Calliope laughed. This girl. “Well, my father named me, apparently. That’s pretty much all I know about him. My mom says he named me after a circus instrument, and then ran off with one.” Calliope smiled ruefully, recalling how she’d seen herself on an old circus advertisement in a museum when she was a child, which read, Big Top Calliope, the wonderful operonicon of the muses. She’d imagined her father riding off in a circus carriage, as if he’d gone black and white and disappeared into the past. The past was safer, Calliope had thought. No one could hurt you there. No one could leave you. They were already gone. Later, she’d learned she was also the Greek muse of epic poetry, and although she couldn’t write poetry to save her life, she’d felt better about being a strong woman rather than a mere instrument. “My middle name is Anne though, like St. Anne, mother of Mary. So my mom squeezed a little Catholic in there.”

“Got ya.” Amy yawned. “I’m glad she didn’t name you Martha.”

They traveled in silence after that, and Calliope wondered if Amy had fallen asleep same as Eunjoo, she’d become so quiet. Time passed by with the shrubs and tumbleweeds, in the muted grays of the landscape, usually shades of brown and ocher, now washed out in charcoals, as if they’d gone black and white too, like her father in his imaginary circus. The dashboard flashed. “Dammit,” Calliope muttered under her breath. What had happened? They’d had half a tank just half an hour ago. Had the odometer been wrong? Had they ripped a fuel line? She stared at the dashboard light, afraid of what this meant in the middle of the desert with nowhere to stop.

Amy turned her head toward Calliope without opening her eyes, not lifting herself from the position she’d been sprawled in for the last thirty minutes, spindly legs stretched in front of her like vines growing from the front seat, dirty boots on the dashboard. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re out of gas.”

Amy’s eyes shot open. She sprang forward, dropping her legs and boots to the floorboard with a thud. “What the shit? I thought you said we had enough.” She leaned over the center console. “Completely empty?”

Calliope nodded toward the light beneath the last rung of the fuel gauge. Her voice an apology, she said, “I don’t know what happened.” They should have stopped again when Amy had suggested it.

“Most cars can make it another thirty or forty miles. Did it just turn on?”

“I don’t know,” Calliope admitted, another thing she’d miscalculated, another thing she’d done wrong. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You want to turn around?”