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Zoe
Zoe hurried down the gangway, away from the obnoxious babysitter her mother had hired to escort her through the airport. Really? She was sixteen. Did she really need the unaccompanied minor service? Like she couldn’t figure out how to get on and off a plane? Typical of her mother. Ask her to act like an adult but treat her like a child.
That babysitter had been stuck to her since the check-in desk, where her mother, sobbing like an Oscar-nominee, had hugged her goodbye. Trace had stood by the doorway, holding Danielle in his arms. This had made Zoe even madder. She would have liked to have a moment to say goodbye to Danielle. But Trace always acted like Zoe posed some sort of danger to his little angel, so she didn’t know why she was surprised.
She found her seat and flung her backpack into the overhead bin. Then she plopped down in the window seat. She buckled herself in, put in her earbuds, and looked out the small window. Ah, Missouri. She’d hated to leave Maine and move to Missouri, and now she didn’t want to make the reverse trip. It wasn’t that she particularly loved Missouri, but she knew Maine wouldn’t be any better. Would life suddenly be fair in Maine? Would she suddenly become likable? She didn’t think so. And she wasn’t even going back to South Portland, where she’d grown up. She was going to the boonies, to Carver Harbor, where her mother had grown up.
Apparently, her mother hadn’t gotten into any trouble in her entire childhood, and she hoped Carver Harbor would have the same effect on her daughter. What a load of bull. Zoe closed her eyes and tried to relax. She still couldn’t believe this was happening. When she’d first been told the plan, she had promptly decided to torture her grandmother until she sent her home.
Now she wasn’t so sure. That plan made her feel guilty. None of this was Gramma’s fault. She was a very nice woman. Gramma had tried to see her as much as possible when they’d lived in Maine, even though she’d lived three hours away. They’d been so busy that it hadn’t always been easy to get together, but Gramma had always made the effort. She’d come to her stupid school plays. She’d always been around for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And she’d taken them to the beach a few times each summer. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe she would just stay in Maine. Maybe she would just stay with Gramma. That would protect her from Reboot, at least.
A man stopped in the aisle and checked his boarding pass. Then he flipped open the bin and heaved his bag up into it. He pushed and shoved and swore. Then he reached in and reefed on her bag, yanking it over to the side of the bin. It slammed into the wall, and she gave him a dirty look, which he didn’t see. He went back to pushing and shoving and swearing. Finally, he got the bin door shut. She was glad she hadn’t put anything breakable in her backpack.
He sat down, perching on the edge of his seat as if she were contagious. Really? Had he never been on an airplane before? The seats were kind of close together. She hoped the drink cart ripped off his kneecap. She slammed the window shut, turned up the Pearl Jam, closed her eyes, and rested her head on the hard plastic wall.
She didn’t know what she wanted. All she knew was what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to move to small-town Maine to live with an old lady. She didn’t want to leave Missouri. She didn’t want to go to Reboot. But what did she want?
Pearl Jam sang her to sleep, and suddenly she was driving a car really fast on a shoulderless road on the side of a mountain. To her right, a wall of rock. To her left, nothing. If she looked straight down, she saw exactly zero earth below her, as if the mountain was just floating in the sky. She realized the car was about to careen around a corner. The road was impossibly narrow, so she yanked the wheel to bring the car as close to the right side of the road as she could. But the wheel didn’t do anything. Did she have no control over the vehicle? She pressed her foot to the brake.
Nothing.
She was in the driver’s seat, but she wasn’t driving. She glanced around to make sure she was alone in the car. She was. That was good. If she crashed and her car flew off this mountain, she would be the only one to die. No great loss.
The car rounded the corner to reveal that she was about to leave the mountain behind. A bridge stretched out in front of her. It had no guardrails. It was a narrow road across the sky, heading toward another mountain in the distance. As her car flew out onto the bridge, she cried out and brought her hands up over her face. She felt sick to her stomach. But the not being able to see where she was going was worse than the seeing, so she dropped her arms to see that she was fast gaining on this new mountain, and the road went straight up it. Her stomach rolled. What was this? She had to get out of this car!
The car lurched, and gravity pressed her into her seat as she drove toward the sky, nearly perpendicular to the bridge she’d just left. She strained to look out the windshield. What if the road tipped a few more degrees, and the car fell over backward, plummeting roof-first into nothingness? She’d seen dirt bikes defy gravity. She didn’t think she could pull it off. She started crying. No, no, no, please let me get to the top of this mountain. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to fall. She didn’t think she’d ever been so scared and didn’t know if she could bear this kind of fear. And then she saw it.
The crest of the mountain.
But what came after? It was a mountaintop. There was no evidence that the road leveled off. She couldn’t see any more road at all. Either it dropped down over the hill or it simply stopped. If it stopped, she was dead. The car was going so fast. Even if the road pitched down, at this speed she might go flying straight ahead, leaving the relative safety of this insane road beneath her. She stomped on the brake again, crying. She was almost to the top. She closed her eyes, and her stomach dropped out of her as the car crested the mountain and headed straight down. Was she still on the road? Or was she only falling? She didn’t know, and she didn’t dare open her eyes to find out.
