Free Amy & Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson Page B

mother will understand if we’re a day late.”
    I wasn’t so sure about that, but I nodded. “So where should we head?” I asked. “I picked Yosemite. Where do you want to go?”
    “Well,” Roger said, glancing up at me for a moment, then back down at the map, and flipping to the page for Colorado. “It looks like if we get on the interstate in Utah, and follow that through Colorado, we’ll hit Colorado Springs.”
    “Pretty close,” I said. It wasn’t, exactly, but it was close-ish. I looked up at him, surprised that he would want to go someplace he’d already been. “Is that where you want to go?”
    “Well, it might make sense,” he said, not looking at me but fiddling with the volume on the iPod. “We’ll definitely have a place to crash, free. And I can show you around the campus, see which of my friends are around….” He said this last part very quickly.
    “Sure,” I said, turning the pages back to Nevada. “That’s fine with me.”
    “Great,” he said, looking incredibly relieved. “So, Highway 50?” he asked. “Shall we?”
    “Let’s,” I said, nodding, and Roger signaled and pulled back on the road.

    After two hours, we realized something was wrong. The highway had switched from a four-lane road to a two-lane road at some point, with one lane going in each direction. But that in itself wasn’t worrying, as we’d encountered several stretches of those near Yosemite. What was different was that suddenly there just wasn’t … anything. The road stretched out ahead of us, a straight line extending as far as I could see. There were mountains in the distance in front of us and mountains in the distance behind us, but mostly there was just a huge, open, deserted landscape, cut down the center by the two-lane highway. And nothing else. The flatness of it was a big change from the winding mountainous roads near Yosemite. There were what looked like scrub brushes on the side of the road. I found it hard to believe that only a few hours ago, I’d been surrounded by pine trees.
    We continued to drive, and I noticed that Roger was sitting up a little straighter, looking around as well. There was just nothing . No gas stations, no mini-marts, no fast-food restaurants. And there were almost no other cars. Occasionally there would be one behind us, but it would inevitably pass us. It wasn’t like there needed to be a passing lane—you could see ahead of you for what looked like miles. Very occasionally a car or semi came roaring up the opposite lane. But in two hours, we’d only seen about three other vehicles.
    “Um,” I said when I couldn’t take it any longer. “Is it just me, or is this kind of strange?”
    “Very,” said Roger. His expression was troubled, and it made me realize for the first time how cheerful he normally looked.
    “Should we …,” I started. I looked out at the road, which seemed like it just continued on, more of the same, for miles. “Should we turn around?” My heart sank a little at the thought of having to retrace our steps, lose those two hours, and still not be where we wanted to be.
    “I don’t know,” Roger said. He was sitting up very straight now, both hands on the wheel, and his brow was furrowed. We drove without speaking for a while, just the sounds of Roger’s mix playing. Finally he said, “Look, we’ll have to hit a town soon, right? And once we do, we can go from there.”
    “Okay,” I said, figuring that he had to be right. Civilization hadn’t totally disappeared. At some point, we would meet up with a highway town. We had to.
    An hour later we hit a town.
    I had never in my life been so excited to see a gas station. It was a tiny little place, two pumps and a mini mini-mart. We pulled in, and I used my mother’s card to pay for the gas. As Roger filled up, he told me what he hadn’t wanted to tell me before—that we’d actually been getting pretty low, and if we hadn’t come upon this town of Fallon, Nevada, when we did, we