Free You Are Here by Jennifer E. Smith Page A

things he missed about her. “Very smart.”
    Peter opened his mouth, but Dad scraped back a chair and sat down again across the table, giving him a long look.
    “She didn’t feel like she had to go running off to see the world,” he said, bowing his head to examine the tablecloth. He used his fingernail to chip at a crusted piece of ketchup left over from last night’s dinner. “Her life was here. She was happy here .”
    “It’s not that I’m un happy here,” Peter said quietly. “It’s just that there are other things, other places …”
    There was a long silence, interrupted only by the dripping of the kitchen sink and the hum of the air-conditioning from the next room. Finally, Dad shook his head, frustrated, and stood up to leave. He tipped the contents of his coffee mug into the sink, tried twisting the faucet off again, then grabbed his sunglasses and hat from the counter. Peter watched all this with a sort of detached fascination, aware that something had shifted between them, an opening of something that perhaps should have been left closed.
    Dad had a hand on the back door when he turned around once more. His eyes flicked across the room, taking in the drab green curtains and the faded floor tiles, the fraying tablecloth and his improbable son.
    “She wasn’t happy here in spite of being smart, you know,” he said. “She was happy here because of it. She was smart enough to know a good thing.”
    “Then I guess she was smarter than I am,” Peter said, his voice barely audible. The words emerged almost before he could think to stop them, and it was obvious by the way the door slammed that Dad had heard him loud and clear.
    Later that morning, when Peter pulled the blue car out to the end of the driveway, his hands were shaking. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing, only that it felt like it was already too late to take it back. And as he drove deeper into the state of New York—moving so quickly along the well-known map routes that it almost felt like falling—his mouth was dry and chalky with the very real fear that at any moment a police car would flip on its lights and peel out after him.
    He knew that if it weren’t for Emma, he probably wouldn’t have made it very far. It simply wasn’t in his nature, this tendency toward flight, this ability to break the rules without a second thought. No matter what he told himself, no matter how much he’d like to believe he’d have made it all the way to Gettysburg, in reality, he probably would have only stopped for pizza a few towns over, wandered to the farthest corners of the county, maybe waited until it was dark out before slinking back home to accept his punishment.
    But then his phone had begun to ring, and the trip had suddenly changed from something meandering and lonely and spiteful into something more purposeful, an unlikely adventure with Emma, a journey filled with incredible possibilities. It was no longer just an afternoon jaunt. It was an expedition. It was a voyage.
    It was unlike anything he’d ever done before.
    All afternoon Peter tried not to imagine what Dad’s reaction would be when he found out. After the first fifty miles he stuck a Post-it note over the clock on the dashboard, because all he could think about was the rapidly approaching hour when his father would arrive home from work to discover an empty house and a missing car. And it wasn’t until five o’ clock came and went, and the sky fell a shade darker, and the rest stop grew closer, and the phone in his pocket failed to ring, that Peter was struck with a new worry. That perhaps his dad had noticed that he wasn’t there, and just didn’t care enough to do anything about it.
    But for the moment, at least, he was on his way, and he distracted himself by thinking about all the landmarks he’d always wanted to visit, not just the battlefields—which stretched up and down the coast like a scar across the land—but all the other things too: