Dreamland

“On your mark, get set, go!” he shouted.

After a single turn, she’d lost sight of him. Two more turns and she couldn’t hear anything but the occasional gust of wind through the dry corn. Another two turns and she hit a dead end. She backtracked quickly. Her heart was going hard, skipping a beat here and there, then trying to compensate, spilling together into a constant thrum. It was too quiet. Even the clouds had stopped moving.

She was seized by irrational fear: what if, somehow, this was all still a part of Shawna McGregor’s dream? What if she had never woken up? What if the conversation with her mom and seeing Co

She knew it was stupid, but she couldn’t shake the idea. It was so bright. She started ru

She didn’t want it to be a dream, though.

She turned a corner and ran straight into Co

“I found you,” he said.

“I found you,” she corrected him. “I guess we tie.” She realized they’d made it to the very center of the maze. The sun was almost directly above them.

If Co

“If I ever needed a place to hide out, I’d come here,” he said, as they wound their way back to the parking lot.

She raised an eyebrow—or tried to. Gollum was teaching her but she hadn’t mastered it yet. “Are you pla

“Think about it! A maze is even better than a moat. It’s like a built-in security system. No one would ever find you.”

“Except for the tourists,” Dea said.

Co

A few miles away from the corn maze, Dea spotted another billboard, this one just after a sign pointing the way to DeWitt: THE RAILROAD DINER: WORLD-FAMOUS MILKSHAKES.

“You hungry?” Co

“I don’t have to be hungry for milkshakes,” she said. “That’s like asking if I feel like breathing.”

They pulled over and got milkshakes (vanilla for him, strawberry for her). The diner looked like it had come straight out of a billion years ago. There was even an old cash register made of brass. The waitress, Carol, who seemed just as ancient as her surroundings, warmed to Co

He made her feel like she belonged, too.

Next up was a fifteen-mile detour to Ohio’s largest rubber ball.

“We’re never go

“It’s the journey, not the destination,” Co

By the time Co

It was after three, and Dea knew they should turn around. But she didn’t want to. She felt fizzy with happiness, like someone had uncorked a giant bottle of soda inside of her. For once, she was glad she didn’t have a real cell phone, except for the crappy pay-as-you-go one she’d bought one winter with the savings she pocketed from scraping off people’s windshields. Her mom didn’t even know about it, which meant that she couldn’t call Dea and bug her to get home.

Miriam owned nothing: no cell phone, no property, no bank account even. She kept all their money in bricks of cash, elastic-banded together, concealed in shoeboxes in her closet, stashed in the passenger seat of the car, camouflaged in a tampon box beneath the bathroom sink. (That was the emergency fund: when even the tampon box was empty, Dea knew, it was time to move.) The money came in spurts, like blood from a new wound, and Dea didn’t ask where she got all of it, like she didn’t ask why Miriam was so afraid and who Miriam thought they were ru

“We’re like wind,” Miriam always used to say, ru

It had never occurred to her that someday Dea might grow up and wish instead to be visible. That she might want a cell phone and friends to call, apps and pictures and customizable ringtones. That was why Dea had bought the phone, even though it was plastic and cheap and she hated to bring it out in public and half the time she forgot to charge it: she wanted to feel like everybody else.

But for once, Dea wanted to do exactly what her mom always talked about: vanish. If no one knew where she was, maybe she wouldn’t have to go back.

“Where to next?” she said. Don’t say home, she tried to telegraph in his direction. Anywhere but home.

Co

She put the car in gear. Her cheeks ached from smiling.

When they reached the outskirts of the city, Dea turned off the highway and onto local roads with no clear sense of where they were going. Houses clumped together, like water beading into a narrow stream: a blur of dingy white Cape Cods and low-rent trailers and patchy yards and garages fitted with old basketball nets. Co

“Let’s stop,” Co

“You want a toaster?” she said.

Co

“Listen to me, Dea,” he said solemnly, like he was about to recite a pledge. “You can never, ever, have too many toasters.”

She laughed. “Freak,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, still smiling, touching his fingers to an imaginary hat.

A dozen folding tables, the kind found in school cafeterias and at cheap weddings, were set out on the lawn in front of 249 Warren. Behind one of them, a girl a few years younger than Dea sat slumped in a lawn chair, punching her iPhone with a finger. Two barefoot kids made circles around the lawn, shrieking, smacking around a Wiffle ball. An overweight woman, sweating through her dark T-shirt, was ma

“Jackpot,” Co

Dea felt a quick lift of happiness, like the soft rise of a moth’s wings in her stomach.

She loved rummage sales—the strangeness of things grouped together that didn’t make sense: children’s clothes next to old smutty paperbacks next to kitchen equipment next to lawn mowers, like a long and glorious sentence full of mixed metaphors. She’d always liked to imagine belonging to a family that dug through its closets and basement and garage once a year, and carted up all the broken and stained and useless things, expelled them like a disease. Dad would complain about giving up his golf clubs; Mom would point out he never played. Little sister and brother would refuse to give up a beloved toy, even though it had long been retired to the bottom of a mothball-smelling trunk, underneath the winter sweaters.