Summer sat alone in the motel parking lot atop the hood of a beat-to-shit pickup truck. It was still early morning, and she’d smoked half a pack of cigarettes waiting in the muggy Virginia air. She had aimed to smoke a half pack more, when along came Craig in a pickup of his own.

He parked alongside her and sat in his cab a good bit before finally climbing out. Summer watched him take his sweet time rounding the vehicle until he stepped up alongside her and pulled her into his arms. He hugged her good and tight, like two friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long, long time.

Which they were.

“Not the reaction I expected,” she said when finally he released her.

He plucked the cigarette from her lips and took a long, steady drag. He looked her up and down.

“You look good,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“No, really. Last time…I mean, you look great.”

“Easy, rider.” She nodded her head toward the closed door of her motel room. “Not in front of the kids.”

Craig followed her gaze and squinted. If he had something to add, he kept it to himself.

He handed her back the cigarette and said, “Texas, huh?”

She nodded.

“That’s a crazy place,” he said.

“You’ve got no idea.”

Behind them, traffic passed along the interstate at a steady enough clip. Folks headed to work, but nobody drove slow enough to notice anything along the off-ramps, least of all the two of them.

“I heard some things on the news,” said Craig. “There was a cult down there, maybe about fifty, sixty people. A bunch of hippies, they said.”

“Oh?”

Craig sucked again from Summer’s cigarette and nodded. “They loaded themselves up with guns and their leader made them drink a bunch of Molly. They went half out of their minds until the Feds showed up.”

Summer took her cigarette back from him, but she did not bring it to her lips. Instead, she kept eyes on the door of her motel room.

“There was a bit of a to-do, but eventually they winded up with their asses in jail.” Craig laughed to himself. “Being Texas and all, those kids were lucky they didn’t end up shot to hell and back, or burned to death like those freaks down in Waco.”

Rather than damage her throat with further cigarette smoke, she tossed the butt to the asphalt. She watched it smolder at his feet.

“The guy behind the whole deal,” said Craig, “was the craziest of them all. I heard he slipped the drugs into their drinks and forced them to drink it. They put him on the stand to testify for himself and he talked up and down the room about folks who weren’t there and taking orders from somebody who couldn’t nobody see. Any time the cops would parade him in front of the other kids, they’d fall to their knees and chant hippie shit.”

“Like you said,” Summer smiled. “Texas is a crazy place.”

Craig eyed her sideways. “You weren’t nowhere near none of that, were you?”

“Me?” She took a minute before adding, “Texas is awful big.”

“True that.”

She nodded to a brown envelope he held in his hand. “You got something for me?”

“You know I do.”

“Thanks a lot.” She hopped off the hood of the car. “Let’s step inside.”

Craig didn’t move. Instead, he eyeballed the front door of the motel.

“Is that a good idea?” he asked.

“Don’t be silly.” Summer led the way. “He won’t bite.”

Once inside, she did not click on the light. The room was dark, save for the television before the twin beds, switched to a cartoon which had been left on mute.

“Dear God,” breathed Craig. “What happened to him?”

Summer closed the door behind them. “Things got a little messy leaving Texas.” She rubbed the inside of her arm with her thumb and forefinger and wondered if that itch would ever quite get scratched. “I’m afraid our boy, he didn’t—”

“Maybe it’s best if I don’t hear nothing about it,” said Craig. “You asked me to get you some Florida IDs, so I brought them. Lucky for you I picked up the phone. Last time…”

Summer brought him around to the tottering table and switched on a tiny lamp. She took the envelope from Craig and dumped out the contents.

Drivers licenses. Two of them.

Social security cards, also two.

A pair of birth certificates.

Two brand new lives scattered across a scuffed tabletop.

“This is good stuff,” said Summer. She picked up one ID, then the other. She held them beneath the lamp and flipped them from the front side to the back. “This is really good stuff.” Over her shoulder, she called, “Hey, you ought to come check this out.”

When no movement came from the far bed, Craig scratched his head.

“Hey, is he all right?”

“He’ll be fine,” said Summer. “You know how he gets.”

Still, Craig shook his head. “Yeah, maybe…but I ain’t never seen him like this.”

“My name is Katrina Merriweather,” she said to the room. “Will you get a load of that, Hux—I mean, Andrew. From now on, my name is Katrina Merriweather and your name is Andrew Catton.”

