You Are Here by Jennifer E. Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

unlike the one he’d seen Emma drive off in just yesterday morning.
    This one had shown up a couple of months ago, discovered on the side of the highway by some kids a few miles outside of town. Peter always wondered about the stories behind these abandoned cars, left like orphaned children on country roads. Most of the ones that came in were here on a more temporary basis—someone ran out of gas or collected one too many parking tickets, and the car was towed in to wait until its owner showed up to reclaim it—but the lengthier residents of this little parking lot always fascinated him. He imagined one day being the kind of person who was so accustomed to life on the road that leaving a car behind—to break up the monotony, to get a change of scenery, to hitch a ride and feel a different sort of vehicle surge beneath you—was just one more story to add to an ever-growing repertoire.
    He walked past the minivan and toward the convertible, running a hand along its hood. The sky to the north had turned an angry purple now, and the air felt charged and ready. Peter looked over at the house, and the empty windows of the kitchen gazed back at him. He jiggled the handle on the convertible, but the door remained shut tight, and though he knew about the drawer full of keys in his dad’s desk, he pulled his library card from his back pocket and slid it down into the groove between window and door—a move he’d learned from a book, though he doubted it would work on a more reliable car—and the lock sprang open.
    Peter didn’t have a car of his own. His driver’s license, which he’d gotten just less than a year ago, was more or less decoration, permanently stuffed into the depths of his wallet. He’d learned to drive on his dad’s squad car and had since seen very little of the road. But still, he liked to sit out here on certain gray afternoons, facing down the house and the sky as if in challenge, his foot poised above the gas pedal, his hands resting on the wheel, just a key turn away from motion and distance and velocity.
    He sat down now on the scarred white leather of the driver’s seat and closed the door as the rain started up, sweeping heavily over the car. Peter leaned his head back and closed his eyes and listened to the sound, like a thousand drummers attacking their instruments at once, but hollow and faraway and somehow comforting.
    He’d always considered himself a wholly practical person, dependent on numbers and facts and statistics. But logical or not, there was something about sitting inside these motionless cars, these vehicles without destination or purpose, that always stilled his busy mind long enough for him to think about his mother.
    Peter didn’t wish for his life to be different in the far-reaching, deeply hopeful way that others often do, and he rarely imagined what things would be like if she were still alive. How could he? She was somewhere beyond his memory, a hypothetical answer to the rhetorical question of his life.
    But his dad had never attempted to discuss her absence other than to occasionally announce—with a sense of resigned finality—that “bad things just happen sometimes.” Even when he was very little, Peter had absorbed this information, had embraced it by the time he was five, hated it at seven, welcomed it again at ten, and rebelled against it at twelve. Now that he was nearly seventeen, it had become simply the statement it was: a chain of words that had dictated much of his father’s life, and as a result his own.
    He knew enough to realize that when she died giving birth to him all those years ago, a part of his father must have died as well. He understood this to be the way these things happen, the scripted etiquette of sudden death: the grieving widower, the crying baby, the rain falling across the freshly dug grave site. Peter had seen it a million times in the movies, but it bore such little resemblance to what was at stake now—to what amounted to his