Here for a Good Time

Three strangers attempt to out-run the killer hunting them on Interstate 80.

HERE FOR A GOOD TIME by Kade Dishmon

If the bar’s security camera had been working, this is what it would’ve shown:

A night-black parking lot, the asphalt wet with rain-soaked light. The bar’s unassuming facade. There are no flags plastering the outside, no political signs. But the two figures huddled near the entryway are laughing as their kisses map mouths, hands, necks, laughing like it doesn’t matter if anyone sees them. Here, it doesn’t. This place is safe.

The world is not.

The door swings open and a man steps—staggers—outside. He’s too drunk to drive, but it won’t matter soon.

Raindrops darken his sleeves within seconds. He fumbles for his keys, surveys the lot. It’s late, but cars line up like crooked teeth; the parking lot a jaw ready to bite down. Three a.m. is a lonely hour anywhere else, but here is one of the few places that it isn’t. He casts one last goodbye glance back at the bar, its windows fogged with heat. These queers are here for a good time and a long time, if they get to pick both. Which car is his? Not the Subaru. Not the Subaru next to it.

The camera would’ve shown him walking to his car. Climbing inside. Turning on the high beams and cruising out of the lot. Nicking the curb on the way out.

Would it have shown the man in the backseat?

There it is in quick succession, like the strobe of headlights through guardrails.

The car.

The man.

The blade.

He’ll get a few miles down the road before he realizes anything is wrong, too far for anyone to save him. He’ll never clock his pursuer, the world too much of a blur to understand that a truck is edging ever-closer. He won’t catch a glimpse of motion in the rearview mirror. Won’t quiet the liquored-up drumbeat of his pulse long enough to count another set of breaths.

No.

He’ll only see the headlights.

Kai collects knives they don’t know how to use.

Objectively, they know how they’re supposed to use them. Knives stab. Cut. Saw. It’s easy—just flick it open, then strike. But Kai’s switchblade always gets stuck, catches like a scream in a throat, until they stick their fingers in and pry it out.

If they could open it now, they’d drive it straight through the fucking phone.

“Can you repeat that address?” the counter girl asks boredly through the speaker as she takes the order Kai’s about to deliver. More specifically: the order that’s going to deliver them directly to their breaking point. They know the address already.

That’s exactly the problem.

“Ten cheese pizzas,” the counter girl affirms, and Kai fidgets again with the knife in their pocket. They try to tell themself this job is worth it. That just a little longer, and they’ll be able to pay off their literal mountain of top surgery bills. They try (and fail) to tell themself that every week they’re one shot closer to becoming the kind of man Logan can’t hurt.

They tell themself fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Is something wrong?”

Their breath hitches. Their face haunts the mirror that hangs behind the counter: ghost pale, sweat-slick. The knife catches in their fingers, but anger cuts deep in their chest. There’s no reason, no way, to explain that Logan calling them at work is their last fucking straw.

“Just need a break,” they mutter, because they’re a blade that won’t snap open.

Because they must loooove mood swings, they quit smoking the same month they started taking testosterone. So they don’t light up when they duck around the back of the restaurant. Instead, they squat in the night-dark parking lot behind their dented, pizza-mobile shitwagon, turning the blade over and over in their hands as if the answer might be written on the side of it.

But the answer is the same as it’s always been: run.

Kai’s tried and they can’t.

Bile rising in their throat, they check their phone. The phone is second behind their tits on a list of least favorite appendages. As a pizza delivery driver and, unfortunately, a person, Kai can’t go anywhere without it—which means there’s no way to dodge Logan’s calls. There’s no reason for Logan to call them again, and again, and again.

(Or maybe there’s just no good one.)

It doesn’t matter what Kai wants to be: a tattoo artist, a man, the kind of man who isn’t afraid of every dark road. All that matters is what they are right now: completely fucking helpless.

They climb into their car and shut the door like its slam can keep out the world. But the world ekes in like the October chill.

Slowly, slowly, slowly they unfurl Logan’s note.
Thinking of you.

They shudder, their gaze whipping around the parking lot. But the scariest thing here is still their boss’ conservative bumper stickers…and the memory of tramping across their lawn’s morning frost to find the note lying in wait beneath their windshield wipers.

Kai hasn’t seen Logan since the breakup—but Logan has seen them.

They slump against the steering wheel, sucking a breath in, in, in. If Logan is thinking of Kai, then he’s thinking of them outside their building at night, the buzzer shrilling at three a.m. and scaring them awake. He’s thinking of them by their mailbox, their deadname leering from his meticulously-creased envelopes. He’s thinking into the phone line, each slow breath a warning. And Kai knows how warnings work:You only get so many.

Kai’s not sure they have any left.

Their phone buzzes—and they jump—heart in their throat as the rectangle clatters down to the trash-strewn void by their gas pedal. For a moment they just stare, steeling themself against whatever existential horror the caller ID will bring. But relief overtakes them as they see who called: River, their online best friend.The one person they still trust.

Kai reaches through a graveyard of crumpled energy drink cans to grab the phone, their eyes darting nervously around the parking lot as they answer.

“Mississippi.” They exhale their dread as if they’re expelling smoke, sticking the knife back into the pocket of their non-uniform cargo shorts. “What’s up?”

Kai hasn’t confessed that anything’s wrong, mostly because there’s almost no one to tell and also because there’s nothing new about their situation. It’s been wrong—life—the relentless chafing of a too-tight shoe until each small step is agonizing.

“You texted,” River answers. “So, you tell me.”

For a second, pointless fury sharpens behind Kai’s ribs. “There’s a special delivery requesting Kiley,” they spit their own deadname, the cold, damp rain on their shirt finally soaking through to their skin. “Courtesy of my fucking ex.”

Silence.

“Do you want to know how much blood is in the human body?” River finally asks.

River’s a crime writer, so this is the kind of question they ask more often than how are you, a quality that Kai appreciates.

“There’s going to be zero blood left in mine if I actually deliver this pizza,” Kai tells them, the static in their brain building, drowning out the sound of River’s clacking keyboard. “Please tell me he actually wants ten cheese pizzas instead of to kill me.”

“One point five gallons,” River answers. “Which is the exact amount I’ll spill if this honk-honk clown man tries anything on you.”

The problem is he already has.

“I should run,” Kai blurts, suddenly remembering they’re allergic to revealing how their life has spiraled out of control. “But now if I die, at least you’ll know what happened.”

They wish they didn’t need the money so badly. They wish that Logan understood that no matter what Kai still looks like, they’re not some girl-next-door that persistence can win back.

“Wait,” River cuts in, their voice sharp and insistent. “Before you go, I promise you’re safe.”

A nice promise—even if Kai knows it’s not true.

River’s goodbyes dissipate into the wet autumn wind as Kai hangs up. It’s barely ten p.m., but around Kai, the night is painted a thousand shades of black. The wind howls, scattering trash across the empty parking lot.

But not empty enough.

There’s a flash of movement by the back entrance to the restaurant.

Kai jerks to attention.Uneasily, they open the car door and climb out. It’s ridiculous to think that Logan would be skulking around this parking lot when he just called…right? If he wanted to confront Kai face-to-face at their workplace, he’d rock up to the counter and order a slice.

No. He wants Kai at his house.

