Page 109 of Here We Go Again

He goes quiet, and she goes back to counting mile markers.

“Is this hell?” he eventually asks.

“No, this is Connecticut.”

ROSEMARY

She dreams she’s a puppet master, like in that scene fromThe Sound of Music. A wooden stage with her above it, pulling strings to make the puppets dance.Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo.

Except the strings have all been cut, so her wooden puppets aren’t listening to the commands of her fingers, running around on their own accord. They are leaving her stage, and she is yodeling all by herself.

“Rosie.”

Something brushes her shoulder, and she finally lets go of her grip on the strings.

“Rosemary. Wake up.”

She blinks away, sees a bright white light. Gas station lights.

Then Logan’s face comes into focus above her. She looks terrible.

“I’m so sorry, but I can’t drive anymore.”

Rosemary tries to sit up, but Odie is pinning her to the back seat. “Where are we?”

“Massachusetts. Please. I’m so tired. I just can’t.”

“Right. Okay.”

Rosemary pees inside a Cumberland Farms with her eyes onlyhalf-open, then zombie crawls her way to the register to buy a Monster energy drink and two packs of Ding Dongs. She’ll ride a processed sugar rush through New England.

When she gets back to the van, Logan is already snoring next to Joe. He’s vaguely conscious, enough so that he gives Rosemary a droopy version of his smile and says, “Maine doesn’t even matter, Rosemary. This does.”

She doesn’t know what to do with that comment, either.

LOGAN

She wakes up to a smell.

She hasn’t slept nearly enough, there’s a crick in her neck, and something in the van smells like poop.

Her first thought is cows. Her second thought is Odie.

But then Joe groans deeply and in an unmistakably GI-upset kind of way.

Logan bolts upright.

“Rosemary, something… happened…”

Joe groans again.

ROSEMARY

There is poop everywhere.

It’s five in the morning in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and everything is literalshit. It’s been almost twenty-four hours, and she’s reached the delirious stage of the journey.

“How could you possibly poop this much?” Logan shouts with her tank top pulled over her nose like a mask. “You haven’t eaten anything!”