“But I saw the deer coming,” I said.

Mom’s eyes went fierce. “Yeah, you saw the deer,” she said. “But everything you saw after that—the car flipping, us dying—all of that was a lie. That’s why you can’t believe in visions, not yours or anybody else’s. They never tell the whole truth.”

How could Mom know something like that? But by then the ambulance had arrived, all lights and sirens, and we had questions to answer, and they loaded Murphy and Mom onto stretchers, and we had to go to the hospital.

Three times I asked Mom what she meant that night.

Three times I was punished for it. The last time, Mom locked me in my room for a whole day and night, only letting me out when I had to pee.

So I gave up. And I almost never mentioned my visions to Mom again.

At least not directly.

A few hours later Murphy and I stopped at a gas station. I didn’t have any idea where Benign, Louisiana, was, and my phone reception was getting spotty. So while Murphy pumped gas, I went inside to look at a map.

I have this thing where I love gas stations. They’re like shitty airports, you know? All these people from probably-not-that-far-away places converging to eat junk food and get gas and use the bathroom. I love watching them file in and out and wait in line—cops and lawyers and truck drivers and personal assistants. Everywhere sells the same boring crap, the same ironic T-shirts, the same Coke Icees and Gatorades and burnt coffee. Gas stations are some of the only places where we all belong.

And yet there’s something different about each one, something unique. Once in Arkansas I found a gas station with a boar’s head mounted in the bathroom, giant tusks ready to gore. In another one I saw in Pensacola, they had a functional bait shop, minnows darting around Styrofoam coolers and cages of scritching crickets all over the place.

This one had something special too. In the middle of the dirty tile floor was a foldout table full of pickled eggs. These were home-canned in mason jars, swirling with green liquid like science experiments. I wondered who had made them, if it was all some old lady’s handiwork. I could imagine her then, this bent-backed woman with crazy gray hair dropping eggs into the brine like a weird witch casting spells. I could see her beleaguered husband on the couch, the TV blasting COPS while their beautiful daughter smoked cigarettes on the roof, watching the sunset. I could picture this old woman wandering the woods outside her house, snatching up eggs out of nests, praying for her daughter to turn into a bird and fly away, wishing her husband’s bones would dissolve and he’d sag into a fleshy pile of guts she could just scoop up and dump in the trash.

I bet all those eggs tasted bitter. I bet they tasted like captivity, like the desire for freedom.