“You’ve been… what?” Holden’s left eye started twitching, like the harbinger of a stroke.

I took a deliberate moment to notice Imogen and Wynonna. “Oh, hey! Were you guys all planning on riding together? I can drive!”

While Wynonna and Imogen exchanged looks, I made sure to wink discreetly at Holden—like this was our plan all along. Holden gave an exasperated sigh, shook his head, and started for the passenger-side door.

“Oh, shotgun!” said Imogen. She beat him to the door. “I have dibs on shotgun!”

“What?” said Holden. “You can’t call shotgun.”

“Why not?”

“Because best friend always gets shotgun!”

“That’s not a rule. The rule is: Whoever calls shotgun gets shotgun. The end. No epilogue, no addendum.”

Wynonna shoved her way between the two of them. Opened the passenger-side door, slid inside, and shut the door behind her.

Holden and Imogen stared at her through the open window, slack-jawed.

Wynonna pressed the automatic window button. It rolled up with a long, intense VUHRRRRRRR.

Then she locked the door.

It was one of those awkward car rides where nobody was talking, the tension was thicker than a bowl of Chunky Campbell’s Soup, and only half of us knew why. The other half—Holden and Imogen—were silently puzzling over the highly unusual behavior of their respective best friends.

Wynonna was brooding like a vampire in the passenger seat.

All I could focus on was how uncool she was being. I’d never seen her with her shit so not together.

I really wanted a moment alone with her. Just to ask her what was going on. I mean, I kinda knew what was going on—but I felt like there was a whole layer beneath the surface that I was missing.

I turned my attention to the road.

Downtown Carbondale walked a fine line between quaint and sketchy with a chance of violent crime. The SIU Power Plant—yes, Southern Illinois University had its own power plant—pumped plumes of smoke into the air like the cove beneath the Piles Fork bleachers where all the skeezy kids vaped. We crossed some allegorical-looking train tracks, passing college apartment complexes that maybe used to be decent, but now they had an eerie Roman Polanski vibe. Past Polanskiville, it was all ancient houses, ancient businesses, with a faint undercurrent of ancient evil. Like a fictional Stephen King town with a dark secret—a sort of Midwest Derry or Castle Rock.

The Amityvale Theater itself was all used-skeleton-colored stone walls, an ominous dark brick tower, and a vertical, Toblerone-shaped sign that read AMITYVALE in a red vintage font—visible on two separate, slanted sides. It was probably impressive in the 1920s—back when flappers were the “cutting edge”—but now it was only impressive in the sense that it was most likely haunted.

I mean, Amityvale? C’mon. You’re not fooling anyone.