Lovelock looked like a mining boomtown that hadn’t ever boomed. The main streets were named after Ivy League colleges. They were hard to tell apart. There was a billboard that quoted Time magazine calling Lovelock the Armpit of America. Someone had spray-painted underneath: Thanks for Noticing, and over that: Thanks for nothing.

We had nothing but an address in our pockets and the long hours of the day in front of us. “Let’s wait until tonight,” I said. “She’s probably working anyway.”

“We can do it how you want.” Tom shrugged. “I don’t think Sherman found out what she did for a living.” He seemed relieved as well. Neither one of us was ready to find her, and neither one of us was ready to admit it, and our biggest consolation was that we could agree about this without having to confess it explicitly.

We found a rusty trailer with a flapping wooden sign that said Visitors Here! as if a flock of tourists were trapped inside. At the desk, a woman named Shelley paused her game of solitaire to tell us about local attractions. There were silver mines somewhere, collapsed. I pictured them like toothless gums around the hole of an old man’s mouth. The courthouse, she explained, was one of only two round courts in the nation. Apparently, an innovation could be remarkable simply because no one else thought it was a good idea. One thing was clear: There wasn’t much to do. We would have to work hard to avoid what we’d come for.

Shelley suggested someplace called Rye Patch Reservoir. She squinted at Tom. “Bring sunscreen,” she said. “You look like you just crawled out of a cave.”

The reservoir was bright and large. The heat made us sleepy. We drank orange soda and watched sparkling flakes of light ripple across the water. We got bored, and then we watched a family get bored nearby. They tried to entertain themselves with plastic pool noodles in the water but finally broke down and ate their sandwiches two hours before noon.

Tom was antsy. Shelley had been right about one thing: His skin was going to burn, and then it was going to peel right off his body. My own face felt achy and flushed. We didn’t last long. Back in town, we found a diner called the Cowpoke Café. Flies hovered above thumbprints of dried ketchup on the tables. When I swatted them away, their bodies felt still and hard as pebbles. The waitress grinned at us. “Hey, city kids,” she said. “Y’all hungry?”

Tom ordered curly fries that came in a plastic wagon. It was a specialty of the house, we’d been told; it came with two settler dolls perched on its hard front seat. The fries were a nest of deep-fried snakes ganging up on them from behind.