Killer on the Road

TWO AND A half sandwiches in her kangaroo pocket now, Harper finally just decides to stand, hoof it. She's got the glow-bracelet on her wrist, right? Doesn't that make her practically bulletproof?

Half a dozen steps later, another set of tires crunches in behind her.

Harper cringes, doesn't need any more salvation, fuck you very much. But, at the same time, she knows she probably should load up on water, if there's water to be had. And maybe a handful of tissues too, since she's now committed to walking away from all indoor bathrooms.

She turns, her most pitiful face on like a mask, and it's-it can't be. Cropped-short orange hair in the passenger seat, a perfect white smile over the steering wheel. Kissy and Jam? Who are supposed to be in Yellowstone for the whole summer, chasing wolves and tagging bears?

Harper holds her arms out so they can see how flabbergasted she is, how out of the blue this is, and then she holds them there a bit longer, shoulder high, her face trying to maintain the same shocked expression. But she's processing now: if they were in town for the day, for the weekend, for whatever, then . . . they were in stealth mode? not looking her up? avoiding her?

What kind of bullshit is that supposed to be?

Jam slithers up from the passenger side of the blocky-old four-door used-to-be-white Forest Services looking truck-Park truck, Harper's just now registering-crosses his arms over the roof and flops his head over to the side like to see Harper better, or slower, make this moment last.

"We leave for two months and you're already sacrificing yourself to the interstate gods?" he says.

"Harper!" Kissy yells from behind the wheel, tapping the horn three times in celebration, the third time long and loud.

Harper has to smile.

Her hands thrust back into her sweatshirt pocket, she sashays up to Jam's side-short for 'James' since junior high-and leans in to hug him, reaches past him to hold hands with Kissy, which has been her name since forever, for obvious reasons.

"Figured you'd be pregnant already," Harper says to her.

"Not for lack of trying," Jam says around the back of his hand and not even close to a whisper, and Kissy hits him in the hip with the side of her fist.

"There's bears up there!" Kissy says, about Yellowstone.

"Bears and pic-a-nic baskets, yeah," Harper says, looking down the ramp to a clump of three choppers riding in formation. "Y'all are going back?" she says into the cab real casual, trying not to load it with anything.

"We swung by your house," Jam says, quieter, shrugging it true. "Your mom was, um, redecorating?"

"She'll be moving on to my room next," Harper says, rolling her top lip in between her teeth. "Now that she can do what she wants with it, I mean."

"I'm sorry," Kissy says, batting her eyes like she's a deer in a Disney movie. The bad thing about Kissy, which is maybe the good thing too, is that she's put together just like the cartoon Pocahontas in the movie Harper took Meg to last week: impossible cheekbones, bustline that won't quit, shampoo commercial hair. Never mind that she's not enrolled at Wind River, or anywhere. On all her applications she checks the ethnicity box she has to draw in, "Cherokee Princess." It kind of fits, sick as it is. It makes her everybody's grandmother, just, when that grandmother was hot.

"You look good," Harper says to her. "Pre-pregnancy suits you."

"This is all I've got cooking in me," Kissy says back, extending her middle finger slow like a bun rising in an oven.

"I've missed this," Harper says. "Been kind of a long summer."

"Tell them where you went looking for her next," a voice calls over the backseat, even though the backseat's . . . empty?

Harper lowers her eyebrows to Kissy about this but is already stepping back to look through the rear window.

Dillon, kicked back across the bench seat, his down-at-the-heel boots chocked up on the passenger side armrest.

"We thought y'all might be . . . back together," Jam says, as apology.

"And he's going back to the Park with you now?" Harper says.

"I was worried about you," Dillon says. "I know how you can be. I mean, if anybody does."

"You fixed my mom's couch, didn't you?" Harper says to him, disgusted.

"I did," Jam says, raising his hand to take this heat. "We didn't have loverboy with us yet then."

"That's one name for hi-" Harper says, looking up the ramp and catching almost immediately on the side-profile of her mom's pale Buick, cruising out from under the bridge like she gave the car some pedal a quarter mile back, is just riding that out in silent mode.

