Free Destroy All Cars by Blake Nelson

rings, which means my fries are ready. I pay for them and sit and eat a couple. Libby comes and eats some, too. She’s found a girl she knows. The two of them sit across from me, eating fries and chattering about schools and people they might know in common.
    I get bored and decide to walk around. I go upstairs and stand in the main lobby and watch a limousine pull up, gleaming in the cold desert air. There are people in suits standing around, men in “dress” black cowboy boots, women with Botoxed faces. Maybe these are the people my dad came here to network with.
    I think about my mom back at the cabin with my dad. I’m not a huge fan of my dad—I guess that’s pretty obvious. He has a way about him, though. He is good at making people do stuff. Forcing you. Manipulating you. People like him rule the world. Maybe I should be glad. Our family has everything we need.
    I look up at the ceiling of the big main room. It’s designed to look like a Native American lodge, with huge wooden beams, all of them going into the center like spokes on a wheel.
    I miss my mom. I mean, it’s not like she went somewhere. She’s right downstairs every morning when I wake up. But not really. Not totally.
    I walk around more. There are nice carpeted halls on the second floor, leather couches, old photographs of ranches and early settlements. I find two high school girls talking on cell phones. They wear sweatshirts, sweatpants; their hair is pulled back in neat ponytails. They look at their nails while they talk. Boyfriends back home, no doubt. I pass them and go outside, onto the deck. The stars are out. And you can see Mount Bachelor standing in the distance. Silent, god-like, Mount Bachelor. What if, when the polar ice caps melt, the oceans rise so high that the mountains are the only land that’s left on earth? That would be weird. Like only the stuff on those mountains would still be alive, like alpine flowers or certain birds. Gabe says birds can survive anything. They’ve been here longer than any other species. That would be funny if, in the future, aliens came to earth and found this water world, with only a couple tiny islands sticking up, and they moved here and set up floating colonies and lived here for hundreds of years, and then one day a couple aliens decided to explore the ocean and went down there and discovered our abandoned cities. Wow, they’d say in their alien language, someone was here before! All the other aliens would get very excited. There would be TV specials about us. They would have pictures of what they think we looked like. But then the buzz would die down. The average alienwouldn’t care that much. Eventually it would only be the geeky scientist aliens who would think about it. Nobody else would really care. They’d have their own problems.
    It’s cold on the deck so I go back downstairs to the TeenZone. Libby wants to stay and hang out with her new friend. So I slip Black Elk Speaks into my coat pocket and walk home to the cabin without her, which turns out to be a mistake.
    ME ( walking in ): Hey.
    MOM: How was the lodge?
    ME: Okay.
    DAD: Where’s your sister?
    ME: She met some girl she knew.
    MOM: What? You left Libby?
    ME: I didn’t leave her. She met some girl she knew.
    DAD: Where is she now?
    ME: I don’t know. Back at the teen place.
    MOM: You can’t just leave your sister!
    ME: She’s thirteen. She’s fine.
    MOM: It’s too late for her.
    ME: It’s not even ten o’clock.
    DAD: She can’t walk home by herself.
    ME: She met some people. And why can’t she walk home? There’s nobody here but rich people.
    DAD: Don’t start giving us attitude. This is Libby we’re talking about.
    ME: What attitude?
    MOM ( to Dad ): Do you think she’s okay?
    DAD ( to Mom ): I’ll drive over there.
    MOM ( to Dad ): Where do you think she is?
    DAD ( to Mom ): I don’t know. I’ll find her.
    ME: