"You really didn't read it, though?"

"The money's too good for some people," Ellie said. "How do you think I got roped into this?"

"I didn't read what it pays either," Ari said, not knowing why he felt this would make him seem any less crazy. "I just want to do it."

Ellie made a sound like a small angry dog, and it took Ari a split second to recognize that she was laughing. "Wow! Okay, how does three thousand a night sound to you? That's what I get, and my only job's to be the girl and absorb all the weird internet attention."

Ari's face contorted itself in a way that made his ears pop and admit the roar of wind from Graham's open window. Within seconds, though, the same part of his brain obsessing over the distance he'd be putting between himself and his job hijacked his mouth. "How often are you doing this, though?"

A gig that paid well only really paid well if you did it regularly, after all. A good afternoon on Church Street only supplemented his pancake and egg diet for so long.

Graham was unfolding a laptop onto his knees. "Right now we're taking two cases a month, but, I mean, we don't always need ghoul support. Sometimes it's, you know-"

"A scam." Wyn was awake.

"Scam's kind of a strong word," Graham said.

"Not if you take this kind of thing seriously, it isn't. How long did you let me sleep?"

"Like, an hour. You zonked out while I was loading the cases.”

"Graham took pics," Ellie said, jerking an accusing thumb toward the van's shotgun seat. "Probably video, too."

The aging steel and plastic in Wyn's seat creaked as he crossed his arms over his chest and one knee over the other. “And you say you absorb all the creepy attention.”

Between the roadtrip chatter and debates over which mix CDs to queue up, the job didn't come up much. Ari allowed that. He wanted to exist in this space where he might actually be making new friends, at least for a while.

It was a beautiful day and the deep green of fields and roadside flowers fed by months of rain seemed to stretch across the entire surface of the Earth. Everyone was easy to talk to, especially since Wyn mostly excused himself from conversation by sticking his head in a book. Which book? It was in one of those sewn book protectors Ari associated with grandmas, so there was no knowing.

Ellie and Graham definitely had a dynamic, and that dynamic was that Graham would provoke Ellie until she threatened (as a joke, Ari assumed) to pull over and roll him down the embankment. And he would do this several times within the same hour, and she wouldn't get tired of it.

Until she did.

"Ari, can you distract him so I can pay attention to the Garmin?"

Graham leaned across the gap between his and Ellie's seats to scrutinize the GPS. "Looks like a straight line on 89 pretty much forever to me. Come on, what's one small detour?"

"Are you ten? You can wait twenty more minutes to eat."

"No I am not and no I cannot." Graham rotated himself so that he could half choke himself with his seatbelt while addressing the back seats. "You guys are hungry, right?"

"I'm good," Wyn said. No surprise there.

Ari had to admit that Graham's campaign to visit a place called Creamy Freeze - which had been going on for at least a quarter of an hour - was working on him. This wasn't entirely due to Graham's impassioned arguments. "I didn't eat breakfast."

Ellie looked up to the van's roof as if pleading for Heaven's assistance. Hamburgers did not drop from the sky. A tinny guitar riff, played very quietly, cut off whatever conversation she was about to have with Creation. "You better pick that up fast, Crackers, before I whip it out the window."

Graham's head disappeared when he bent himself in half to, Ari assumed, go diving in his bag to retrieve his phone. He popped up again with a suspiciously cheery, "Hi, boss." He listened, and Ari did too even if he'd never be able to make a word out. "Okay, that's cool. We're basically there. Wanna meet at Creamy Freeze and give us the update in person?"

"No Creamy Freeze!"

"Yes, Creamy Freeze!" Graham shot back. "Okay. Yeah. Cool. Ten minutes. Byeee."

"I swear he's got this thing bugged," Ellie said.

"You and I both know I'm the one who bugs stuff," Graham said, indicating a small camera in the corner of the windshield, trained on Ellie. Ari hadn't even noticed it. "Anyways, our spot's not ready yet and there's some, y'know, friction about that, so we're regrouping. At the Creamy Freeze."

"What's Creamy Freeze exactly?” Ari asked, for no other reason than everyone seemed way more worried about that than about work.

"Roadside burgers and ice cream with huge portions," Graham said, his tone almost dreamy. "Also, extremely photogenic."

"You mean tacky," Wyn said.

"Potato, tomato."