I was so happy—holding a duffel bag full of Vitner’s potato chips and cans of Old Towne pop that Rasul had bought for our trip. All we needed was some good weed—not the brown dirt full of seeds and sticks, but the fluffy, bright green kind that smelled like rainwater when you smoked it. When we finally escaped Chicago city limits, the fields of Indiana started passing us by like swirls on a record playing. In the front seat, Rasul turned up the tape player so loud that I couldn’t help but sing along to “Real Love” by Mary J. I made him rewind that song three times while I simulated dancing like the girls in the videos. We laughed back and forth until my lips slowed down and my eyes got heavy. The last sign I saw before I fell asleep with my baby on my mind said “Cleveland, 396 Miles.”

WE BOTH HAD been too hungry for each other to wait for night. Around noon, Rasul had nudged me awake outside of a Travel America where he had planned on getting gas and snacks. A Howard Johnson’s was attached to a sprawling gas station and rest center. It was the first large motel he or I had ever seen, apart from the huge ones downtown, that didn’t charge folks by the hour. Riding inches away in a roomy car whose windows blocked out the rest of the world, we had been filled up with a new sense of each other. The heavy scent of our excited youth had hovered between us like another passenger. The Eldorado was a tight pressure cooker, forcing us captive to imagine the possibilities that accompanied our new freedom. Just two hours into the trip and already we had gotten lazy, weighed down by anticipation and the desire to have one another for the first time. The fire in our groins had made us docile and sullen. When I leaned against the car and stretched from head to toe, adding a short yelp to dramatize how stiff I had become, Rasul fell into me and held me tight. He smiled toward the Howard Johnson’s neon-orange sign, and my eyes crinkled as I just shook my head without saying a word.

We were obviously ready to be hustlers in New York; Rasul had to give the bucktoothed, carrot-topped front desk clerk forty extra dollars of my money in exchange for letting us check in without ID. But forty extra dollars was a small price to pay for the heaven of four walls closed around just us—no other diners, train passengers, or neighbors stomping on and off the stoop. We had rustled through garbage bags for lotion, deodorant, and clothes to change into in the morning. Neither of us had thought about night clothes, but it was too cold to go back out and my guess was we wouldn’t need them.