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

to be getting any closer to them. But I didn’t mind. They just added to the picture—how I’d imagined the desert looking, even though I probably wouldn’t have been able to put it into words until now. And even the isolation was beginning to seem kind of cool—the shadow our car made was the only thing on the road. It was like the two of us were getting to see something nobody else was, and something that not many other people had seen.
    After an hour, my butt beginning to hurt from sitting in the same position, I kicked off my flip-flops and placed one foot on the dashboard, then the other, looking over at Roger to see if he was bothered by this. But he didn’t seem to be. He just looked over at me and gave me a small smile before turning back to the road. He’d put on cruise control, and it looked a little strange to see both his legs bent at the same angle, feet flat on the car’s mat, like the car was driving itself into the endless horizon. I slid down a little farther in the seat and looked out the window.
    We drove. Just outside a mini-town called Middlegate, we passed an enormous cottonwood tree that had hundreds—or thousands—of shoes dangling from it, casting shadows on the highway. Roger slowed down to look at it—which was easy to do, since there were no cars behind us. “You know, I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said, looking at the tree.
    “Go for it,” I said, looking at the sheer oddness of the spectacle, all these sneakers and shoes and boots, joined by their laces and tossed over the branches. The car slowed even more, and I thought Roger was going to stop and do it. But then he shook his head. “It’s probably pretty wasteful,” he said. But I noticed him looking back at the tree in the rearview mirror as we sped up again.
    About half an hour after the shoe tree, I made Roger pull over so that I could take a picture, and I realized that there was no way to ever capture the entire landscape. So I turned in a circle, taking a picture in every direction, knowing that was the only way I could come close to capturing what it looked like. I lowered my camera and stood still for a moment, just taking in the silence. Even though it probably should have been scary, standing by the side of a deserted desert highway, it wasn’t. It felt strangely peaceful.
    There were no other cars on the road. Just the sound of the wind, and the motor idling, and through his open window, the faint clicking sounds of Roger making another mix. I closed my eyes and let the wind whip my hair around my face, letting out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.

We’re on the road to nowhere. Come on inside.
—Talking Heads
    When we reached Eureka, one of the little mini-towns, it started to get dark. We hadn’t stopped to eat dinner—partly because there didn’t seem to be anywhere to stop and get dinner, but mostly because Roger seemed to want to get across Highway 50 as quickly as possible. We loaded up on more snacks at another little gas station mart, and I added some granola bars and trail mix this time, feeling like we should have something that was closer to real food than, say, Fritos.
    We headed back on the highway, the sunset beginning with a line of pink at the bottom of the horizon, and then slowly taking over the whole sky. The car’s shadow was lengthening far in front of us, and I leaned my head back and took in the sunset.
    “Amy?” Roger asked. I looked over to see that he was playing with the various buttons and levers around the steering wheel. “I don’t know what happened—the lights came on automatically last night. Maybe I turned that off….”
    He was right; it was dark enough now that the headlights should have come on. “Let me see,” I said, looking over to see, but soon realizing I wasn’t going to be able to get close enough with my seat belt on. I unbuckled it and leaned over to Roger’s side, fully aware of how close together we now were. “Um,” I said. I