Amy & Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson Page A

we turn around and find an interstate? And call your mother and tell her exactly where we are? Because I’m not feeling so good about this anymore. I think we might have found the Highway to Hell. We really might be in an AC/DC song at the moment.” I looked up and met his eyes, then looked right back down again. “What do you think we should do?” he asked.
    “I think …,” I said. I looked down at Barb’s phone number and thought about the road we’d just driven on. I thought about facing more of it. Much more of it—according to Barb, at least eight more hours on Highway 50 before we would make it to the interstate in Utah. But to my surprise, it didn’t bother me. Now that I knew why we weren’t seeing any cars or people—that we hadn’t actually entered some kind of Lost -esque purgatory—I was much more okay with it than I had been before. “I think we should keep going,” I said. Roger sighed and gripped the wheel, and then let it go. “I mean, time-wise, it doesn’t make sense to go back,” I continued.
    “But what if something happens?” he asked. “I mean, normally I stick with a road and hope it gets better, but I don’t know if I can handle eight more hours of that. Do you know how to change a tire?” I shook my head. “Me neither. And despite what Barb says, I don’t want to have to rely on her brother-in-law in case we have car trouble in what literally seems to be the middle of nowhere.”
    “But we’d have to go back two hours to get on the interstate anyway,” I pointed out. “And there are other people driving this road. It’s an American highway. It’s not like we’re in the outback or something.”
    “No,” said Roger, starting the car. “But we are on the most depressed road in the country.”
    “Loneliest,” I said. “There is a difference.”
    He looked over at me. “We’re doing this?” he asked. And for the first time since the trip began, it felt like we were doing something. The two of us, making a choice, taking a leap, together.
    I nodded. “We’re doing this.”
    Roger gave me a small smile. “Well, then,” he said, pulling out of the gas station. “Let’s hit it.”
    I glanced back and saw Barb standing in the doorway, watching us. On impulse, I waved to her, and she waved back, and I looked back at her small figure until we turned a corner and she was gone from view.
    Barb had been telling the truth, and Fallon ended almost as quickly as it had begun. As we left, there were signs warning that there would be no more “gas or services” for a hundred miles, and to make sure we were prepared. I saw Roger frown as he read that, but he kept going, and we were back on Highway 50.
    We drove. Time seemed to pass a little differently when there was nothing to mark how far you had come, or what you were heading to. I would look at my watch, thinking an hour had passed when it had been five minutes. Or I would catch the car’s clock and realized forty-five minutes had gone by in what I would have sworn was fifteen. Now that I knew what to expect from this road, it wasn’t so stressful. There were still moments when the sheer aloneness of it all would cause me to have a momentary panic. But then it would subside, and I would look out the window, take in the view, and feel myself calming down.
    Maybe it was because I’d never really seen anything like it before. But even though it was scary and isolated, the scenery out the window was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was just stunning. I could see much more of the world than I was used to. It was like someone had opened the pages of a pop-up book, where the pop-up was our car, and everything else all around us was totally flat. It was sunny, but not squint-inducing, and Roger had since reclaimed his sunglasses. The sky was a bright, clear blue, and the few clouds that filled it seemed too picturesque to be real. There were mountains in front of us, way off at the horizon, and we never seemed