June. None of it had seemed real. None of it had made sense. I wasn’t the sort of person girls like her visited in the middle of the night; that sort of thing didn’t happen to me.

But I’d said that when Dad died too. Clearly these things did happen to me, over and over and over. I decided I’d have to re-evaluate my self-image.

What had she even been doing there?

I found her account unconvincing. Not because I didn’t believe her, necessarily; she really might have been having a bad night. Fine. But why did she think I could help? What made her think she could trust me?

I should have been happy about this. There shouldn’t have been anything upsetting about a pretty girl who liked books and hipster music and robots driving me to school in the morning. But it was upsetting, because it wasn’t right, and the trades the universe required for us to even have arrived there were unfair; this wouldn’t have been happening had there not been a cemetery containing the putrefying corpse of my dad for us to meet at, or had there not been something the matter with her in the first place, bad enough that she had to seek out Dad, and then me. Our relationship was born from misfortune. Not the best start.

We both had our issues, clearly. But I stood on top of mine like a parade float, and hers – I imagined she kept them somewhere else. In a safe. Underground.

And then there was the more immediate issue that she would soon be on her way in a car that could kill me. Strike that. A car that could travel fast enough for a sudden stop to kill me.

But it’d be fine. It’d have to be fine.

Anything could kill me.

Just get in the damn car, Whitaker. Let her handle the rest. The idea of relinquishing any sense of control over the situation was comforting, maybe, somehow. She’ll be in the driver’s seat. If something happens, then it happens, and I won’t have anything at all to do with it. But I wasn’t sure I even had the capacity to relinquish control of anything; you can’t relinquish something you didn’t have in the first place.