And so it became thus.

Katrina escorted Craig to the door and stepped outside. He stopped before they reached his truck and pointed to the hills on the other side of the freeway.

“You know, Keith was born just over that rise.”

She furrowed her brow. “Keith?”

Craig nodded toward the motel room door.

“Oh, yes.”

“A little town called Lake Castor,” he said. “Not big enough to land on anybody’s map, and you could drive past it without ever knowing.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” said Katrina. “If that’s what you’re looking for.”

He went on. “What I’m saying is, he’s still got people over yonder. You could leave him in that motel room and haul ass down that highway with your new drivers license and be a whole new woman.”

Katrina’s gaze drifted northbound, then south.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” said Craig. “If you ask me, he shouldn’t never have left Lake Castor in the first place.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Who’s to say what we should have done with our lives? Right? All that matters is how things shake out when it’s all said and done.”

Craig spit sideways. He kicked gravel with his toe.

“Me and Andrew—” she smiled a bit “—Andy…eventually we’ll probably move on, same as anyone else, I reckon. One of us will decide to settle down and put down roots and the other…” She sucked the insides of her cheeks. “But for now…”

She let the thought hang in the wind like a cattle thief.

Once again, Craig held her tight. Before climbing into his pickup, he stopped and took a final look at her.

“Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said. “Florida is no place to jerk around.”

“Show me a place these days that is.”

Craig slipped the truck into gear, then waved with two fingers as he backed out of the motel parking lot and, in a spray of gravel and rock, got himself onto the freeway.

Katrina stood there a spell. Behind her, the cleaning lady shuffled her cart past each door, placing a newspaper on the mat before each occupancy. After she’d slouched along, Katrina picked up the paper and sighed into the printed face of Donnie Williams. Above the photograph in large, bold type were the words: CULT LEADER BLAMES INVISIBLE WOMAN FOR DRUGGING FOLLOWERS.

“Front page news for two weeks now,” she said with a sigh. “Ain’t that something?”

Maybe Craig had a point. Maybe Andy would be better served by going home to his family. Maybe time for a change beckoned. Maybe she should hop on that same freeway and pick a direction and not stop until she got someplace she could call home.

She looked at that newsprint in her hands at the photo of Donnie Williams and saw not the drug-induced mania set within his eyes or the hair standing at end on all sides of his head. Rather than the lunatic he’d become in the mainstream media, she thought instead of their last conversation, as they stood at the gates of Miracle Ranch, hand in hand.

“Are you sure we should leave them behind?” Katrina had asked him, back when she preferred to be called Summer.

“Of course, we should,” Donnie had answered. “We haven’t time to argue. Hux has brainwashed them and they’ll be coming for us.”

“How do you know?”

For a moment, she’d seen something flicker in the young man and couldn’t quite put her finger on it. His aura had darkened and something passed through him, like a wraith. She shuddered then at the gates same as she did back at the motel parking lot as she recalled it.

Donnie had opened his mouth and said, “Luther is telling me we should make a run for it.”

“What did you say?”

“Luther says so,” he told her. “For the first time in my life, I can hear him. It’s so wonderful.” Donnie hopped up and down. He spun round and round in circles. “Do you hear me? I can hear him, plain as day, and he’s telling me to take you by the hand and run far, far from this place.”

“Let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone in the whole, wide world.”

“Sure.”

“Luther’s not real, you idiot. I made him up.”

For what decision was there left to make? She’d long ago ceded control, just as she’d been told. Running to the gates with Donnie had been little more than Kabuki. She would never leave Andy Catton, or Jack Jordan, or Hux Pariah, or any number of names he had or would have. Should the comets converge in the heavens, then rain ash and ice from the sky, she would still be at his side, and he at hers. For there was a devil she knew, and a devil she didn’t. There also was a planet hurtling through the solar system upon which she was supposed to walk, and she preferred to do it with a friend.

Katrina Merriweather stepped back into the motel. This time, she flipped on the light. The figure beneath the blanket still did not move. She sat beside him on the bed and listened to the shaky rhythms of his breathing and the labored spasms from the thing he called a heart.

Was she happy?

Hell, she could be anything she wanted in this whole, entire world, so why in good hell could she not be happy?

“You hear that, Andy?” she called to the lump beside her on the bed. “I’m going to be happy.”

And so it became thus.