Harper rolls to the truck, flattens herself against it, and, easy as anything, Dillon slips the door open, pulls her in, his hand to the jut of her right hip, his other hand guiding her head below the level of the window.

"She's stopping, she's stopping . . ." Kissy announces, tight to the rearview, her foot revving the engine even though they're not in gear.

"Shit shit shit," Jam says, bouncing in his seat, drumming one hand on the outside of the door.

"Go already!" Harper says from the floorboard of the backseat.

"She'll know," Dillon says, and then kicks the door open decisively, takes one step out into the grass, and lets loose with a harsh arc of pee, leaning his whole body back from it.

Halfway through, his staged emergency over, he looks up like just seeing the Buick up there. He turns to it, waves big, probably some other part of him waving as well, and Harper's mom puts her foot to the gas now. When Dillon leans back in, breathing hard with excitement, Kissy passes a baby wipe back to him.

"You can just pee any time like that?" Jam says, impressed. "Never knew that about you."

"Full of piss and vinegar, my mom always said," Dillon says, leaning back to zip up. "That's half-true, anyway."

"You could have faked it," Harper says. "She can't see detail that fine all the way from up there."

"That fine?" Dillon says after a beat.

He balls the wipe up, tosses it into the grass.

"Listen, thanks," Harper says to Kissy and Jam, her voice ramping up to goodbye-no way does she need to be taking any road trips with her ex, thank you-"but y'all probably need to be getting back to-"

"Ho," Jam says, his hand cupping the side mirror, holding it steady against the engine's vibrations. "You weren't the only rabbit hiding in this ditch, were you?"

All of them look back, and, goddamnit: it's Meg, standing from the drainage part of the ditch she'd evidently ducked down into at the last moment, probably after sneaking out the backseat of their mom's Buick at the gas station-oh, of course: she saw the Park truck, knew it from Kissy and Jam stopping by, and . . . shit. Here she is, right where she should never be.

She raises a hand hi, her smile sheepish, seed heads floating all around her.

"Caught," Kissy says, and before Harper can say anything the truck is reversing up the down-ramp, one tire on the shoulder, one on the blacktop, Dillon standing on the running board, his arm wrapped around the window post as easy as anything. Which Harper kind of hates, since it's kind of precisely what she used to love about him-how he doesn't have to think about complicated dangerous scary stuff, just does it like it's the most natural thing ever. In another era he would have stepped up onto a moving train just the same, never had to look down at tracks or the big steel wheels or anything.

Kissy stops right alongside Meg.

"What the hell?" Harper says to her.

Meg shrugs, her lips covering her new braces.

"Mom thinks you're sleeping in the backseat, still?" Harper goes on, trying to make her eyes hot and mad, not about to cry from seeing Meg.

"You broke my plate too," Meg says with a shrug, and Harper has to concentrate to keep all these plates spinning in her head. But then it slows enough for her to see it: the one Meg got off that infomercial because the dog on it looked like Sheba, her dog that had got parvo two summers ago. Harper had camped in the backyard with her and Sheba for four nights until . . . until.

"Shit," Harper says, and reaches through the window to pull Meg's head to her shoulder. "Shit shit shit, girl. I'm sorry."

"I tried to put it together, but Mom-Mom-" Meg says, which is the last thing Harper hears before the world becomes sound and stinging gravel: a shiny Kenworth's taken the left onto the ramp fast to keep its momentum, really dive down onto 80, but that means it's riding the bright white line of the shoulder. The one their truck is straddling.

The Kenworth's air horn opens, splitting the afternoon in two, filling all their heads with instant panic, with certain death, and then Kissy straightens her arms against the steering wheel and stomps the pedal in.

For a moment, a lifetime, the truck stands there on its one spinning tire, Jam screaming, his left hand pushing up into the headliner like that can possibly save him, that Kenworth's grill filling all their mirrors, its horn filling all their heads, but then the Park truck's one spinning tire catches and they bolt forward, and it doesn't...