Pushing away that thought, Kai straightens up. They can’t drive over to Logan’s all jumpy like he’s going to kill them. All Logan will do is be transphobic and flirt badly, and that’s if Kai even sees him. It should be easy enough to drop off the pizzas and disappear.

It would hardly be Kai’s first disappearing act.

Dread rises in their throat. They thought dropping out of school would change everything. Would force them into becoming the tattoo artist they’ve always wanted to be. Would reveal the man they hoped they already were. But all they have is a handful of clients off Instagram and the miscellaneous stick-and-pokes marring their legs and arms. Their body is scribbled up like a Notes app, and all the notes say the same thing: Will any of this change me?

Kai always wanted only to be themself. They just didn’t realize that person would be so unimpressive.

Sucking in a breath, Kai staggers inside towards the restaurant bathroom before anyone can consider which door they chose.

They splash their face with cold water, drinking in their expression the way they’d throw back a shot. They know what they’re going to see—choppy, ear-length, blond hair; their jawline delicate as a heart dotting an i—but it still burns going down.

They know what Logan will see if he gets a chance to look.

Exactly the girl Kai still sees now.

Swallowing hard, they back into the stall behind them.

I’m a man, they told Logan, because they thought that saying it would mean believing it. But it never felt less true than beneath Logan’s gaze, watching him as he waited for Kiley to rip off some Scooby Doo mask and show him this man that she was talking about.

They hadn’t even mentioned the rest. In a way, dropping out to become a tattoo artist with no experience whatsoever felt like the harder confession: I’m a man—and this is the kind of man I am. They didn’t want to leave any room for their rough sketch of a life plan to become an argument. So they said the truest, most silencing thing they could.

Now here they were, all the unsaid words trapped in their throat like a scream. But if they could let the words out, they’d sound like help, help, help.

They don’t look like the man they imagined yet, which makes it feel impossible to be him. They want to use he pronouns, but can’t seem to fit them into any sentence: He’s on the verge of tears in the women’s bathroom; He’s being stalked by his ex; He gave up everything to be an artist and the only thing he can create is a huge fucking mess.

Now, they’re in the same stall as Logan’s graffiti.

The handwriting is tainted with either rage or haste: FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL KAI AINSLEY. There’s no one else who could’ve written it.

No one who would know how much it hurt.

“Order’s up!” someone calls through the bathroom door, and Kai jumps.

They take the boxes to the car in two trips, the neon restaurant lights casting an ominous red on the wet asphalt. There’s no one there now at the back entrance—no employees on their breaks, no flicker of movement at the corner of Kai’s eyes. Just the memory of Logan’s note and the bone chill of what awaits them at Logan’s address.

But right now, Kai’s alone.

They’re not supposed to be. They’re not supposed to walk around by themself at night, or even want to. Their parents told them that truth and it’s one more part of them Kai can’t get rid of, like their endless phone calls and the fear of god that swells in their guts.

He wants you back, their mom had said the first and only night they called her—their heart in their throat, switchblade in their hands. That was the first night the buzzer went off, at two a.m, a few hours after they’d called her in a panic. Logan wants you, she said. The real you.

But what Logan wants is someone who doesn’t exist.

And he never took kindly to “no.”

Logan’s house leers at Kai like an eye through a keyhole.

The sky is enormous out here: a bottomless, suffocating black. Kai’s a mile away from Logan’s house and still they can see the lights glaring. Their stomach drops as the road tips downwards, spilling the car back into the dark. The brush beside the highway bristles like rows of a predator’s teeth. Unwillingly, they remember another of their mom’s rules:

Don’t drive alone at night—or someone will follow you home.

They’ve never been afraid of the road. They’ve always been more terrified of everything that happens off it: the blunt force of fists, the slice of a blade, the carnage of bullets. Being alone isn’t what scares Kai. The potential violence behind a stranger’s stare is far more terrifying.

And now, they’re no longer alone.

Headlights blaze through the rear windshield.

The stars glint in the black like a spider’s thousand eyes. Kai’s skin crawls with them. They’re not supposed to be this scared of being alive when living is the one thing they’ve always wanted.The only thing they have.

They turn on the radio, blasting music that’s as angry as they want to be. The headlights get closer. The black pickup truck behind them speeds up.

Their parents’ warnings reverberate in their head like the rattle of the shitwagon’s door. But there’s no way this truck is actually following them. They’re obviously on their way to Logan’s, for what’s probably a Halloween party, and their costume is fucking loser who forgot to turn off their high beams.

And now the truck is beside them.

The window is an impervious black, the faceless driver edging the truck closer until the two of them are neck-and-neck. Kai doesn't know who’s there—if it even matters who.All that matters is what they want.But as their engine revs, their fear dissolves into fizzling incredulity.

This motherfucker wants to race.

Hot, giddy joy grips their chest. They didn’t realize this was something that happened outside of movies. And even in the movies, they didn’t realize it could happen to someone like them. They don’t know why this truck picked them, but it picked right.

They slam their foot to the gas.

The road is empty beside the two of them, just the mile to the exit and the growing distance between Kai and their anxious thoughts. Kai can’t hear them over the roar of their engine as the car speeds faster. They can only hear their own half-delirious laugh, thick and low in their throat in a way they’ve never felt before.

Exit signs strobe in Kai’s headlights like the sudden bursts of their thoughts: Kai’s winning this race, he’s streaking triumphant down the highway, his laugh sharp enough to cut through all his fears.

But as soon as they remember their fear they summon it, like chanting Bloody Mary in a bathroom mirror. They’re not escaping Logan. They’re driving directly toward him.

Logan’s exit looms in their vision, a mere quarter mile ahead. And as they flip on their blinker to merge, the truck does the same, sliding into the lane directly behind them.

The exhilaration of the race sours in Kai’s gut…if it was a race at all.

What if they’re being followed?

The truck backs off almost the second they think it, but not before a spindly hand waves from the rolled-down window.

When Nate was thirteen, he saw something impossible on Carr’s Farm Road.

It was the night his papa left and the night Nate tried to leave with him, just ran down the road’s wet throat until the night swallowed him.

No one should’ve let him run that far. Within seconds there were no taillights to follow, nothing besides the moonlight blurring through Nate’s stinging tears. There should’ve been someone back at the house to haul him screaming off the porch, past the dead refrigerator and the old washtub where Papa’s rough hands held him under when Nate refused a haircut.

But his mama didn’t want to watch Nate’s old man leave so she didn’t see Nate either, plunging into the darkness like breaching the surface of something much deeper.

I know this road, he told himself as his legs carried himself farther, but he was suddenly unsure if he really did.

The night was alive with all kinds of creatures, and with the rank stink of cow manure, a wall pressing in around him. He felt something close to him in the darkness, the way a foot feels for the bottom step in a cellar, inching towards nothingness.

It hadn’t been a millipede’s thousand legs creeping over his foot in the damp soil that spooked him, nor the insistent static of insects just beyond his ears.

It was the rustle.

It seemed to stop the second he noticed it, the hush-hush of feet through grass lost in the cicada shrill of rural nighttime.

“Hello?” he cried out, panic gripping him as his voice bounced between the darkened barns nearby like a thousand teasing answers:

hello? hello? hello? hello.

Then panic truly gripped him—because the last one wasn’t an echo.

