Free Adverbs by Daniel Handler

said, and led the way. “You’re too drunk to drive.” She clapped her hands like she used to do every birthday when the candles arrived in a halo of light, and her dwindling friends sang the same old song. “I haven’t been behind the wheel in forever. Hooray!”
    Hooray. We were outside in the weird afternoon, damp and hard to breathe in. Some seagulls from someplace were eating fried chicken that the casino had thrown away, and up near the spiraling clouds I saw some other kind of bird flap against the wind only to go the opposite direction. Lila took the keys.
    “Come on!” she cried. “Come with me!”
    The same album was on, of course, from the giddy ride up, and I drummed my fingers against the window as Lila threw us into gear. “You don’t know what it’s like,” said the singer, who had probably done worse things than wrap Adam’s seeping wrists with towels left over from Lila’s mother. “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody the way I love you.” The original artists were a bunch of grinning white men, but the version Lila and I listened to was by a woman who made the whole thing fierce and wise. I turned it up and let it speak. I’d spent my life driving around my city with Lila while the pop music told us what was happening and what it was like, and never wished I was doing anything else. We merged to the bigger road and flew south, the winter weather getting crankier around us as we sangthe song together. “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody the way I love you,” and we retraced our woodsy steps down the only road back. We filled up the car without paying in Bainbridge, which is getting harder and harder to do, the gullible men hunted to extinction, or maybe hiding in difficult parts of the globe. Lila spun the wheel around each corner as the album ended again, but even this turned out to be a wrong dream. The girls don’t win on Super Bowl Sunday, no matter how the game goes.
    The Jewish people are not islanders, except Manhattan and its many bridges of escape, its secret underground railroads and its taxis that must take you anywhere you want by law. We prefer the mainland, as we have never been able to leave someplace easily. We linger in the entryway at the end of my parents’ dinner parties, and we clutter up the aisles of the synagogue, and the bribes at the border don’t work, and we end up surrendering our shoes and boarding the train. No one has fixed this, this plague thrown down upon us, and when we turned the last corner Lila threw on the brakes for the mass of traffic stopped on the road to the ferry. All the red lights of automobiles stretched out like a holiday I didn’t celebrate. “What’s going on?” I called over to the guy in the rusty sedan.
    He rolled his window down too. “There’s no way across,” he said. “The last ferry’s canceled, is what I heard anyway. I’m trying to hear on the radio. It’s an emergency, I guess, but nobody knows what to do.”
    “There must be someone who knows,” I said. I got out of the car with bourbon bravado and gave Lila a thumbs-up.
    “Come back,” she said.
    “The ticket booth guy,” I said, pointing down the red light district. “He’ll know something. I’m going to walk there and see.”
    “I mean,” Lila said, and wiped at her eyes without knowing it. “I mean, come back after that. Don’t fall in love with the ticket guy and leave me here in the car.” There was a noise above us like an airplane zoom, but it was getting too dark to see. People started laying on the horn, braying like bad geese in a panic. “I am here,” Lila said with a trembly smile. Our driver’s ed teacher had told us that’s what the horn should mean. Not Move along, buddy or I am displeased but I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!
    “I will come back,” I said to her, shut the door, and ran down the asphalt to the booth where they took your money. A woman in sweaty overalls was already