It didn’t take long to get out of Indianapolis. Once you get outside of the city, Indiana is about as bright and shiny as North Korea on Earth Day. The high-beams of Rick’s Chevy poured out into the endless, never changing, darkness before them. Inside the sedan, Rick and Liz’s faces were illuminated by the under-lights of the dashboard and chrome radio.

Being inside the Chevy was like being in a time machine. There wasn’t a computer chip in the whole thing. Rick had kept everything in the classic condition it had been when it was first pressed off of the assembly lines back in the atomic age. When cars were built by people, not machines.

“Cool car,” said Liz.

“Thanks,” said Rick. “The gas millage isn’t great, but it’s real comfy. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”

It was true. It was comfortable. The seats were huge. The front seat was about twice the size of the Ikea futon Liz slept on back in her apartment. It was also about twice as soft. The seat was full of springs and it had a bounce to it. They were covered in real leather that warmed up to the temperature of the body as you sat there. Until now, Liz had never realized just how awful modern cars were.

In the back seat of the car was a blanket and a few pillows. Fast food wrappers and empty soda cans littered the floor.

“So...” Liz said. “You pretty much live in here or what?”

“Something like that,” said Rick. “I’m on the road a lot.”

“Let me guess…” Said Liz, “Bible salesman.”

Rick laughed.

“Nothing so glamorous,” said Rick. “How about you? Is bar tending your life’s ambition?”

Liz laughed.

“No.” Liz said. It was funny to her that Rick still thought she was the bartender. She thought it was even funnier that he thought she had ambitions. “You know, Rick? I haven’t really got a clue what I want to do with life. I have a degree in English. Like what the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t know,” said Rick. “I guess you could be a teacher or something?”

“Sure, if I want to go to school for another two years to get another degree in education.” Liz said. “Then I can wait around for a slot to open up so I can become a teacher’s assistant. After doing that for a year, then I can finally start getting a pay check to start paying off my student loans. Woohoo!”

“Sorry,” said Rick. “I didn’t realize it was such a sore subject.”

“Well, it is.” Liz said. “People your age don’t realize how hard it is to get a job these days. It’s not like back in the old days where you walked into a place a place with a smile on your face and they would just tell you you’ve got great moxie and to go to work. Everything is on the internet these days. Even simple jobs have like two hundred people fighting over them.”

Rick cleared his throat.

“The old days, huh…” Rick pulled a cigarette out of the pack. “People my age…” He took a puff and cracked the window. “With our moxie… wow… moxie…”

Liz was beginning to realize what she had just said. Oh God, she thought, I’m such a drunken idiot sometimes. Why did I say that? He probably going to dump me in the middle of the woods and leave me for dead. She tried to use her powers to see how the situation turned out, but she was too drunk. She was just going to have to wing it.

“I’m sorry, Rick,” said Liz. “I didn’t mean to say you are old. You’re not that old. Definitely in the bone-able range, for sure.” She put a hand on his knee. Guys always like that.

“Oh, the bone-able range!” Rick said as he choked and laughed at the same time. “Thank God for that! I was starting to worry I was too old to be boning anymore. I thought they were going to come take my bone card away.”

Rick and Liz were both bright red in the face and laughing.

God, Rick thought, maybe she’s right… What was he doing with this little college graduate? What was she? Like fifteen years younger than him? He tried not to think about it. She was beautiful and she was hanging out with him. That just had to be enough for now. It’s better than he had been doing in a while.

Life on the road was lonely. Every day, waking up in a different city. Never seeing a familiar face. It wasn’t fair of him to ask Liz to come with him. No one deserved this. No, he thought to himself, she’s an adult, not some kid. She’s perfectly capable of making her own decisions.

Liz kept picking up her phone even though it was dead. It was instinctual. It was like Rick’s cigarettes. Something to keep her hands and her mind busy. But now it was just a black box. With the phone off, Liz felt rather silly swiping at the screen. She had wiped the screen clean with a tissue, and now she didn’t know what to do with it.

“Uh… Rick?”

“Yes?”

“Do you happen to have a phone charger?” Liz asked.

“Of course I do. It’s in the glove box.” He said.

Oh thank God, thought Liz. She opened the glove box and inside she found the phone charger. It was a big black square with two prongs on one end and a plug on the other end she had never seen before.

“What the…” Liz pulled the charger out. “Is this your phone charger?”

“Yeah,” said Rick.

He pulled out the flip phone from his pocket and handed it to her. She hadn’t seen anything like it since she was a little kid.

“How do you live with this thing?” Liz asked.

“Quite well, thank you. That thing lasts for three days before you have to charge it. It’s perfect for being on the road. If you are really thinking about living the traveler’s life, you should get one. They’re the best.”

Liz handed the phone back to him as if it was made of contagious mucus.

“Hard pass,” she said. “So how do you check your Facebook then?”

“Facebook? What’s that?” Rick asked.

“Oh my God? You don’t know what Facebook is?” Liz was trying to think how to explain it to him. “Do you know what social media is? Instagram? Twitter?”

“Ummm…. Is that like email? I got a Hotmail account.” said Rick.

Liz’s eyes were like saucers. Even her parents knew what Facebook was. How could he not know? Did she travel back in time by accident or something?

“I’m just screwing with you,” said Rick, “I know what Facebook is. I work in the entertainment industry. It’s pretty much a requirement.”

Liz was trying to be mad at Rick, but it was pretty funny. He really had her going.

“I have a computer,” said Rick, “a laptop. I go to the coffee shop or the library and use Facebook when I feel like it. I don’t have an MP3 player either. If you want to put on some music though, I have a bag full of tapes in the back seat if you want to put one in.”

Rick’s placement of the bag of tapes had not been on purpose. He had simply moved it off of the passenger seat when Liz got in the car. But putting it in the back had worked out well.

When Liz climbed over the back of the seat to reach for the bag, her butt stuck out in the air only inches from his face. It was a much better show than her retrieval of PBR from the fridge back at the bar. While Liz’s rear might not have been anything to inspire a Sir Mix-a-lot song, its shape was perfectly suited for enticing Rick’s imagination.

Liz went through the bag of cassettes. It was all a bunch of butt rock tapes from the late 80’s and early 90’s. She finally found License to Ill by the Beasties Boys. She slid it into the chrome radio.

At first they were fighting for their rights to party and doing the brass monkey, but by the second time that the boys were promising not to sleep until Brooklyn, Liz was curled up under her jacket and losing herself to the booze, the darkness, and the hum of the engine.

Liz was dreaming.

She was at the beach with her mother. The beach was on Lake Erie near the summer cottage they had when she was a little girl. Liz was making sand castles. She ran down to the water to fill up her bucket and then run back up to where she was building near her mother. It was difficult to run up the beach because the bucket was heavy and it made her little feet sink into the sand.

She had made herself a moat around her castle. She dumped the water into the moat, but it would only sink into the sand to run its way back to the lake. Soon her moat would be full of wet sand. She scooped up the wet sand with both hands and let it drip onto her castle from between her fingers. The drips of wet sand made towers that looked like melted candles.

Liz noticed bubbles coming out of the sand in the moat. She dug her hand into the sand and pulled out a hermit crab. She dropped him into her pail and kept digging. Soon her bucket was half full of crabs who were trying to climb over one another in an attempt to escape. She brought the pale up to her mother who was sitting in a beach chair, reading a book.

“Mommy,” said Liz, “Look at all the crabs!”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Liz’s mother without looking up from her book. Liz tugged at her arm.

“Mom!” Liz cried. “You’re not looking!”

Liz’s mother looked up from her book, but when she did, it wasn’t her face, but that of her father’s, complete with mustache and cigar.

“Shut up, you little brat,” said Liz’s father. “Can’t you see I’m trying to read?”

Liz was in the living room. The broken vase was on the floor. She had broken it. She had to break it. She had seen it in her vision two weeks before. No matter how much she tried to change things, no matter how far away she had tried to run, how she had tried to avoid that vase, she had no choice. She had to break it. It was fate.

Her parents were fighting about her again in the next room. It seemed no matter what Liz did, it was never the right thing. They had already been angry at her for running away. Her father was embarrassed that he had to involve the police in looking for her. He was upset that he now owed the precinct a favor. Liz imagined that most parents would have just been happy to have their daughter back.

Now, Liz had broken the vase. That’s why she had run away in the first place. So she wouldn’t break the vase. But fate had dragged her back kicking and screaming, right into the side of the wobbly end table. Now her parents were arguing whether or not to send her to military academy or to an asylum.

The argument was pointless. She was going to the military academy, she had already seen it. She breaks the vase and her parents send her off to Culver. The future was already set in stone. She was crying. She ran up the stairs to her room. She never got there.

As she tried to run down the hallway towards her door, it began to stretch on into infinity. The more she ran, the longer it got until it was so stretched out and distorted that it no longer resembled a hallway anymore, just some twisted surreal tunnel. Then from the darkness in front of her came Mr. Stranger.

Mr. Stranger was a name she had given him, for he had no name, at least, no name he was willing to tell Liz. Whenever she looked too deep into the future, there he was, waiting for her, blocking her way.

“Liz,” said Mr. Stranger, “Are you lost again?”

“I don’t want to go to military academy,” Liz sobbed.

“You don’t have to,” said Mr. Stranger. “That’s the past, not the future. That already happened. You’re lost again. Look to the west. Look at where the sun sets. That is your future, Liz. That is where you will find your destiny.”