“That’s in Orange,” I interrupted. “We’re nowhere near that.”

The soft blue light of evening gathered around his blond hair, stripping it of color. He studied me for a minute, scratching his chin again. “So you are from Virginia, then.”

“I’m not—”

He held up a hand. “Please. No one outside of this state gives a crap about where James Madison’s house is.”

I sat back. Walked right into that one.

It was my mom’s fault. As a high school history teacher, it had been her personal mission to cart Dad and me around to every major historical site in the area. So while my friends got to have pool parties and sleepovers, I got to walk around one battlefield after another, posing for pictures with cannons and Colonial reenactors. Fun times, made even more fun by the thousands of bug bites and peeling sunburns I always showed up with on the first day of school. I still had scars from Antietam.

Liam smiled at the dark road, keeping the minivan’s headlights off. I thought it was fairly brave—or stupid—considering the commonwealth of Virginia had never considered it a priority to install lights on its highways and roads.

“I think we should stop for the night,” Chubs said. “Are you going to find a park?”

“Relax, buddy; I got this,” Liam said.

“You keep saying that,” Chubs muttered, sitting back, “and then it’s, Oh, sorry team, let’s huddle together for warmth, while the bears try to break in and eat our food.”

“Yeah…sorry about that,” Liam said. “But hey, what’s life without a little adversity?”

That had to have been the fakest attempt at optimism since my fourth grade teacher tried reasoning that we were better off without the dead kids in our class because it’d mean more turns on the playground swings for the rest of us.

I lost track of their conversation after that. It wasn’t that I had no interest in hearing all about the bizarre traditions and habits they’d managed to form in the two weeks since escaping their camp; I was exhausted with trying to figure out why, exactly, those two were able to cling to the thin thread that bound their friendship together.

Eventually Liam found Highway 81, and Chubs found a shallow, restless sleep. The endless stream of old trees, only a few fully dressed for spring, passed by my window. We were going too fast, and we were too far into twilight, for me to make out the patchwork of leaves that had grown in. Wherever we were, there were still traces of the dead leaves from the fall before staining the highway’s cement. Almost as though we were the first car to drive the road in quite some time.

I leaned my forehead against the cool glass, reaching over to point the AC vent directly at my face. My headache was still there, pinching the space behind my eyes. The freezing air would help keep me awake, and, if nothing else, alert enough to catch my mind blindly groping for Liam’s.