He was a mess of flailing limbs and gasping breaths, staggering in the direction he last saw Papa’s headlights. But direction meant nothing in a dark as encompassing as the ocean—no left, no right. Only further and further and further.

He ran outstretched, his hands grasping—

And then, hands grasped him.

“Got you!” his best friend Jamie yelled, gripping him from behind.

A scream tore from Nate’s throat as he tumbled into the grass, his skin crawling with goosebumps and the insects that surely found the heat of his skin.
“Jesus,” he spat because it was the worst curse he knew at age thirteen, hot with holy wrath.

“Just me,” Jamie answered, grinning as she flicked on her flashlight.

But when he turned to look, he saw that it wasn’t just Jamie.

Nate would’ve said there was a man in the flashlight’s beam, but it was more of a shape than a person. It was more of a ghost than a shape.

Do you see that? Nate wanted to—tried to—ask. But acknowledging that there was anything to see was like asking it to see him back.

And turning off the flashlight was like begging it to get them.

Which is why, when Jamie did, he screamed.

He screamed for his papa, who he knew was gone months before the taillights disappeared down the road. He screamed for all the places that were supposed to be familiar but seemed to change the further he walked into them, like Carr’s Farm Road and life it-fucking-self. He screamed for every single freckle on Jamie’s face because he had dreams about kissing each one and was never going to get the chance. He screamed, and screamed, and—

Nothing was there when the flashlight turned back on.

He waited for Jamie to say something. He waited for himself to start breathing again.

Slowly, Jamie finally spoke.

“Do you think…” she asked, a sharp-edged grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Do you think that was the ghost of your dad’s ability to give a shit?”

And, impossibly, he laughed.

Nate’s not afraid of the dark anymore. He just hates the person he becomes within it; fearful and obsessed with the past.

Some nights, it feels like a relief to pull off the highway with its cars full of unknown people, anonymous behind their windshields. But other times, the road to the farm feels remote enough to scare him. He has this childhood fear that it’s dark enough that the landscape could change completely without him knowing, like letters shifting in a dream.

And he still remembers the ghost.

A shudder grips him, but he clutches the steering wheel and shuts it out. He hasn’t seen anything like that in all the years he’s lived here since—over ten, if you were counting—since he never lived anywhere else. If there was anything on this road once, it’s gone now.

Like his papa.

Like Jamie.

The night seethes with insects, fat beetle bodies thunking and splattering against the rusty red pickup truck’s windshield as he makes his way up towards the farm. He’s driving, which makes it easier to fight the urge to reach for his phone and search Jamie’s name the way he has so many times before.

He knows what he’ll find if he does: a page with a hundred thousand followers and pictures of a life in New York City that Jamie’s told him nothing about.

Jamie never posts pictures of her face, and Nate’s stomach involuntarily flips at the thought of seeing it now.

His hand inches across the console towards the passenger seat, where for a second, he can imagine that she’s still there. On prom night, she was the one crying in her white dress, looking insubstantial as a scrap of paper blown to the side of the highway. They went as each other’s dates, a memory that puts a twist of unfairness in Nate’s gut.

“Do you ever feel like—” she hiccupped, breath fogging the glass of the passenger window “—like no one knows who you are?”

“I know you,” he said.

And he kissed her.

It had been the wrong thing to do.

The truck bucks over a patch of rough road before pulling into the driveway, the house’s windows spilling their yellow glow the way they had that night when he ran after the shrinking nothingness of his dad’s taillights.

But not all the same lights are on.

Mama and Papa had been sleeping in separate bedrooms by the time they split, so the light in his papa’s bedroom hasn’t been on for years. But it’s been about eleven months since they had to check Mama into the nursing home. He flicked off her bedside lamp the day they took her. She protested the whole way, barely knowing who was driving her.

He loves the life he built. His sister, his family, his farm. But sometimes, it felt like a house with the lights winking out one by one by one.

He squeals open his truck door, grabbing his gas station snacks before stomping up the porch to where his sister Anna waits with a bottle of wine.

“You’re back!” She cheers, grinning and lifting her half-drunk glass.

“Yeah, barely made it past the hook-handed man.” Nate exaggerates a shudder, but glances over his shoulder as if there’s some truth to the joke. “Do you ever stop and realize how creepy it is out here at night?”

“Well, the hook-handed man better not have dropped the hot goss before I can.” Anna raises her eyebrow, gesturing to the rocking chair in front of her.

“Nah, he just mentioned something about wanting to rip my throat out,” Nate jokes, sitting back in his mama’s chair. But unease tugs at him like a piece of his hair caught in the wicker. There’s no man lurking on the road, but there are too many ghosts: the echo of his mama’s laughter carrying on the breeze through the open window; the memory of Jamie’s white dress, phantasmal as she ran towards the neighboring farm.

“My turn,” Anna cuts in, rocking his chair excitedly with her foot. “They’re back.”

“They…?”

She catches Nate staring and shoots back a smirk. “Surely you haven’t forgotten the love of your life?”

“I haven’t forgotten you cheating at Scrabble the last time we played.” Nate offers a lopsided grin, tapping the board between them. “I’ve never had a love of my life.”

“Then what would you call Jamie?”

Heat flushes Nate’s cheeks.

“I’d call her my ex,” he blurts. Then seeing Anna’s gleefully widening eyes, “Best friend. My ex best friend.”

“You said it!” Anna accuses, gesturing loosely with her wine glass.

Nate shoots her a teasing look, but his stomach plunges down, down, down like the bottomless drop of his truck over a hill at night. As rural Iowa’s resident alpha dyke (how Anna would refer to herself), Anna’s always been enmeshed in romantic drama. But Nate’s never had feelings for people; he hates the way people say it, like none of the other feelings count.

Demiromantic is the word he found when he sat at his geriatric desktop like Kristen Stewart in Twilight typing “cold ones” into the search bar—searching blisteringly articulate questions like what is my deal with love? The label feels true but incomplete, like calling the road to his farm long or dark when it’s really depthless, infinite.

He doesn’t have feelings for Jamie. He wants to reach through time that crackles like his truck’s radio static to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. He wants to run after her the way she ran after him, to feel the warmth of her palms over his eyes in the unforgiving night and forgive her for leaving.

He wants, he wants, he wants.

But Jamie’s nothing to him anymore, just another window with the light turned off.

Nate sucks in a breath. “I haven’t heard from her since—”

“Them,” Anna corrects. “Jamie uses they/he pronouns now.”

And from the dark, a light illuminates.

“So when you said…” Nate’s thoughts strobe faster than he can process them. “When you said they’re back…”

“I mean they’re back,” Anna answers with a cat-like grin. “Maybe you’ll finally get your prom night do-over.”

Nate splutters. “You make it sound like—”

“What?” she asks innocently, pouring him a glass of wine and scooting it closer to him. “I’m making it sound like you kissed? Because you did.”

He takes a long, slow drink, as if the twelve-dollar-at-best wine could quench his sudden thirst to see Jamie’s face. Anna’s talking about love again the way that everyone but Nate always seems to. The kiss is important, but not as important as everything that came before.

And everything that came after.

“What difference does it make?” Nate asks, bitterness creeping into his voice. “If they wanted anything to do with me, they would’ve responded to a single one of my DMs over the last ten years. They’re back. Doesn’t change anything.”

