“This’ll look nice on you,” the guy said to Emma, folding the sweatshirt into a plastic bag alongside the can of beans. “Real pretty.”
“It’s a birthday present,” she told him. “To myself.”
“Happy birthday,” said the guy. “A real pretty shirt for a real pretty girl.”
Once they’d paid, they walked out of the store together, both struggling not to laugh until they were a safe distance away. Emma held up the sweatshirt and twirled in a circle.
“Real pretty,” Peter said in an exaggerated drawl.
“Aw,” she said, tossing his sweatshirt to him. “You’ll look real pretty in it too.”
“I think this is the first time you’ve ever gotten me a birthday present.”
Emma smiled. “If it makes you feel any better, I forget everybody else’s, too,” she told him. “I’m terrible about that stuff. I must’ve gotten at least some of the absentminded professor genes.”
“It’s okay,” Peter said with a grin, holding up his sweatshirt. “This top-quality half-polyester, half-cotton garment more than makes up for it.”
“Only the best for you,” she said as she opened the door and slipped into the car. Peter stood there a moment, not quite ready to be on the move again. The air had already lost the spongy quality from earlier in the day, shedding the mugginess of the city as they pushed farther into the mountains. There was a coolness here that pinched at his lungs and made his eyes water as he yawned and stretched and squinted out at the glancing sun and the needle-like pines. He felt suddenly happy, and he could tell Emma was too, as if the cure to the blues were always to be found here in this run-down husk of a gas station, and they only ever had to come here to discover it.
The dog was lying on his back in the car, blinking lazily up at the sun, and he scrambled to his feet with a little grunt as they rejoined him. Just beyond the mini-mart the road took an upward swing, and the car bucked and surged as Peter coaxed it along, winding through the dense woods and up toward the campground. Emma was holding her new sweatshirt in her lap, tracing a finger along the edges of the star, and Peter’s mind crept toward nightfall, nudging aside reality—against his better judgment—to consider the kinds of scenes found only in the movies: scenic overlooks and parked cars, a lanky teenager with his arm slung over some girl’s shoulders, the confidence of the lean-in, the big kiss backlit by the hazy white moon.
Whenever he imagined trying to kiss Emma, the idea seemed depressingly laughable; the sheer mechanics of the thing—the subtlety of reaching over, the complicated logistics of leaning and veering and lining things up—completely impossible. Peter had never kissed a girl before, and he had great admiration for those who did it so casually. To him it seemed a feat more difficult than jumping out of an airplane or sailing around the world. Those things required nerve and daring and perhaps a little bit of stupidity. But at least they didn’t involve the possibility of complete and utter rejection, or maybe even worse, a miscalculation of aim that could result in bumping heads or clinking teeth with the girl you were meant to be kissing.
He looked miserably over at Emma, who was busy sorting through the bag of provisions for the evening. The sky ahead of them was marbled with clouds, and the wind picked up as they neared the summit, passing scattered groups of picnic tables and fire pits set along the edges of the woods. To their left the city of Roanoke stretched out in a clumsy pattern of smokestacks and buildings, and Peter remembered the giant star that glowed out across it at night and felt suddenly hopeful. Maybe the answer to all of his problems was nothing more than a darkened sky and a glittering city, a lofty perch above the world below. It seemed entirely possible that it was all just a matter of setting and location, and Peter wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. After all, he understood better than anyone the importance of geography.
Chapter nineteen
In the gray pocket of time between daylight and dusk they set off from the campsite to collect wood for the fire.
“Why don’t you grab some of these little twigs?” Peter told her, snapping a branch with the heel of his shoe and holding it up for her to see. He squared his shoulders and puffed out his chest a bit. “I can handle the bigger ones.”
It took a lot for Emma to refrain from rolling her eyes as she watched him struggle with an enormous limb, half dragging it along the dirt path as the dog loped ahead. The woods smelled of pine needles and smoke, and they could hear other campers in the distance, the thin voices of a few girls singing, the beery sounds of men’s laughter. There was a thin haze that hung just above the ground, hugging the trunks of the trees and causing the dog to reappear every so often like an unbalanced ghost.
When Peter seemed satisfied with their haul, they carted the wood back toward the fire pit. The dog took off with one of the branches Emma dropped, and by the time they caught up, he’d reduced it to a neat pile of splinters. Peter returned to the car, which was parked just beyond a nearby picnic table, and rummaged through for some scrap paper, something to use as kindling to get the fire going. But when he couldn’t find anything, he returned with one of his maps instead, and Emma scrambled to her feet, gaping at him.
“You’re going to use that?” she asked, surprised that he’d be willing to part with it, though she hadn’t once seen him refer to any of them. He had both hands poised to rip it down the center, a half smile on his face, and when Emma looked closer, she realized it was a map of North Carolina. “That’s the only one we actually need!”
Peter shrugged. “I already know the way.”
“But what if we get lost?” she said. “Why not tear up Madagascar or something?”
But he was already shredding it into small pieces, tucking them between the twigs set up like teepees in the charred circle of ash: first Durham, then Wilmington, then Hendersonville, the little scraps of the towns straining in the wind as if reluctant to be sacrificed.
“Once you’ve been somewhere, you know it,” he said. “So you don’t need a map anymore.”
“That’s great,” Emma said. “Except we haven’t technically been there yet. We’re still a state short.”
“I know,” he said with a grin. “But it’s symbolic.”
Peter pulled the blue lighter out of his back pocket. “There are worse things than wandering.”