Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas Page A

You’d like to get stolen, wouldn’t you?
    We drove. It was black and starless. Even in my stupor I was careful to memorize the route, the exact roads taken, the billboards and landmarks passed, because I needed to chart with precision any venture that took me away from the Town. It was bolstering to know the details of my whereabouts outside a place that was not anywhere. I had my backpack which held the drugstore notebook sticky with glue and shreds of maps; as soon as there was light to see by I would sketch in a new one, the one I was drawing in my head, fat black lines between stars-for-towns dipping across blue lines for rivers and the van itself a bright red circle flying down the page, destined for locations I had only seen on other maps.
    I must have slept. The van still throttled along but now everything was steeped in glare and the waxing heat of midmorning. There were mountains on our right and the road reached ahead into a little valley with colors more vivid than any I had witnessed at home: dazzling aquas and limes, rich muddy reds, the gleamy transparent silver of the air itself. It was like watching a movie. The gray-scale filter I was used to had been lifted clean.
    Where are we? I asked Squinch. He had his head on my thigh and was smoking with his eyes closed.
    I don’t know. Every highway on earth looks the same, he added mournfully, as you will soon discover.
    I learned that these pirates were plagued by their own special sort of illness. The only foods they could stand to eat were potatoes and toasted bread products. They got nauseous at the mention of vegetables or anything that came from an animal. Instead of eating they plied their stomachs with stay-awake medicine. On the floor of the van, spilled coffee had soaked into little wax packets and powder-flecked ziplocks. All four boys, I noticed, were twitching constantly, glancing around with fretful eyes. This agitation made me feel closer to them. Their translucent skin, the dried sputum at the corners of their mouths, and the way their shrunken muscles hung as if ready to come off the bone meant they were nothing like the normal people I’d grown up with. I started laughing from the pleasure of being among people who had something wrong with them. Squinch looked at me suspiciously, maybe thinking I was crazy because I laughed at nothing but was so quiet the rest of the time. I assumed he had seen plenty of lunatics in his travels and would prefer them, in their illness, to the lackluster of the healthy sane.
    The night sky was lanced by lightning, shards of wind. We waited on the thunder in the asphalt lot behind a truckstop cafeteria and the boys placed wagers (size of storm, duration of storm, what particular shit might get fucked up by storm). Innocent rapture crinkled their snouts. The water hammered dents in the roof of the van. Squinch jumped out and dragged me with him into the soak, dancing off-balance, threatening to relieve my arm of its socket.
    In the men’s room we dripped and shivered. He lifted me onto the sink—the gun-mouth faucet at the small of my back—and hoisted my legs around him, gnawing my collarbone, snortingand giggling. He pinched my breasts between his fingers and said, Love of Christ they’re so little!
    Cold beads of humiliation sprang up on my cheeks; I kept my eyes on the ceiling.
    But then your nipples, he went on in a surgeon’s voice, are the longest I ever saw.
    Holding him there, bracing my leg muscles so he wouldn’t fall, I calculated the distance I had traveled from home.
    He clawed at the buttons of his shirt. This is my heart, he instructed, pressing me to listen against his damp chest. I felt the ridges meet my cheek: knobby, corrugated flesh.
    I drew back, forgetting not to breathe, and gagged at the urine waft. What’s that?
    Well, love, it’s a little scar, you see. Thick and bruise-colored, a crosshatch of notched lumps, it stretched from sternum to armpit. A frayed black thread poked out