Anna gives him a careful, appraising look. “Do you want it to?”

Yes.

It flashes across his face before he can stop it, but he swallows it with a heavy pour of wine. “He thinks he’s too good for us,” Nate blurts, the drink as sour in his stomach as all his confusion and resentment. “Look at his Instagram. Who posts pictures of caviar spreads? Like, how pretentious can you be?”

He only realizes he’s been rocking frantically back and forth in the chair when Anna reaches a leg across the divide between them, stilling him. “I think you’re getting a little carried away.”

“We did kiss on prom night,” Nate admits. “But we didn’t just kiss, okay?”

Anna raises her eyebrows. “So you…?”

“I told Jamie I wanted to be with them.”

She waits for him to continue, cicadas shrilling in the tall grass as he imagines himself walking the distance to Jamie’s family’s neighboring farm, step by step. He can walk it in his mind the way he’d spell out his own name. It’s too embarrassing to say that every day he drives past it, he considers pulling down the long road, shutting off his brain and pretending that Jamie is still there waiting for him.

“I did tell them I loved them,” Nate says, the half-truth slipping from his lips. The truth is that he remembers every word and is haunted by them all.

I’ve never been able to imagine myself with anyone, but it’s different with you, he said on their porch, their back turned and their dress plastered to their skin with rain. They jumped out of his truck after the kiss but he followed them up the bumpy driveway back to the farmhouse with headlights searing through the mist, not wanting them to walk alone. You don’t have to feel the same way, Nate murmured, not knowing it would be the last time they ever talked. Just please, don’t let this change anything between us.

Then, of course, it changed everything.

“What would you say to them now?” Anna asks. “If you could?”

“That maybe I’d be in love with them still,” he confesses.

He turns to stare down the road—and freezes.

An apparition hovers at the edge of the porch light.

The face emerges from the night, lupine eyes glinting in the darkness—nothing, then a sudden flash. But this is no animal caught in the rapture of headlights.

It’s Jamie.

Nate startles, drinking them in like the wine—their face bringing the same flush to his expression. He wouldn’t be able to explain it, but they look like a song he can’t quite remember the name of; intimately familiar yet impossible to place.

And they’re striking, Nate realizes, heat pooling low in his stomach. Stubble sharpens Jamie’s jaw; their eyebrows look thicker, more intentional. Their cutoff jean shorts reveal tattoos that Nate can’t quite discern but wants to, and he’s filled with a sudden, twisting desire for Jamie to climb up onto the porch and back into his life. To learn the music of their life together all over again, until the lyrics fall into place.

It occurs to Nate that it’s possible Jamie never posts pictures of themselves because they don’t want to elicit comparison—that they don’t want to invite anyone to search their face for the person they used to be. But that person never existed; Nate’s certain, looking at this one.

“I—” Nate starts with a blush, unsure how to end the sentence: I didn’t think you’d walk in on me confessing my love for you the next time I saw you?

I didn’t think there would be a next time?

“I…” Jamie starts, and Nate has no idea how this sentence will end, either. I didn’t mean to stop talking to you? We just fell out of touch? I always meant to reach out?

I always hoped you’d still want me to?

Then a shadow falls over Jamie’s face.

“My parents sent me. I need your help,” they murmur. “There’s something killing my family’s cattle.”

The word something snarls like a burr against Nate’s skin.

He hears Jamie’s voice carry from across the dark as he trudges to the barn where they keep their anti-coyote equipment, the corn gleaming starkly beneath the moonlight like it’s in night vision already.

He wonders if Jamie is remembering the same thing he is: that negative space in the flashlight’s glow. It had been more suggestion than man, and the suggestion had been run.

They hadn’t, and they never saw it again.

Nate punches in the code to the gun safe and grips one in his hand, feeling its heft.

He was afraid that night, but he’s been more scared since; of whatever closed the shops on main street until its slouching facade became more memory than place; whatever makes Nate’s blood go cold when he notices someone watching the glint of his earring; whatever made their papa leave and their uncles drink and the lights wink out in the windows, one by one.

There’s something more wrong out here than ghosts.

And it’s always been people.

Sam checks his phone for the last direction and turns into the local bar.

Not for him, thank god (passing by bars, rather than going in them, is something he’s still learning how to do). He’s here to pick up a ride, a side gig that provides the steady drip of extra income adjunct professors need to survive.

Cold leaks through the windshield as Sam’s car rattles into the parking lot. It’s October and at only six p.m., the darkness is as consuming as intoxication. He scans for anyone who looks particularly like they’re waiting for him, trying not to think about how much it feels like he’s hunting for a parking spot himself.

But he’s safe. One of the first things he did when he moved in with his boyfriend, Aaron, was to share his location.

You’ll know where I am if I ever need help, he said, even though he meant it would keep him honest about the places he decided to go. A divergence in meaning that felt more like a chasm, the same way Sam first told Aaron he once had a drinking problem, like it was some haunted antique he picked up and lost somewhere in his house.

His house. It’s something he didn’t have just a year ago back in Jersey, like a life or a boyfriend or more than an hour of consciousness at a time. One more reason he’s here teaching at Cardale College; another reason that’s true, but not the real one.

The real reason he’s here is that the old Sam isn’t.

It helps Sam to imagine himself as an entirely separate person now, even though he knows that’s not quite real either. He imagines that in rural Pennsylvania, he’s so far out in the middle of nowhere that Other Sam can never find him.

Even though it feels more like Other Sam is in the backseat.

Sam shudders and looks over his shoulder, spotting two people huddled under an awning by the bar as the wind flattens their puffy jackets to their skin.

Not just two people: Emily (she/they) from South Carolina and June (she/her) from Boston, two freshmen from his course on children’s literature. They’re definitely not old enough to be at this bar, but it’s far from the deepest thing he knows about them. People tend to open up quickly in the Queer Student Alliance, the campus group Sam’s proud to head up.

The group that Emily’s a part of, but June isn’t.

Sam rolls down the window and waves to them, wondering if either one will recognize him as they scurry towards the backseat. He should probably feel embarrassed being their professor and their Uber driver. But Sam doesn’t care if his students know that teaching doesn’t pay. He believes in transparency like that. What he doesn’t believe in is outing someone, and so he makes a mental note not to bring up anything that might tip June off that Emily’s in QSA.

He remembers the way that Emily said she/her out loud when he’d gone around the room to ask but had written she/they on their index card, underlining they in pencil so he got the message. Later, they spoke up in QSA and nearly cried about how hard it was to be free of her conservative family and yet still fear the conservative values they force-fed her for years. He likes most of his students, but he likes her in particular. She’s got the kind of story that’s easy to root for. And he knows all too well what it’s like to be the kind of person who doesn’t.

Sam stiffens for a moment as the two slide into the backseat, the cloying scent of vodka soaked through with something sweet filling the space on their breaths. But it’s followed quickly by a sudden, fierce protectiveness as Emily breaks off mid-laugh, freezing at the sight of him.

His heart plunges. He can imagine how scared Emily is at the prospect of being outed—has to imagine, when he himself didn’t come out so much as he was just never in.

“Sam—Professor!” they correct excitedly, their words in drunken italics.

