Twenty-five years on this earth, and I’ve never been out of Nevada.

It’s sad, really. The border is so close to Gun Creek. Up the mountain pass, back down onto the other side, and through miles and miles of old ghost towns and bare fields. Somewhere along Route 268, Nevada turns into California, a tiny sign denoting the border crossing, so small that if you blinked, you’d miss it.

I do not miss it.

We’re in Pike’s car, an old sedan that’s seen better days. I kind of wish we were in a giant truck where the center console separates the driver and passenger so wide, you have to yell to hear each other. In this car, we’re so close that Leo’s arm brushes against mine every time he touches the gear stick between us.

We don’t talk, except about the directions; which road to turn onto, how many minutes left. I don’t have my phone; too paranoid about Damon tracking the GPS, I’ve left it at home, underneath my pillow, along with a bunch of clothes assembled in a rough body-outline that could be mistaken for my sleeping form in the dark.

“This thing go any faster?” I ask, at one point. Leo smirks. “You sound as thrilled as me about this piece of shit,” he replies, eyes firmly on the road ahead. “I’m sitting on ninety. I get pulled over across state lines, your stepdaddy’ll be hauling me back to Lovelock before sundown.

My stomach sinks. I’m acutely aware of the risk I’m putting Leo at by asking him to go to California with me. I’m a selfish fucking bitch.

It’s going to be fine, I tell myself. We won’t get caught. By the time Damon even notices I’m gone, if he notices at all, we’ll be well on our way back to Gun Creek, and nobody will be the wiser about our little road trip to Lone Pine.

“So,” Leo says, as if reading my mind, “remind me where we’re going, again?”

“Nowhere special.”

“Nowhere special,” he echoes. “Okay. You think they have food and a gas stop in Nowhere Special?”

I look at him, and for the briefest of moments, it’s like we’re teenagers again, and the last almost-decade didn’t just happen.

“We’re going to Lone Pine, smart ass. And yes, they have food and gas there.”

“Good,” Leo says, a small smile remaining as he focuses on the road. “I’m starved.”

---

Three hours later, Leo is sitting in a restaurant on Main Street that boasts the best burgers in town and a life-sized cardboard cutout of John Wayne. I leave him there with a promise to come back in thirty minutes, and drive his car down the street to the place I’m actually intending to go.

Mount Whitney Cemetery is easy to navigate. Most of the place is dedicated to a mass grave from a massive earthquake that leveled the town over a hundred years ago. If you didn’t look properly, you’d assume it was just a grassy field. I head for the individual gravestones on the opposite side of the road, already knowing which plot I’m searching for. The things you can find online these days — they have maps of cemeteries that show exactly which plot each body is buried in, right down to the satellite coordinates. It’s like a dead person GPS.

The Collins family plot is smaller than I expected but covered in more ornaments and trinkets than my eyes can take in at once. The whole space is only big enough for two coffins to rest side-by-side, but I guess they stack them in the ground these days.

And besides, I remind myself, there might be three headstones, but there are only two people buried here.

Richard and Adelie Collins, two people who fucked one night and somehow created the man who has been my singular nightmare for eight years.

I think of Jennifer as I stare down at the family plot, at each gravestone. I look around, making absolutely sure nobody is looking at me, and then, like the psycho I have become, steal every little ornament and trinket from Daniel Collins’ empty grave, shoving each piece in my bag as I struggle to hold back vomit.

Nobody ever talks about it, but cemeteries have this particular smell. Bodies, in various stages of decomposition, all rotting in their pine boxes under six feet of hard-packed dirt. People pretend that smell isn’t there, but I’m hardly one to shy away from the practicalities of death.

Beneath me, the ground rumbles, and I immediately wonder if the next earthquake is just now hitting this tiny town. Wouldn’t that be ironic, if I fell into this grave and was buried alive in the resting spot meant for Damon. I close my eyes briefly, partly because the sun is so bright, and partly to wait and see if the ground will split open to swallow me up, but when I open them again, the rumble is just an earthmover driving past me on its way to dig a fresh grave.

I don’t stay to pay my respects. That was a lie. There’s nobody to pay my respects to anyway because Daniel Collins isn’t buried there. He isn’t even dead. He’s a grown man, living in my house, sliding into my bed, making bruises on my pale skin.