I wait in the car as Sam explains to Niya and Ramesh what’s happening. I don’t know if they give him a hard time or not, and I don’t ask when he gets in the car. I imagine the conversation went something like:

Sam: “Uhhh, Mom? Dad? Is it okay if I go on a trip with Dara?”

Niya: “What, right now?”

Sam: “Yeah.”

Ramesh: “Where? What are you talking about? For how long?”

Sam: “She said something about New Jersey? For a few days?”

Ramesh: “New Jersey? Whatever for?”

Sam: *growing impatient* “Dad, she’s leaving town with or without me, and I think it would be better if she had someone with her. We won’t stay away too long, I promise. And I’ll check in all the time.”

Niya: “I don’t like this. Let me call Mellie—”

Sam: “No, don’t. Dara’s leaving because of Mellie.”

Niya: “What do you mean? What happened?”

Sam: “I don’t know. But it must be bad.”

Niya: *hesitates*

Ramesh: *looking at Niya* “It’s not as though we can stop him. He’s going to be off to college in a couple months.”

Sam: “We’ll be careful. Love you.”

Niya: “We love you too.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to make the imagination bubble above my head, and the perfect, happy family inside it, pop.

It doesn’t work.

Sam and I don’t talk as I drive to the bank and take money out of the drive-through ATM. I don’t have a lot of savings, and what I do have I had been planning to use for the circuit, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Everything in Francis shuts down by nine p.m., so the streets are dark and empty. The question lingering in the car is so conspicuous that Mellie herself may as well be perched on the console between Sam and me, crowding the front seat, causing a giant blind spot, and making it difficult to pay attention to anything else.

But Sam doesn’t ask just yet, and I don’t offer the information. I just want to put Francis firmly behind me. Once we’re finally on our way somewhere and not simply leaving somewhere, then I’ll talk.

The one stoplight in downtown Francis is red. I bring the car to a halt and wait, even though the streets are abandoned and there’s no one coming in any direction. It occurs to me that this is yet another example of how I’ve been conditioned to just go with the flow, not asking questions, not being allowed to make decisions for myself. I could put my foot on the gas right now, drive safely under the red light and into the intersection, and carry on with my journey, and no one would be worse off because of it.

You know what?

Screw it.

I ease the car forward.

A little shot of adrenaline and self-satisfaction surges through me, and I smile.

“Dara!” Sam says, breaking the silence and grabbing on to the inside of his door as if he needs to brace himself against the impact of me going a whopping twenty miles an hour on a deserted street. “The light didn’t turn!”

“There was no one coming,” I say calmly.

“That’s not the point! Someone could have come out of nowhere! Or you could have gotten a ticket!”

“Oh yeah, because the Francis police are out in full force tonight, huh?”

Sam sighs as I pull onto the highway extension. “Okay, what is going on?” he asks.

I shake my head. “First we need to figure out where we’re headed.” The road we’re on now is the only highway around here, so we’ve got to be on the right track. But directions would help.

“I thought you said New Jersey.”

“Yeah. Cherry Hill. Can you look up the address for William and Ruth Pembroke?” I nod toward the phone in his hand.

Out of my peripheral vision, I see Sam’s head whip toward me. “Pembroke? Like Celeste Pembroke? From the box?”

“Yes.” He seems to sense I’m not ready to elaborate, but I can feel the curiosity radiating off him.

He taps the screen a few times. While I wait, I switch to the middle lane and check to make sure I’m not doing too much over the speed limit.

“Okay, I got the address. Plugging it into the map.” He holds the screen up in my line of sight. “Five hours, seventeen minutes. In about forty miles, we’re going to merge onto I-81S. I’ll let you know when the exit’s coming up.”

“Perfect.”

“It’s already late, though, Dara,” he says uncertainly. I glance at the clock, surprised to find it’s after eleven. “Do you really want to drive through the night?”

I’m wide awake, and itching to put as much distance as I can between Mellie and me. The drive won’t be a problem. But he does raise a good point—I probably shouldn’t go ringing my long-lost grandparents’ doorbell at four a.m. I really want this to go well, and that wouldn’t be the best start.

“Yeah, let’s keep driving. You can sleep if you want.”

“Okay …”

“But first can you look for a hotel for us to stay at when we get there?”