A smile breaks across his face before he straightens it into his Uber-driver veneer of professional indifference. Emily’s happy to see him.

He knows he’s made a difference in one life: his own. And every day, he half-expects to lose the chance at changing another. But something in Emily’s uninhibited smile warms him. Maybe it’ll be different than he keeps fearing. Maybe it’s different already.

“Good to see you’re both still around!” He beams, waiting for them to buckle their seatbelts before he pulls out of the parking lot, away from the lights and out onto the swath of darkness that is the road back to campus. “Half the students have left for Thanksgiving already.”

“I’m going back to Boston. Emily is…I don’t know. What about you, Professor? Are you spending Thanksgiving around here? With A-aron?” June asks, wiggling her eyebrows goofily. The whole class has been obsessed with Sam’s (admittedly very attractive) boyfriend ever since they found out he was a beloved, young dance professor.

“And what about Cookie and Cream?” Emily chimes in, referencing his two cats whose pictures endearingly and embarrassingly decorate his class syllabus with his self-made memes that are almost definitely “cringe” but, he hopes, at least slightly charming.

His heart surges. He belongs here. He’s in the parking lot of a bar in the middle of fucking nowhere Pennsylvania, and it’s all somehow okay. He is somehow okay in spite of all the ways he’s never expected to be okay.

Which is exactly why he can’t leave.

His stomach flips as he remembers the joy in Aaron’s voice on the phone last week: I got the NYC job! As he remembers the bottomless sound of his own silence.

“Cookie and Cream will be preparing dinner,” he jokes, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as his students respond with a more-than-perfunctory laugh. “At least, they better be. Because if I burn the mac and cheese again this year, they’ll be really disappointed in me.”

He loves the normalcy of it. Loves that they think he has this routine with Aaron, when really, this will be their first Thanksgiving together. His first sober Thanksgiving. To them, he might as well step out of the ether and into the classroom to crack corny jokes at them for an hour and a half. He has no past, no problems. Just a beautiful boyfriend, two cats, and the job he always wanted.

For now.

The lane darkens like his mood as the bar’s lights fade from his rearview mirror, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it strip mall of a town yielding to winding backroads and tree branches that reach for him like his own thoughts.

“Tell them I say hi,” June giggles. She’s the smiley kind of drunk, the type of drunk Sam had always thought he could be but never was.

“Tell them to give me an A on my next paper,” Emily chimes in, playfully whacking the back of his seat. Sam’s favorite joke that’s only a little bit of a joke—that Cookie and Cream do everything for him, including grading his papers. That he’d be lost without them.

“You don’t need their help,” Sam assures grandly. “You and June are in great spirits. That kind of excitement that can only be achieved from hours of studying, am I right?”

“Well, we were talking about books,” Emily snickers, clearly pleased with the fact that he’s not chiding them for going to a bar when they’re obviously underage. But Sam knows they could be up to so much worse, and he loves that they aren’t. They’re not driving home, like he would’ve. Like he won’t ever again.

“Stories, anyway,” June cuts in, their words drunkenly stumbling over one another’s. “Professor—Sam—did you ever hear the story about the murder on Lover’s Lane?”

“Yes, I’ve heard the urban legend,” he laughs, thrilled to not be living under a complete rock at age twenty-eight, just too old to really feel like his students’ peers anymore. “It’s funny to me how puritanical the story is, too. Teenagers have always loved it, even if it’s essentially a cautionary tale built off horror movie values of who lives and who dies.”

“It’s a real story,” June insists.

“All stories are real,” Sam hams it up, loving the role he can feel them slotting him into. “They’re a product of the real existential fears of the communities that create them.”

“You’re such an English professor,” Emily laughs—but for a moment, something unnamable crosses her face. “C’mon June, he doesn’t want to hear about it. It’s already creepy enough on these roads.”

“He’s a man,” June says, arching her eyebrow in the rearview mirror. “No offense, Professor. But you don’t have anything to worry about out here, right?”

Sam opens his mouth to fire off a retort, but something sours in his gut.

He always has something to fear—the other Sam in the backseat, desperate to reach forward and take the wheel away from him.

“Unfortunately, it’s true,” he murmurs in reply, his tone slipping only a little. “I live a blissfully carefree existence; things like paltry salaries and second jobs are meaningless to me.”

“This story is about an Uber driver,” Emily warns, seeing June leaning forward in her seat, ready to unleash the horrors of society on Sam in the form of storytelling. “It’s…how do I put this?”

June’s expression is mischievous, emboldened by the drink. “It’s really fucked up—”

Sam’s never thought to be afraid on these roads at all—has only ever been afraid of the feeling of breath on the back of his neck, a flare of headlights in the rearview mirror; the stare of an all-too-familiar driver. It’s definitely the blackout drinking, but Sam has never quite shaken the fear that there are two of him.

And he’ll never shake the fear that he doesn’t know which one he is.

“Tell me,” Sam answers, using his most professorial tone. Professor Slate is who he wants to be. But as the memory of Aaron’s voice echoes in his head like a scream in an open field—I got the NYC job!—he knows it’s not who he is.

“There’s a road in town named Lover’s Lane,” June continues over the sound of rain against the windshield, its faint patter like radio static. “That’s where people say he disappeared.” She pauses for effect. “The driver who went missing last semester. The story goes that he was driving late one night, heading to pick up a student on Lover’s Lane. But the road…wasn’t where it was supposed to be.”

The low, steady thrum of her voice floods his brain like liquor into blood. His head, oddly heavy, lolls towards the steering wheel. This is a girl who knows how to tell a story, he realizes.

And he’s the kind of man who knows how to believe one.

“This was a driver who’d been around a long time. An older faculty member at the school who never made tenure doing everything he could to make some extra money on the side by tutoring and driving. But he knew the students, knew the roads. And something wasn’t right about where Lover’s Lane was appearing on the map. His certainty went bone-deep that the road was actually on the northern side of town, up near the supermarket. Still, when he looked at the map tonight, it was somewhere else—almost out of the town entirely, in a wooded area far from any of the shopping centers or highways.”

Fear grips Sam and he squeezes the steering wheel, headlights of an oncoming car strobing through the trees like camera flashes. And he can’t help but wonder for a fleeting, foolish second what the images would show: His own terrified face, filled with thoughts of leaving this life behind? Shapes menacing from the trees? Eyes menacing like an animal’s in the dark? He never missed a thing about his old life.

Now, he misses streetlights.

June presses on, her voice rising in pitch—climbing, climbing, climbing, a roller coaster preparing for a drop. “But what was he going to do? It was his job to pick students up, and so he couldn’t exactly ignore the address. Someone could be waiting there, alone and unsafe, and it would be his fault. So in spite of his instincts, he drove to the wrong Lover’s Lane.

“He didn’t mean to start thinking of it that way—as the wrong Lover’s Lane. But the closer he got, the more he was sure that he inadvertently tapped into something that he didn’t want to try and explain. He saw on the map that the road was near the woods, but the trees hung over the road in a particularly threatening, overgrown way, almost scraping the hood of his car, like fingernails on a chalkboard. It was as if no one had driven that way in a long time.

“As if he wasn’t meant to.”

Headlights flare in Sam’s rearview mirror.

His stomach lurches, his foot instinctively tapping the brakes. The car jerks before he can stop it, and Emily lets out a little drunken shriek.

