should get off and take local roads. They’re going to catch up with us on the highway. We’ll just keep heading west toward the city.”
“New York City?”
“Yeah. I’ve only been twice, when I was a kid, but there are ten million people there. I just think it would be easier to lose them. In these smaller towns we’re too exposed.”
That sounded right, but I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. We passed a sign for Lakeville Road. I hadn’t figured out how to use the turn signals, so I just pulled into the right lane. The driver behind me leaned on their horn.
“See my bag?” I said, pointing to it on the floor by his feet. “Check the book in there. Sara made marks by the different letters. I didn’t get a chance to decode it all. There was more.”
I went down the ramp too fast and had to slam on the brakes. Thankfully there was no one was behind us.
“I can’t read in a car. It makes me sick.”
“You’re serious?”
“Do you want to see the sandwich I had for lunch?” Kipps raised his eyebrows, his forehead moving like it was made of rubber. Somehow, in the past half hour, he’d morphed into a completely different person than Patrick Kramer. His voice was different. His mannerisms were more exaggerated. He was even a little…he was weird.
“Were you just, like, acting the whole time?” I said. “Every time we talked. You were playing Patrick Kramer? What, did they give you a whole pamphlet on me before we met? Something to give you a competitive advantage? She loves scary movies, raspberry cheesecake, summer weekends at Maple Cove, blah blah.”
He let out a long, shuddering sigh. “Whoa. That’s pretty narcissistic.”
I tried to keep my expression neutral, but my neck felt itchy and hot. I don’t know how much time passed before he finally laughed.
“Jess, I’m kidding,” he said. “I’ve watched the show since I was eight. My family was obsessed with it, especially after the fifth season, when your parents got in that car crash and Lydia took temporary guardianship over you? Everyone was tuning in every week, freaking out about what would happen next.”
“Yeah, riveting…” I rolled my eyes.
It had happened in the spring, on the night before Easter, and we’d found our unfinished baskets scattered on the floor of our parent’s walk-in closet. They must’ve been building to the finale. Every year there was another catastrophe, another drama, and that one had been small, more manageable, in comparison to the tornado or Sara’s diagnosis.
“But yeah, they still made me research you after they decided I’d be the love interest. Except it wasn’t a pamphlet, it was an email with like five thousand attachments and an interactive slideshow and all this crap. I read through your psychological profile and all your likes and dislikes, and then they made me take a test at the end.”
I turned left onto a main road. The sky had darkened, slipping into a hazy pinkish blue, and there weren’t as many cars out. I just kept driving west, like Kipps said, trying to imagine what my psychological profile would even consist of. What did they have slides of, my favorite foods? The music I listened to?
“You couldn’t say no?” I asked.
“My parents aren’t really into hearing no anymore.” Kipps was quiet for a minute, then he rested his forehead on the window. I thought he might say something else, but instead he changed the subject. “What is that, a mall? What town are we in?”
I noticed the building he was talking about, a towering complex with stores on the first floor. The upper levels looked like apartments. We caught glimpses of a man in a tank top cooking dinner and a family huddled in front of a giant screen. ALL TIME MARKET read a sign on the bottom floor. It had the same logo as the supermarket we’d passed through less than an hour before.
“I have no idea…”
“We’d never even been to Long Island before we moved onto the set,” Kipps said. “I lived in Pennsylvania my whole life. There has to be a map somewhere…” He jabbed at the dashboard screen, then dragged his finger right, but he couldn’t figure out where to find it.
“We’ve been going west, for sure,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Doesn’t the sun rise in the east and set in the west? Or is that a lie too?”
I pointed to the horizon line, which had the last remnants of the sunset, a few streaks of sherbet pink and orange. I’d pulled down the front visor to block the glare.
“I think that’s true,” Kipps said.
“I mean, if you’re right, we just keep heading this way until we hit the city.”
We passed a sprawling golf course. The greens were completely dark, the parking lot empty. I pulled into the right lane to let someone pass when something sounded on the dashboard—a low, steady beep. But the screen was still saying we were in DRIVE. Everything looked exactly the same as it had a few seconds before.
“What is that?” Kipps asked, when it didn’t stop after a minute or so. He swiped through the dashboard, eventually stopping at a panel with a red, blinking image of a battery. 5% LEFT.
“Please do not tell me the battery is running out,” I said.
“Well, it is, but don’t worry,” he said. “It says something about a replacement battery. It’s probably in the back.”