Sam opens a new window on his phone, and a few minutes later he’s booked a room. It’s in Philadelphia, twenty minutes from Cherry Hill, and it had a low rating on TripAdvisor, but it was the cheapest room available on such short notice.

“Are you going to tell me what happened now?” Sam asks. “No more laws to break or Google searches to do first?”

I watch the dotted white lines of the three-lane highway pass on either side of the car. He’s going to need to know eventually, and it should probably be before he gets fed up with me and changes his mind about the trip. If the roles were reversed, I don’t think I would have been nearly as patient as he has.

I shake my head faintly. “You’re not going to believe it when I tell you.”

He waits.

I take a deep breath. “Mellie is … transgender. Or transsexual. Or both? I’m not a hundred percent sure how it works.”

This time Sam’s entire body jerks toward me. “She’s what?”

“She was born a boy. Or … that’s not how she phrased it, but … you know what I mean.”

“Whoaaa.” The word is a never-ending whisper.

“Yeah.”

“But she looks … I had no idea. Did you? I mean, did you ever suspect …?”

“Oh yeah, all the time.” I shoot him a look.

“Sorry.”

But another memory sneaks up on me. An awful heat wave had descended on western New York the summer I was thirteen, and my mom and I spent her days off at the public pool in the next town over. Sometimes Sam would come with us, but on the days he didn’t, I would beg Mellie to come in the water with me. I hated swimming by myself, and she knew that. But she refused every time, insisting she was fine sitting under her umbrella with her book, her one-piece bathing suit mostly hidden under her caftan, untouched by water and chlorine. I was so mad at her for not being willing to even wade halfway in. Looking back, I wonder if she refused to go in the water because she was uncomfortable being in a swimsuit in public. There were hints; I just never knew how to decipher them.

“She’s been lying to me my whole life, Sam. She’s been lying to everyone.”

He takes a second and then says, “So she adopted you.”

“No.”

“Oh. Trans women can have babies? I didn’t know that.”

Oh, Sam. “No. They can’t.”

“So …” He still doesn’t get it.

A pair of headlights comes up fast behind us, and I switch to the right lane to let them pass. I’m grateful for the few extra seconds before I have to say … what I have to say. “So,” I continue once the speeding car’s taillights are far in the distance, “she’s not my biological mother. She’s my father. The man in the pictures, the father line on the birth certificate … Marcus Hogan. That’s her.”

I glance at him just in time to watch it all click. His eyes go so wide you can see the whites all around his irises. “Holy shit.”

My heart is pounding. Sam’s reaction has brought it all to the surface again for me. All I say is, “Yeah.”

“Tell me everything,” he says.

Mom’s final request sounds in my ears, but I don’t care. Sam and I never keep secrets from each other.

I tell him all I know as I drive. About Mellie being Marcus, and how she was a pro player, and about Celeste and her family, and how Mellie transitioned after Celeste died, how she spent our money on the hormones and procedures, and how she ran away from my grandparents and changed our names so they wouldn’t find us.

My phone vibrates with one, then two, then three calls. I ignore it.

“So I was kind of right about her kidnapping me. She stole me away, and lied to me and the world about who I am.” Now that I’m talking, it’s hard to stop. Every feeling that enters me comes right out again in a rush of words and tears and snot. I’m not even fully talking to Sam anymore. I’m talking to me, the highway, the universe. There’s something validating in saying it all out loud, as if somewhere between my heart and the tip of my tongue, between my brain and my lips, these vaporous, unnamed things inside me are given a shape and a name, and made real.

“And you know,” I say, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my hoodie, “I think the worst part is, she didn’t have one good reason for why. Why it was so important that she do all of this. How she was able to justify all the deception. Even as she was speaking directly to my face, confessing this long overdue truth, she still wasn’t considering my position in any of it.”

I glance at the speedometer and realize I’m going thirty miles an hour over the speed limit. Not surprising, considering my whole body is so tense that my foot is practically forcing the gas pedal as far forward as it will go. I ease up, and we slow down a bit.

We’re nearly halfway to Philadelphia when Sam asks, “So what are you going to say to your grandparents when we get there?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m just going to introduce myself and see what happens?”

