One day when his van passes she’s able to follow him up the freeway, changing lanes when he does, and flashing her signal right, right, right until she herds him up to the rest stop where they met before. His license plate reads ZIP, and she thinks the three numbers are the same. The sun glints off the chrome of parked cars whose license plates are a map of the United States, for Maryland to Oregon, Alabama to Minnesota. Families sit at the picnic tables. A man in his fifties jumps out of the light blue van. He has the short hair, the long nose, but he leans his arms on the open window of her car and says, “Lady, what the hell do you want, anyway?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought you were someone else. A friend of mine has a van just like this.”

“Yeah? Well, you’ve got a hell of a nerve trying to run me off the road like that.” Turning abruptly, he climbs back in his van and drives off, the wheels spinning in the dusty gravel of the parking lot.

She sits alone in her yellow Volkswagen for nearly an hour before driving down the hill to the freeway.

Though Ilka laughs with the rest of us, I think I can feel her sadness, and I curl my hands into fists under the table when I picture the unarmed man chasing Ilka, catching her, then throwing her back out on the road again so he can play with her without letting her defend herself. What good is her karate if she can never touch him again? Lynne’s right, I say to myself, Ilka should carry a gun and shoot him through the windshield the next time his teasing blue van speeds by.

“Maybe you dreamed him. Dreams can often be more true than reality,” says Patty, who plans to change her major to psychology.

“No, he exists, I can assure you.” Ilka takes off her silk scarf and shakes out her long blond hair, fluffing it away from her head with one hand while the other plays with the scarf. “But I did dream about him the night after that guy told me off at the rest stop.”

We lean forward.

In her dream, the armless man drives up and parks beside her as she sits in her car halfway up a hill. It’s not the rest stop, just a green meadow with poppies in the grass. There isn’t even any road. She smiles at him; he smiles at her.

“You never told me your name,” she calls to him in German.

He answers in English, “I’m one of the unnamed.”