He climbed over the center console and into the cramped backseat, his scrawny butt bumping me in the shoulder as he went. Despite being tall, he was narrower than most guys our age, and he moved completely differently now that he wasn’t on camera. His limbs seemed floppier, wild almost, compared to the rigid, buttoned-up guy I’d talked to at Jen Klein’s party.
He fiddled with a panel in the backseat. When he finally opened it, a silver battery was inside, with two cords coming out of the top. I watched in the rearview mirror as he examined it.
“Is that the spare?”
“Um…bad news. I don’t think there is a spare.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means we’re going to have to ditch this thing.”
The beeping was incessant. I hit the button on the screen, where it said 3% LEFT, but nothing stopped it.
“And what are we going to do with it?” I said. “We can’t just leave it on the side of the road. Whoever finds it is going to know we’re here, in…” I scanned the shoulder and spotted a sign that read LAKESIDE GOLF CLUB, EST. 2002. “…Lakeside.”
Kipps was still in the backseat, and he went from window to window, surveying our surroundings. I’d barely moved my hands the whole time I’d been driving. The car was slowing down, from forty miles an hour to thirty-five, and falling still. It didn’t matter how hard I pressed on the gas pedal. Nothing helped.
“There’s no one behind us right now,” I said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Maybe we just pull the car onto the golf course and leave it there. They won’t find it until morning. It’ll at least buy us some time.”
“Sure, great.” Kipps peered out the back windshield, then the front, checking for oncoming cars. “Go now.”
I turned the wheel to the right and our front tire hit the curb first. The impact threw us back in our seats, but we kept going, breaking through a bush and out onto the golf course. The hill we were on sloped down and we picked up speed. We hadn’t counted on the lake that split the green.
“Turn the wheel, just go around,” Kipps yelled.
“I can’t.”
I tried to guide the car off to the left, but the momentum was too strong. When I braked we just skidded over the damp grass. We went down one more slope and crashed into the lake, water splashing over the front bumper.
“This is not good,” Kipps said, as the vehicle floated out, slowly coming to a stop where the water was deep. I went to roll down my window but couldn’t. I banged on the glass, my heart alive in my chest. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end, not here. Not like this. I wasn’t going to drown in some nasty golf course lake.
Think, think, I repeated silently. Kipps said something but it was somewhere beyond me. It was a few seconds before I came up with anything.
“We have to open the doors, just let the water come in,” I said. The hood was already submerged, and the vehicle was starting to tilt to one side. “Then get as far away from it as possible.”
“Really?”
“I saw it on Rescue 911.”
“Cool, I guess. I trust William Shatner,” Kipps said.
“On the count of three. One, two…”
I never made it to three, I just nodded, and we pushed the doors open at the same time. The water was relentless, rushing into the Cloud and sinking it twice as fast as before. I kicked off the frame and swam as far out as I could. I’d completely cleared the car when I realized what I’d done.
“Oh no…my purse,” I said. “I need it.”
“You do not need your purse. Have you lost your mind?” Kipps yelled. He was on the other side of the vehicle, swimming toward shore. The water rushed over the roof. Then slowly, gracefully, it slipped below the surface.
“It has the book—the code Sara left,” I said.
I took a deep breath and dove under before he could argue with me, swimming fast toward the sinking Cloud. The water was a murky greenish color, and it wasn’t until I was only a few feet away that I was able to see the outline of the thing. The door was swept back and tilted up toward the sky. I had to wrench myself on top of it to get in.
The purse wasn’t near the steering wheel like I thought it might be. I’d hoped it had floated up as the Cloud tipped on its side. Instead I had to go farther into the car, diving down into the well beneath the passenger seat and feeling for it there. I still couldn’t find it. My lungs were hurting now, and I could hear my pulse in my ears. I knew I wouldn’t be able to last much longer and still have enough air to get back to the surface. I felt around the back seats before pulling myself out.
I was swimming away from the Cloud when I caught sight of it, drifting along the bottom of the lake. My chest felt like it might explode. Part of me wanted to get to the surface and take another breath, but what if the bag was gone by the time I came back? I dove several feet down, the pressure in my head growing. As I looped the strap around my arm, I could no longer see the surface. The sky had gone completely dark and it all looked the same—up, down, sand, stars. I wasn’t even sure where the car was anymore. I could feel panic taking over—that need for another breath.
Then I felt Kipps’s hand on my arm. He tugged and we were both moving fast toward the surface, him kicking wildly as I floated behind him, clinging tight to his hand.