Dan did have a second lunch courtesy of Anne Malone catering, and he handed some Chips Ahoy! to Rob. Rob ripped the blue foil open but then stopped, looked up, and whispered grace. Dan crossed himself, mocking his friend.

“You’re going to hell, Malone.”

“Those cookies are cursed by the devil.” Dan, admittedly, was trying to set off Bad Rob mode.

“Stop it.”

“Do you really think there’s a hell? Do you think God has nothing better to do than keep track of who is praying for cookies?”

“Not funny.”

“What if you choked on the cookies?”

“Shut up.”

“What if we die in a bus crash right now? Does the cookie prayer deliver your soul to heaven?”

“Look, can’t hurt”—Rob put the cookies on the bus seat between them—“but let me say this . . .”

Dan took one and chewed obnoxiously. “What if these were really crappy sugar cookies? Same prayer? Better salvation for Oreos?”

And rather than activate Bad Rob, Dan got his smart and calm spiritual brother. “Hey, God is good, all the time.”

Shocked by the simplicity of that and embarrassed at his teasing, Dan swallowed his cookie. Rob combed his hair behind his ear and scooched into the aisle. “Mr. Donahue, how long until we pull over for dinner?”

“When I hit something that looks like good eating, I’ll give you the signal to go back and scrape it off the road.” Donahue gave Rob a don’t-fuck-with-me marine stare in the rearview, then softened. “We are an hour from Waco, then two hours to Austin. We have a shit-ton of miles to go.”

Rob winked at Dan. “How much coffee have you drank today, sir?”

Donahue bit his lip in estimation. “I’d say this is my twelfth cup. But it’s the office stuff, like drinking dirty water.”

“You seem jumpy, sir.”

“And you seem like a smart-ass, McGhee. Stop trying to trigger a Nam flashback where I drive us off the road.”

As the traffic finally broke up, Rob and Dan crept into the stairwell at the front of the bus to secondhand Donahue’s chain-smoking and reload him on coffee. Donahue was in full discourse mode, doing twenty solid minutes on Irish history (it was St. Patrick’s Day), the Afrikaaners’ claims to the veldt, a deep dive into the war of independence that Ho Chi Minh had been fighting, and the fact that short of “nukes and putting down blacktops in Hanoi” there was no way to win there, then a sudden veer into David Shipler’s Arab and Jew to explain the intifada. By Waco, Dan needed a break from this caffeinated run of Facts on File and wandered to the back of the bus, where Stick was playing hearts with Lee Molfetta and a couple of upperclassmen. A big rig air-horned, and Coach Moyle bolted out of his nap.