“June! You’re scaring him!”

He realizes she is—he’s terrified.

He understands the liquor-liminality of this story, has driven senseless roads with signs he can’t read to places that feel imaginary the more he tries to remember them. But the memory of his life before is all too real, imposing as the New York City skyline on the horizon.

June grins, clearly thinking the story itself is what scares him.

But the scariest story has always been Sam’s own.

“Still, there was also no reason to turn back at that point. Nothing out of the ordinary had actually happened. Maybe it was a problem in the map software. Maybe a satellite was glitching out somewhere in the great beyond. Still, a feeling grew as he pulled into the neighborhood. It looked exactly like the Lover’s Lane he remembered, but everything was off somehow, in a way that seemed impossible.

“All the streetlights were off. And while the shapes and styles of the houses looked familiar in the dark, the longer he stared, the less the houses looked real to him. And that’s when he realized they were all painted one color.” June’s voice is insistent, threatening. “I mean all one color, the landlord special. The walls were white. The doors were white. The windows were white, the glass coated in paint that made it impossible to see through.

“He started to wonder who would actually live on this darkened street, with rotten leaves piled so thickly in the road that the car was straining to drive through them. But he could still drive, deeper and deeper into the spiraling cul-de-sacs, the unlit street signs giving no indication of where he should turn.”

Turn. Sam’s not looking at his GPS, not looking at anything but the headlights now glaring in his rearview mirror. They’re too bright, too green, something he can’t put his fingers on. Something’s wrong about the headlights, even if he can’t figure out what it is.

Or maybe something’s just wrong with him, listening to June’s story and having it fill his head like a fifth of hard liquor.

“The passenger should have been at the pickup spot, but there was no one in sight. He circled and still found no one. He zoomed in on his map.” June pauses for effect. “Every single street in the entire neighborhood seemed to have shifted into one big maze, and the GPS said that every single one of them was named Lover’s Lane.

“It was at that point he started to really panic. He had no idea where he was going, which meant he had no idea how to leave. The houses were strange, but there were houses. Someone had built them, which made this a real place. It frightened him how much he suddenly knew he needed the reassurance that this was a real place.

“That’s when he got out of the car and realized: the street signs had nothing on them.”

A hiss of breath escapes Sam’s lungs. Everything about this story is too familiar.

Nothing felt real when he was driving drunk because nothing was; not the lines on the highway or the wheel beneath his hands. This isn’t a story at all, but a place that Sam can never go back to.

The same place that, without realizing it, Aaron’s asking him to go.

“The road signs. The stop signs. The yield signs. Blank. Nothing more than shapes, with all the clumsiness of a child’s toy set. He staggered back towards the houses, terrified of what might be inside them.

“And then the hook-handed man burst out and killed him,” Emily snorts, breaking the spell.

“And then the hook-handed man burst out and killed him,” June agrees, almost giggling.

“That was our dorm,” Emily says, gesturing behind the car almost apologetically.

“Right,” Sam answers, stupefied.

He blinks. Almost without noticing, he’s back in civilization; time porous around him, the way it always used to be. When he was drunk, life was nothing more than a flash of a scene. A flash of another. All the images the same; threatening and directionless. He tries to laugh with them, but he can’t.

“I didn’t mean to freak you out so bad,” June exclaims, her eyes alight with sincerity and mischief. “But now you know how we feel when you assign us fifteen-page papers. Just saying!”

“You might’ve earned yourself a twenty-page paper for that one,” he manages to say.

Barely.

“Are you okay?” Emily asks him, her voice so sincere that for a second heat pricks behind his eyes. She cares about him. She doesn’t even know all the reasons she shouldn’t.

Stop. He’s away from the woods. Away from himself, safe here amidst string lights in dorm windows and students shrieking as they run through the rain.

“I’m fine,” he says, his voice more sure than how he feels. “You guys be safe now.”

Emily holds his gaze for a moment before sliding out of the backseat, June close behind her as the two stagger up the steps towards the dorm.

“Don’t let the hook-handed man get you,” June laughs over her shoulder.

Sam’s going the hell home.

He speeds out of the dorm parking lot and out onto the highway, sleet glazing the windshield until he can hardly tell where he is. No more rides. No more stories. Just him and Cookie and Cream and the certainty that he’s safe as long as Aaron is watching him.

He’s never minded being watched. He’s more afraid of being seen.

Looking in the rearview mirror, he’s caught by the blinding beam of headlights.

Something unsettles him then, a splinter lodged beneath his skin. There were headlights on the wooded road behind him when June was telling her story—too close at times, the high beams falling into their car almost violently, like a rock thrown through glass. But they only appeared halfway down the winding road through the trees.

A road that has no places to turn onto.

It’s June’s story, he tells himself as his pulse triples in his chest.

But he pulls over and lets the truck pass him, drives slowly until he can see it turn towards a normal-looking subdivision. Until he knows it’s real.

When Nate imagined their reunion, he never pictured the gun.

It looms between them in the grass in Jamie’s parents’ field, as loaded as the space between their outstretched hands.

Nate’s owned a gun since before he was old enough, but he’s never actually used it for anything more pressing than taking drunken shots at cans lined up along fenceposts.

Tonight, it’s not the thing that he’s most afraid will explode.

“You look…” Nate tries, fumbling for the words.

Jamie smirks. “Different?”

Nate’s flustered. He didn’t go ten years without talking to Jamie just to tell him he looks different as an adult man than he did as a teenage not-girl.

“Good,” Nate emphasizes.

They’re not supposed to be talking at all—definitely not talking about each others’ looks—but something about the intimacy of darkness reminds Nate of their deepest conversations, when they’d lay on Jamie’s basement floor sharing the same sleeping bag and telling each other their secrets. Nate wonders what secrets Jamie would tell him now.

Inadvertently, he considers his own: I’ve never gotten over you.

“I’m not the best at taking compliments,” Jamie answers, “but I guess it’s different since you’re pointing a gun at me.”

“I am not pointing!” Nate insists seriously, jerking back from the gun as Jamie laughs. “That’s like, the first rule of gun safety.”

“Oh shit, really?” Jamie teases. “What are the second and third?”

“I don’t know,” Nate counters, wishing his wit were quicker than his hummingbird pulse. “Keep the safety on. And uh…don’t give it to a toddler.”

Nate can’t believe how badly he’s fucking this up. But at least he didn’t ask something boring like how was college and get an answer like good.

Jamie’s grin wavers as he fights—and fails—to keep his expression serious. “You see any toddlers out here?”

“Nope. But if that toddler is killing your parents’ cattle, I’m terrified of it,” Nate says. He lets the joke settle, then, “Is that why you’re back here?” For the first time in ten years, he doesn’t add. “Couldn’t they have gotten someone else’s help? Couldn’t they have just asked me themselves instead of sending you over?”

Nate wouldn’t expect Jamie to come over his way in any situation.

“There’s a family wedding,” Jamie explains, and Nate’s heart surges with unexpected warmth. A wedding. It’s nice to think about. Nate imagines Jamie wearing a suit.

The night hides his blush, then Jamie adds, “I wanted to see you.”

“You wanted to see—” Joy bubbles up; Nate swallows and lets it burn his throat. “Don’t make me laugh. We haven’t talked in a decade.”

