Page 31 of 72 Hours of You

“I’ll drive,” I say, heading toward my black truck.

“Shotgun!”

“There’s literally no one else here.”

Peter jogs backward toward the truck, smiling. “Still. It feels good to win something sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“WOW. DOES THIS THING HAVE an actual CD player?” Peter leans toward the dash.

Before I can stop him, he’s pressing the eject button and examining the CD like it’s an ancient artifact. “Chumbawamba?”

“It’s Chumba-whum-buh. Not Chumba-wham-buh. And ‘Tubthumping’ is a classic.”

“Right. Of course. My mistake. I bet Chumba-whum-buh is right up there with Chopin.” Peter slides the CD back into the player. The tinny British voice comes out of the old speakers, filling the truck with the same notes I’ve heard a thousand times.

“Well, this is very …”

“Fantastic?” I say.

“Upbeat,” he finishes. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a nineties pop girl. You seem more Billie Eilish than … whatever this is.”

“Just because I know when people are going to die, I have to sit around listening to dark, angsty music?”

Peter tenses. “No, I didn’t mean …”

“Oh my god, loosen up,” I say. “I actually do like Billie Eilish. But in here it’s all nineties all the time.”

I nod to the CD case next to his feet. He pulls it up and flips through the pages of plastic inserts. “R.E.M., Britney Spears, 98 Degrees. This thing is like a time capsule.”

“They were my mom’s CDs. This was her truck. My dad kept it in storage and gave it to me when I turned sixteen.” I don’t mention that it was mostly so he could stop driving me around himself.

Peter flips past the Jayhawks and Jimmy Eat World. “Korn? This looks intense.”

I laugh. “Yeah, well, even she had a dark side.”

“She sounds cool,” Peter says.

“She was.” I turn my eyes back to the road. “Even though she was a mom, she still dressed cool, you know? Nothing embarrassing or anything like that, but she’d wear this leather jacket when it was cold and she still wore jeans, even when the other moms were in sweats. And she hated vanilla ice cream. Isn’t that a weird thing to hate? But it’s kind of punk, right? To hate vanilla ice cream? And she used to play ‘Summer Girls’ by LFO for Jules and me when she’d pick us up on the last day of school. Every single year. The lyrics are ridiculous but every time I hear it I still get this giddy feeling like …” I stop talking. I don’t know why I’m telling him this. Mom is not a thing I talk about. Never with Dad and hardly ever with Jules. But it feels good to say the word again. Mom.

“Can I ask you what happened to her?”

The three bloodred scratches across my mother’s sunken, dead face flash before my eyes and I get the urge to jerk the steering wheel into oncoming traffic. I keep my hands gripped at nine and three, my eyes locked on the yellow dashes on the road. “Breast cancer.”

Fourteen

WE GET OFF THE TRAIN AT GRAND CENTRAL and I’m fine. The platform smells like wet socks, and the muggy air feels like it is physically punching its way into my mouth, but I’m fine. I’m so fine, in fact, that I don’t even blink when a man in a tank top and Beats headphones pushes past me and leaves a snail trail of sweat on my arm. I hardly even register a woman in a 1950s hat-and-gloves set, holding four cat carriers and jostling me to the exit. And I remain unfazed by the three twenty-something finance bros loudly googling where they’re going to find “fresh puss at ten a.m.”

Apparently none of this fazes Peter either, because he takes a deep breath of the stale sewage air, smiles, and says, “Did you know that ice cream cones were invented in New York?”

“Get outta town.”

“And pasta primavera and eggs Benedict.”

“And crony capitalism,” I add, helpfully.

“Nah, I think that was Philly. Or maybe England.”

We exit the platform area into the main concourse. It’s still crawling with people but the enormous ceilings and windows give you the illusion of having more space. Like how the TSA gives you the illusion of safety at the airport. This giant dome crammed with NY train people is actually not suffocating because look at the windows! And a terrorist will not unalive you on your red-eye because take off your shoes and remove your laptops from your backpack!