“They’ll probably welcome you with open arms. I bet they’ve missed you.”

I consider that. He’s right—Mellie didn’t only ruin my life with her selfishness. She took the Pembrokes’ granddaughter away from them. The one thing left to remind them of their dead daughter, gone.

The photos of Celeste, blond and joyful and not much older than I am now, flash before my eyes. I wonder if I’m like her in any other way, if there’s anything similar about us apart from looks. Gestures, facial expressions, likes, dislikes. Maybe Ruth and William can help me find those things.

Sam and I lapse into silence again. There are very few other cars out on the road now, and it feels like it’s just our little box on wheels and us, pioneering through the night.

“I just can’t believe it,” Sam says after a while, almost to himself.

“I know,” I murmur.

“This is Mellie we’re talking about.”

“I know,” I say again.

“Mom’s best friend, kick-ass nurse, neat-freak Mellie.”

“Yep.”

“So weird.”

“So weird,” I agree, though I can think of a lot of other adjectives too.

My phone vibrates in the cup holder again. This time I check the screen. All the calls have been from Mellie. It’s 2:30 in the morning; looks like she’s not getting any sleep tonight, either. I send it to voicemail, and drop the phone back in its resting place.

“You okay?” Sam asks.

“I’m in top physical shape, Samarjit. Want to have a push-up battle?” I might be more tired than I thought. I’m suddenly feeling a little slap happy.

He laughs. “Yeah, okay, but what about mentally?”

“Not even a little bit.”

He reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. “Change of subject?”

I glance at him. There’s a hint of my favorite Sam smile there—the one where his right eyebrow lifts slightly higher than the left—and I’m overcome with gratitude that he’s here with me right now. “Yes, please.”

“Did you know that for every person on Earth there are one point six billion ants?”

I burst out laughing. The shock of it to my system jolts some of the tension loose. “What?”

“But!” he continues, grinning. “If you total all the ants together and all the humans together, each group will weigh about the same.”

I nod, mock seriously. “And where did you learn this very important fact?”

“Online somewhere. I thought it was a good dose of perspective.”

“Perspective about what?”

“I don’t know … that we’re not as significant as we think we are?”

I let that marinate. “Okay, now I’m depressed.”

Sam chuckles. “But it got your mind off things for a minute there, didn’t it?”

I punch him in the arm. “It did. Thanks.”

“Any time.”

But I’m a little jealous of those zillions and zillions of ants. They always have one another, and they always have a clear goal. There’s not a lot of room for mystery or melancholy or loneliness in their little ant lives. And if they get stepped on, well, then at least they don’t die with any regrets.

Sam spends the last hour of the drive asleep, and I have to put on some music to keep me awake. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from wired to exhausted. Especially when you’re at the end of the longest, hardest day of your life and you’re confused about everything, not the least of which is your own place in the world.

We get to Philadelphia—the city where I lived for the first year of my life, apparently—just after four in the morning. I came to Philly once on a school field trip, and had assumed back then that it was my first time there. Yet another instance where Mellie could have told me about our past but chose not to.

I pull into the hotel parking lot and turn off the car. Sam doesn’t stir, and I don’t wake him just yet. Gingerly, as if it’s a baby alligator that must be handled in just the right way, I lift my phone from the cup holder and swipe it on. Eleven missed calls and four voicemails, all from Mellie.

As I debate listening to them, the screen lights up with a new text message.

Please just let me know you’re okay.

I sigh, and type back before I can talk myself out of it. I’m fine. Sam’s with me.

Her reply comes immediately. Thank you for letting me know. I love you.

I clench my teeth. She doesn’t get to just tell me she loves me and not have to go to the effort of actually showing it. That’s what led us to this point in the first place. I think back to what I said to Sam, and my thumbs flash across the keyboard.

You still haven’t given me one good reason WHY. Why it was so important that you transition when you did. Why you thought it would be okay to take me from my grandparents. Why you kept it secret from me. It must have taken a LOT of energy to hide it all, and yet you kept making that choice, over and over, for all these years. You must have had a reason. Something more than a flimsy “I was scared” or “My feelings were hurt.” But when you had the chance to help me understand, you got defensive. I have my own answers to find now. My own story to track down. Please stop calling me.

I turn the phone off before she can respond.