Amy & Roger's Epic Detour

As we headed to the main street downtown, and Roger sped up to match the traffic, I found I couldn’t help wincing and pressing my foot down, hard, on the phantom brake every time it seemed like he got too close to the car in front of us. And the cars in the other lane and across the intersection were just flying by. Why did everyone have to go so fast?

The car behind us honked, loud, and I felt myself jump a little. I saw Roger glance over at me as he put his turn signal on to make the right onto Campus Drive. “You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said quickly, staring at the small green arrow blinking on and off, fighting down rising panic as I realized how he intended to get us to the freeway. “But you know, it’s faster if you take Alvarez.”

“Really?” he asked. “But we can just cut over to—”

“No,” I said, more loudly than I’d meant to. “If you just go straight here, you can get to the 2 that way. It’s faster.”

The light changed, and Roger paused for a moment before turning his signal off and going straight. “Sure,” he said.

I stared out the window, taking deep breaths and trying to calm myself down, trying not to think about how close I’d just come to seeing the intersection at University. I had no idea if the ribbons and signs were still there, or if they’d disappeared into recycling bins and birds’ nests. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get away from it as fast as possible.

As we got closer to the freeway, it struck me—probably a little late—that this would be one of the last times I would see my town. Raven Rock wasn’t going to be my home anymore. And I’d never even really taken the time to think about it. It was just the place I’d always lived, kind of boring, kind of confining. But mine, with all my history, good and bad, wrapped up in it. I saw landmarks from my life passing the window at faster speeds than I was comfortable with. The Fosters Freeze where Charlie and I used to walk to get shakes, and the Jamba Juice where he deeply humiliated me when we were twelve. He told me that if you yelled out “JAMBA!” at full volume, all the employees would yell back “JUICE!” He lied.

I turned in my seat to try to see as much as I still could, but then Roger was turning onto the freeway’s on-ramp, and thankfully not saying anything about the fact that we’d taken the scenic route to get there. I looked in my side mirror to see Raven Rock getting farther away, turning into just another dot on a map, just another anonymous town to be driven past. And as I watched, it disappeared from view until all I could see behind me were the other cars on the freeway.

We drove for about twenty minutes in silence. Once we were out of Raven Rock and off the surface streets, being in a car was bothering me less. On the freeway, where there were no stoplights or people who ran them, I could feel myself relax a little bit.

And Roger seemed to be a good driver, much more comfortable in my mother’s car than I had expected him to be. I kept sneaking glances across the car at him. I had never realized just how small the front seats of cars were. We seemed to be in closer proximity to each other than I had anticipated. Every time he moved, it caught my attention, and I was sitting at the very edge of my seat, pressed practically into the door, so that we wouldn’t bump elbows on the console or anything. Roger just seemed to take up a lot of space, driving with the seat pushed far back, his long jeans-clad legs looking like they were almost fully extended. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the glass of the window. This hadn’t been my style—when I’d been driving I’d been a strictly ten-and-two girl. But he was in control of the car, not driving too fast, but fast enough to keep up in the carpool lane. Traffic was moving, thankfully, since on the other side of the freeway it was bumper-to-bumper—for no apparent reason, at noon on a Thursday.

“Hey,” Roger said, breaking the silence in the car. He tapped the glass on the driver’s side. I looked and saw a familiar yellow arrow and red sign across the freeway. “What do you think?” he asked. “You hungry?”

“I’m going to miss this,” Roger said, reaching into the white paper bag sitting between us and pulling out a french fry. “I love fast food in all its forms, but nothing really compares to In-N-Out.”

I took a careful bite of my burger and nodded in agreement. We were in the back of the Liberty, what Charlie and I had always called the way-back, the open space designed for storing things. The door was raised, and we were sitting with our legs dangling over the edge. The sun was getting strong, and the glare made it harder to look

directly at Roger. But my sunglasses had shattered three months ago, and I’d gotten used to squinting. The cars on the freeway rushed past to the right of the car, and to the left of us an In-N-Out employee seemed to be breaking up with her boyfriend—loudly—over the phone.

We’d taken the food to go, but when Roger struggled to take a bite of his burger while pulling out of the parking lot, it became clear that this was an eat, then drive situation, and he’d pulled back into the parking lot. I hadn’t realized until Roger told me, after we’d ordered, that In-N-Out was a West Coast–only burger chain. There was no In-N-Out in Connecticut, because clearly that state was an inhospitable wasteland.

“It’s annoying,” Roger said, shaking the paper sack. We’d long since finished our individual containers of fries, but apparently there were still a few stragglers rolling around the bottom. Sure enough, he pulled out a small handful. “Because I missed this all year while I was at school. The closest one to Colorado is in Utah, which is a little far to go for a burger. But it might have been doable. Except for the fact that I didn’t have a car.”

I took a sip of my milk shake to buy myself some time to think about a response. “Colorado?” I finally asked, remembering the bumper sticker. “That’s where you go?”

He nodded. “Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. It’s a good school. And I have a lot of great friends….” I thought I saw something pass over Roger’s face for a second when he said this, but then it was gone. “Anyway, I’d planned on being here all summer. But after finals, my father began insisting that I spend the summer with him in Philly.”

“That’s where your father lives?” I regretted the sentence as soon as I’d said it. First of all, he’d told me that back in the kitchen. Second of all, I’d already known it. Third of all, I had a feeling that it was going to be a very long four days unless I could stop acting like such a moron.