When we were finally done, Harry said, “Jesus Christ,” her voice like a strained muscle. She stretched out her legs, and got up to walk in a few ginger circles around the car. I took her seat, still warm, and let my eyes shut, tipped my head back to stretch my neck. It wasn’t fair to blame Harry for my being here, when she’d put no more pressure on me than an invitation. I’d come because I would miss her, because I could guess she didn’t want to make the trip with her parents, because it didn’t seem likely we’d stay in touch once she was gone. Because she’d asked me to. I got up and checked on Emily Dickinson, who was chewing up the cardboard of a toilet paper roll, then plucked the cactus from its cup holder.

“Where are you taking it?” Harry asked, leaning against the Camry’s side.

“I’m going to leave it here.”

“No, no,” she said, and reached her hand toward me in protest. “I want to keep it. It’s not the cactus’s fault.”

I shrugged, and got into the driver’s seat, while Harry went around to the back and began rummaging things around, wincing occasionally when she used her sore hand. When she got back in, she curled up on the passenger seat, and pulled the blanket that we had put there for napping over herself. As we turned back onto the freeway, her voice was sedate: “This person on Twitter was talking about a mouse we drove extinct.”

“Hm?”

“Or a rat,” she said. She’d pulled out her phone. “It’s called the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat. It went extinct in 2015. We drove it extinct.” The we she used was very personal. “Because the seas rose.”

“Oh.” I wondered who on her Twitter feed was talking about dead rats.

“Do you want to see a picture?” I was driving, but she held her phone up in front of me anyway. It was a rat. Big-eyed and sandy brown and curled over itself. It felt strange to be looking at a color photograph of something that didn’t exist anymore, though I guess lots of photographs are of things that don’t exist anymore. The rat looked a little like those desert mice which I always thought looked a little like Harry.

Harry sighed and tucked her phone away. “Isn’t it so sad?”

* * *

The morning before we drove the Going-to-the-Sun Road, Harry made us stop at a gas station because I admitted I had forgotten to eat breakfast. I chewed at a granola bar, feeling slightly sullen, and watched her stretch out her legs in the parking lot, pacing back and forth among the cars. One of the side effects of my medication was decreased appetite. I knew a side effect was nothing to be particularly proud of. The granola bar was stale.