“I had some shit to figure out. And then, what was I supposed to say? After everything that happened, I didn’t want to wait five years to like, text you a picture of my dinner for you to absently heart react. I wanted to talk to you like we’re talking now.”

“How are we talking now?”

“I’m asking…how do you do it?” Jamie asks, his voice lowering insistently. “How did you manage to be queer in rural Iowa?”

“Who says I am?”

“The earring,” Jamie smirks. “But also, your sister. She said you haven’t seen anyone since me, so I figured…”

“That you were so good, I never wanted anyone else?”

The words are too vulnerable, flying like moths to the flame of Jamie’s intent expression amidst the gentle flickering of night-drunk fireflies.

“I mean…” Nate trails off. “I haven’t wanted anyone else.”

“I guess it’s my turn to tell you a secret, then,” Jamie says, staring at Nate like he had in that sleepover dark, back before anything bad ever happened to Nate. Back before Jamie freed himself from all the things Nate wouldn’t understand. “I wanted you to kiss me.”

Nate’s pulse skips. “That night?”

“Any night. Every night,” Jamie breaks off, almost pained. “But when you kissed me then…I couldn’t get over this fear that it was a woman you wanted to kiss. I felt like you were kissing someone who didn’t exist.”

“What would happen if I kissed you now?”

“That’s what I’ve spent ten years waiting to find out.”

Nate leans in to finish what he started so many years ago.

He tears off Jamie’s night vision goggles before tossing his own aside. Their mouths collide, heat pooling low in Nate’s stomach. The warmth of Jamie’s body against him is intoxicating, their teeth at his bottom lip sending a thrill through him.

Nate relishes the feel of Jamie beneath his hands most of all because it means Jamie’s real. Jamie’s here, not a picture on a screen, not an apparition in the porch light.

“So,” Nate breathes along Jamie’s neck. “What did you find out?”

Jamie’s fingers move deftly beneath his shirt—

And a crack startles from the trees.

Nate pulls back, pulse hammering behind his ribs.

He pulls his night vision goggles back down over his eyes, the sweep of surreal green sudden and jarring. Jamie is inches away from Nate and yet less real than ever, a ghastly palette of negative space.

“What was that?”

The hook-handed man.

Jamie’s teeth are an uncanny neon in the night vision goggles, and Nate’s lips throb with the memory of their bites. But Nate can’t help thinking of a sharper set of teeth, lupine and dripping, just beyond the brush. If it’s a coyote at all.

Chills grip Nate as he holds Jamie, feeling their pulse throb in their wrist for an entirely different reason from before. Wind whispers through the corn:

something’s here something’s here someone’s here

“Be quiet,” he whispers to Jamie, and he’s suddenly not sure whether he wants to hear what’s there or whether he doesn’t want what’s there to hear him.

This is the reason they’re here in the first place. Not to kiss, not to catch up, not to stare at Jamie like the world is an endless maze of dark roads and their face is the only map. To find whatever’s out here and kill it.

Nate scans the corn stalks with his night vision goggles, anticipation rising in his throat like bile. He knows what’s out here…

At least, he hopes he does.

“When you said something is killing your family’s cattle…” he murmurs, almost afraid to ask the question. “How did they die?”

Jamie swallows so hard Nate can hear it, the chill in his voice so much colder than the humid air around them. They’re countless miles from any ocean, but the sound weighs down on him like a thousand miles of seawater.

“A coyote,” Jamie repeats, as if convincing himself. “They were torn apart like you’d expect—bite marks, intestines spilled out, unambiguous. Thing is…”

Panic spikes in Nate’s gut.

“One of them…there was something off about the injuries.”

Nate doesn’t say that all of this is off, that he doesn’t understand how he can still feel Jamie’s lips on his while he’s clutching the gun in his fear-tight grip.

“What do you mean?” he asks, not wanting to know the answer.

Jamie swallows. “Its throat was slit.”

The coyote bursts through the corn.

It lunges, all yellow eyes and bared teeth in its frothing rabid mouth. There’s a flash and a crack and someone is screaming, and Nate spends seconds processing the surreal, impossible red of its blood before he realizes it’s both of them.

The gunshot rings through every nerve of Nate’s body.

Jamie’s breath pants raggedly beside him, louder than the squelching leak of blood into grass. Rabies; been a long time since there have been cases in these parts. Nate realizes that he’s not sure what to do next. He’ll have to move the coyote’s wet corpse before it draws others like cockroaches. This must be a biohazard, more dangerous than the intoxicating throb of Jamie’s jaw as his teeth hollow the inside of his cheek. The coyote was rabid. There could be more.

But all he wants is a drink and a shower.

And he wants both of those with Jamie.

“Can we…” he starts, compelled by the impossibility that if he lets Jamie leave now, this night somehow never happened. “Would it be crazy to ask you for a drink right now?”

Jamie’s eyes alight. “Would it be crazier for me to say yes?”

There was never any ghost on the road, but the ones in Nate’s truck are innumerable.

When he reaches over to raise the manual lock of the passenger door and let Jamie in, his hand passes through the memory of them laughing the first time they took this old van out for a joyride, going no further than the boundaries of the rules their remaining three-out-of-four parents had set.

Jamie doesn’t say I’m sorry for never answering your messages.

Nate doesn’t say what does that kiss mean for us?

Instead, their conversation volleys like pebbles striking the metal of the truck.

“Can you believe—!?”

“I could’ve passed out!”

And laughter, laughter, laughter.

“Oh my god,” Jamie cackles, his laughter as deliriously hard-won as Nate’s own. “That was scarier than the time we snuck over to mine to steal my parents’ vodka during one of our sleepovers and my mom thought we were burglars.”

“And she just grabbed the closest thing—”

“A drying rack!” Jamie bangs their fists on the console for emphasis. “It literally still had all of my stuff on it. She would’ve beaten me to death with my own underwear.”

Nate doesn’t ask what the kiss means because he already knows that all of these memories are realer than the memory of the night Jamie left. That everything he ever wanted to tell Jamie with those messages, he’s already said.

Headlights burn behind them in the dark.

Inexplicably, Nate shivers, remembering the way his papa’s headlights would sweep through his bedroom window on the way up the drive and wake him from sleep—how the night felt too still once the headlights stopped.

Nate’s own headlights strobe along the corn’s grasping leaves, the electric flare of highway signs. Usually, there aren’t too many people out here, certainly not at this hour. But he can’t be the only one who needs a drink tonight. He hopes Jamie wants one too, and then, whatever comes after.

“Do you want to swing by the bar?” he asks. “Or we could—

Then headlights flare off the rearview mirror, forcing Nate to squint.

“God, that guy is tailgating the absolute shit out of me,” he grumbles. But there’s no other lane to move to, just the narrow stretch of highway that leads to an ever-dwindling list of destinations.

It’s a no passing zone, but it’s dark enough that Nate would see oncoming headlights. Ideally, the other pickup truck should pass him. But he moves over into the lane for oncoming traffic to force the black truck tailing him to move ahead.

It doesn’t.

Nate catches the faintest glimpse of motion behind tinted black glass as both vehicles line up side-by-side for only a moment before the other slows. It’s not just letting him back in—it’s actively slowing down.

