The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 by Joe Hill Page B

motel TV but at her. “Let’s turn it off?”
    Who are you?
he does not bother to ask.
    Calmly, he becomes aware that the girl he loves has exited the room. Usually when this sensation comes over him, it means she’s fallen asleep. Tonight she is sitting up in bed, eyes bright, very wide awake. Her eyes in most lighting are hazel; tonight they are the brightest green. As if great doors had been flung open onto an empty and electrically lit room.
    The Joshua tree “thinks” in covert bursts of activity:
    Â 
Oh, I have made a terrible mistake.
Oh, please get me out of it, get me out of it, send me home.
    Â 
    â€œThe headache,” she calls the odd pressure at first. “The green headache.”
    â€œPsychosis,” at 4 a.m., when its power over her crests and she lies awake terrified. “Torpor” or “sluggishness” when it ebbs.
    Had you told her,
The invader is sinking its roots throughout you, tethering itself to you with a thousand spectral feelers
, who knows what she would have done?
    Â 
    The next day they wake at dawn, as per their original plan: to start every day at sunup and navigate by whim. They go north on 247, with vague plans to stop in Barstow for gas. The girl’s eyes are aching. Partway across the Morongo Basin, she starts to cry so hard that the boy is forced to pull over.
    â€œForget it,” she says.
    â€œForget what?”
    â€œIt. All of it. The seafaring stuff—I can’t do it anymore.”
    The boy blinks at her.
    â€œIt’s been four days.”
    But her lips look blue, and she won’t be reasonable.
    â€œLeave me here.”
    â€œYou don’t have any money.”
    â€œI’ll work. They’re hiring everywhere in town, did you notice that?” A job sounds unaccountably blissful to the girl. Drinking water in the afternoon. Sitting at a desk.
    â€œWhat? What the hell are you talking about?”
    The boy scowls down at his arm, flipped outward against the steering wheel. She keeps talking to him in a new, low monotone, telling him that she loves the desert, she loves the Joshua trees, she wants to stay. Dumbly he rereads his own tattoo:
Ever unfixed.
For some reason he finds that he cannot quite blame the girl for ruining things. It’s the plan he hates, their excellent plan, for capsizing on them.
    The crumbly truth: the boy imagined that he’d be the one to betray the girl.
    â€œAndy, I’m sorry. But I know that I belong here.”
    â€œO.K., just to be clear: When you say ‘here,’ you mean this parking lot?” The sedan is parked outside Cojo’s Army Surplus and Fro-Yo; it’s a place where you can purchase camo underwear and also a cup of unlicensed TCBY swirl. “Or do you mean this?” He waves his arms around to indicate the desert.
    Had they continued, just a short distance northwest of Yucca Valley they would have reached the on-ramp to I-15 North and, beyond that, the pinball magic of the tollbooths, that multiverse of possible futures connected by America’s interstate system.
    For the next two hours they fight inside the car.
    Round clusters of leaves shake loose in front of her eyes, greeny white blossoms. If she could only show him the desert in her imagination, Angie thinks, the way she sees it.
    When it becomes clear that she’s not joking, the boy turns the car around. Calls Cousin Sewell in Pennsylvania, explains their situation. “We want to stay awhile,” he says. “We like it here.”
    Sewell needs to know how long. They’ll have to put the car on some conveyance, get it back to Pennsylvania.
    â€œIndefinitely,” the boy hears himself say. Her word, for what she claims to want.
    They decide to pay the weekly rate at the motel. They go for walks. They go for drives. Her favorite thing seems to be sitting in a dry wreck of a turquoise Jacuzzi they discover on the edge of town, some luckless homesteader’s