Berry stepped back, holding her hands out like a game show assistant to showcase a giant, boatlike, ancient red station wagon. “Anne, meet Mato. Mato, meet Anne.”

“Mato?”

“It was my parents’ car when I was little,” Berry said, skipping down the front walk to the car and opening the passenger door, which seemed to pop like a dislocated shoulder. She stepped aside with a little flip of her hand. “I thought it looked like a tomato.”

“I mean, it does!”

Inside, Mato was door-to-door red velvet, scratchy and plastic. Her seat belts were like thick floppy ribbons and stained dark in various places. Her dashboard was sun bleached to a salmon pink in parts. As I slid onto the seat, the heat rose up into my butt like fire.

“Yeah, she’s been baking all day,” Berry said. “So she’s a little toasty.”

Mato smelled like cinnamon, probably because someone had tied a bunch of cinnamon sticks to her rear window.

“She’s beautiful.” I ran my finger along the dashboard. “Hi, Mato!”

Berry slid into her seat and turned the key. Mato purred. “Mato rules. She’s my escape pod.”

The air had been hot earlier in the day, when I’d poked my head out to let Monty go for a pee. But now the sky was purple and orange, and the air was soft and cool, like a glass of cold tap water. I rolled down the window and let my fingers dance on the breeze as Berry coasted farther and farther away from town, like we were a ship heading out into the ocean.

“My dad installed the shocks,” Berry said, “so they’re a little. . .loosey.”

I leaned my head back onto the baked potato that was the headrest and felt my body relax for the first time in days. “This is amazing.”

A few miles away from the house, Berry turned off the main road, toward what I thought was the parking lot of a burger joint. Which, honestly, I would have been fine with. Like if someone I knew was sad, I could see taking them to a burger joint. But then she took another left into what looked like an alleyway, past a used car place, to a small yard fenced in by green chain link. And she pulled the car to a stop.

“TA-DA!” She popped out of the car with significant bounce.

“A fence?”

Berry reached into a veil of dried vines and bushes until she found what seemed to be a pretty small opening. After a few minutes of shoving and pulling, she parted the wall of weeds to reveal a small hole in the fence. “Follow me.”

I stepped out of the car and followed Berry through a curtain of green.

“My parents used to bring me here when I was a kid,” Berry explained, stepping onto the frayed Astroturf. “Then I guess it closed. But I still love it.”