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‘Side one needs to be facing up,’ Brooke said, watching me from the corner of her eye. ‘It should be right at the start.’

I stuck the cassette into the stereo, and after a second the speakers whirred to life. The car might have been old, but the speakers were clearly new. Sound burst out of them, bright and clear, and Brooke turned the volume up.

‘I love this album,’ she murmured.

I had no idea where we were going, or how long it would take to get there, but those questions all blurred into irrelevance. I was out of Seattle, and in Brooke’s car, and everything else could wait.

The city started to fade behind us, and Brooke put her foot down on the gas.

Brooke drovefast, and I wasn’t used to that. She headed south toward the Oregon border, her fingers lightly tapping the steering wheel like it was a habit. I closed my eyes for a while, content to listen to the music and the sound of the cool night air whizzing past, the scents changing as we moved out of the city, through the suburbs, then into more wide-open space.

As the sky deepened into inky night and Brooke continued to put more distance between me and my house, each of my muscles started to relax, releasing the tension I’d been desperately clinging to. Sitting next to Brooke wasn’t awkward. The silence wasn’t awkward, either. It was almost …nice… to spend time with someone without being on edge, waiting for the next barbed comment or backhanded slap.

I smothered a yawn and rubbed my fingertips over my eyelids. The mental effort not to let my thoughts wanderback to earlier this afternoon was exhausting. I couldn’t let myself go there. It had cost me so much to get out.

I didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep until I woke up with a start. I glanced over at Brooke, who smiled back at me.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ she said softly.

‘That’s okay.’ I stretched my back and squinted out of the windshield. ‘Where are we?’

‘About an hour outside of the city.’

‘Where are we going tonight?’ I’d been too afraid to ask, not sure if this counted in our deal not to ask each other why we were leaving Seattle. I also wasn’t sure if I’d like her answer.

‘Where do you want to go?’

That made me laugh. ‘You’re the one driving.’

‘We’ve got the entire continental US to explore,’ Brooke replied, and it sounded like a joke and also really not like a joke at the same time. ‘Unless you brought your passport, in which case both Mexico and Canada are possibilities.’

‘I don’t have a passport.’

She didn’t comment on that. I hadn’t spent my life going on fancy vacations in other countries like she had, and I was almost baiting her – waiting to see if she would turn out to be a Mean Girl after all.

‘Have you ever been to Disney World?’ she asked, and I grimaced.

‘No. I’ve never –’ I decided not to finish that sentence. Brooke didn’t need to know I’d only ever visited two otherstates, and both of them shared a border with Washington. ‘I haven’t,’ I said instead, hoping she hadn’t noticed.

She smiled. ‘Awesome. That’s where we’re going, then.’

‘Brooke. That’s, like, a two-week drive,’ I said with a disbelieving laugh.

‘Nah, I figure we can do it in ten days. Maybe less.’

‘How fast do you drive?’ I asked.

‘I won’t break the speed limit,’ she said simply. ‘But we’ll get there, don’t worry about that. Do you have cash on you?’

‘Yeah. And a credit card,’ I said. Not all the money was mine. The credit card definitely wasn’t. It wouldn’t take a lot for Brooke to figure that out, but she didn’t question it. That almost made it worse. She’d want answers eventually, and I had no idea how to explain what had happened.

‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna keep going for another hour, then we should probably stop and get a motel room.’

‘Sure.’

I was so intimidated by Brooke that going along with her plan was easier than trying to suggest something of my own, something that would probably be stupid in comparison. I never got the impression that she tried to be intimidating, but some girls had this thing about them – an aura, maybe, or an attitude – that made me cower in front of them.

Brooke was tall, which helped with her attitude, and classically beautiful, which doubled it. I frequently got tongue-tied in front of pretty girls and usually ended up mumbling or running away … or both. Fortunately, I did that in front of girls who I didn’t think were pretty, as wellas grown women, andespeciallymen, so when I got flustered by a girl I liked, no one knew why. Over the years, I’d become good at hiding what I really thought. Or felt. Or wanted.