Headlights flare off the lines in the road, the flashes as staccato as Nate’s pulse. He moves back into the correct lane as a semi barrels past, shaking the edges of his rust-bucket truck. He learned to drive in this truck, but his memories go back even further, crying in the passenger seat after his papa left, his hiccupping breaths fogging the window. His mama would reach across the expanse between them to draw a smile in the condensation. When Jamie left too, he’d trace the memory of it. He grew up in this truck.

Hell, he’ll probably die in it.

“He must not have realized how fast he was going,” Jamie reassures him, their lips quirking up into a smirk. “Or how much of a jackass he was being.”

“Let’s just swing by Sal’s and grab a six pack.” Nate considers the convenience store a mile up the road, how much extra time he’ll get with Jamie if they just head back to the farm. There won’t be any need to call it a night and go home if they’re already home.

Besides, tonight he doesn’t want a crowd or a wall of loud music and sweating bodies pushing Jamie even further away than he’s been for so many years. He wants the two of them sitting on the big rocks by the firepit behind his house, Jamie’s face alight in the flickers of warmth. He wants them to watch the stars when they’re not watching each other, and make wishes that they’re not afraid to try and keep.

Headlights burst into his vision again.

The cold grip of fear tightens around Nate’s chest. The pickup truck behind him is so close—just a breath behind his own.

He speeds up.

It speeds up.

The two trucks rocket down the highway, Nate’s old tin can shuddering with the sudden burst of throttle. Jamie cranks down the window to stick a particular finger out of it, but Nate can see the unease creeping across their face. Nate recalls a discontinued beer that the bar used to stock: Faster, Faster, and Disaster. He thinks of it as he flattens the gas pedal to the floor faster, faster, and—

“Holy shit,” Jamie shouts as an all-consuming force shakes the vehicle. “He’s ramming you!”

Panic rocks Nate like the strike of the truck’s bumper against his. They’re only just up the road from Sal’s now, but what’s going to happen when they pull over? Is this motherfucker going to pull over, too?

If he does, what will Nate do?

Nate’s truck can’t go any faster, and he can’t take much longer, and the sound of Jamie’s breathing is so loud it rises above the stuttering of the engine—so ragged Nate can almost count a third set of breaths. The bumper feels insubstantial between him and whoever’s driving this death wagon, like danger is already in the backseat. For a second, Nate’s paralyzed by the closeness of it, as if someone’s right behind him.

The lights of Sal’s Convenience Mart leap from the darkness, barely seconds up the road at the speed they’re going. Time slows even as Nate’s heart races.

He has to pull over. He can’t pull over.

He has to.

With a horrible groan, Nate’s tuck swings into the parking lot of Sal’s, a heavy thud striking the inside of the truck as whatever’s actually in the backseat knocks against the inside door. Jamie lets out a startled scream as a half-forgotten pack of the cigarettes Nate pretends he only smokes when he’s been drinking drops down from the passenger side visor, striking them square on the nose. And the truck—

The truck disappears into the dark of night. In seconds, its headlights are nothing more than a bad memory.

“Jesus,” Jamie spits out, a curse or an invocation. “Before, the drink was just an excuse to spend more time with you, but now I actually need one.”

As much as Nate’s heart is already racing, it manages to skip another beat. “Who says you need an excuse?”

And as much as Jamie’s still breathlessly panting, they give him a heart-stopping grin.

He knows Jamie’s only here for a family wedding, but tonight, he can pretend they’re here for longer than that. It doesn’t even feel like pretending, when to Nate they’ve been here the entire time—a memory of them racing down the road, the way he swears he can almost see their face in the window every time he drives by their family farmhouse. When it snows in the winter he remembers hauling their ass up the hill in their dented red metal sled, and when he goes to bring the horses in at night, he walks by the rough patch of wood where they carved their names into the side of the barn.

“I guess all I need is you,” Jamie answers. “So don’t go anywhere, okay?” Then they hop out of the truck, leaving Nate airless and more than a little in love.

It doesn’t happen until they’re halfway across the parking lot.

Hands flash from the backseat.

A knife glints in the dark.

The images strobe like the flare of headlights. Nate sees them from a distance, as if he’s watching through a streaky windshield. Blood on the dashboard. His?

Splatter on the hands reaching weakly upwards. His.

The knife saws, pain sears, and it’s over. A horn sounds for a second outside the gas station before Nate’s limp head flops wetly to the side, red gushing from the gash in his throat.

The crime scene photos won’t show that there was a man in the backseat.

They’ll only show the blood.

The memory of that taunting wave stalks Kai all the way up the driveway.

The car lurches over a pothole, and the dark flashes with animal eyes. There’s a reason Kai doesn't drive this way at night, when the endless expanse of the highway makes all your thoughts louder. Theirs thrum like the party in front of them, all lit up like a haunting: get out, get out, get out.

They tried.

It’s not like they want to be back in college. What they want is a different version of this story entirely, one where they never had to drop out, one where they’re here tattooing flash Freddie hands and Jason masks on partygoers and laughing because it’s somewhere they actually wanted to be.

But in this world, the real one, somewhere isn’t anywhere at all.

They turn the key in the ignition and leap out of the car. There’s yet another version of this night where Logan invited them and they came—a version of this night that feels too close, like breath on the back of their neck. Like there’s another version of Kai here at this party.

And she’s the girl Logan’s looking at.

Kai jumps when they see his face through their car window, pulse tripling in their chest. Right now, he doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d be buzzing Kai’s apartment at the remotest hours of the night or tucking cryptic notes in their windshield wipers. But with his boy-band hair and his nepo-baby wallet, he’s only ever looked like the kind of guy who gets whatever he wants.

When he wanted Kai, he had them. And when he didn’t, he had them too.

They have to, have to remember he was never what they really wanted.

“It’s Kai,” they say, opening the car door into his chest.

He coughs out a gulp of air, and Kai seizes their moment to pass him and jiggle open the back door. “You called for Kiley. My name is Kai,” they elaborate, hauling the precarious stack of pizzas into their arms. “How exactly were you expecting those creepy ass notes to reach me if you didn’t even address them to the right person?”

“What notes?” he asks.

Their stomach drops—

And almost, all ten of the pizzas too.

“Shit!” Kai yells, fumbling their armload of pizzas into the car door.

“Let me help,” he rushes in, their hands touching underneath the boxes.

Kai’s pulse spikes.

Nausea grips their stomach as they stare through the house’s open doorway, like they’re the one slorping back ectoplasm jell-o shots. But that’s everyone inside, completely oblivious to the fact that the lowest-hanging fruit at the party is in the driveway getting emotionally annihilated.

“You know the notes I’m talking about,” Kai accuses, because he has to.

If Logan didn’t write them, someone else did.

And suddenly, that’s the worst possibility Kai can imagine.

His eyes widen innocently, and Kai can feel his pulse thrum where their fingers brush. “Creepy ass ones?”

Kai’s arms are trembling as they wrestle the boxes back into their arms. “Thinking of you,” they enunciate. “For a good time, call—come on, Logan. It’s not what the notes actually said. It’s that you’re leaving them for me in the first place.”

“I didn’t write that many,” he protests, leaning against their car in his historically inaccurate toga. Still, his eyes crinkle at the edges with a smile. “But okay. Guilty.”

He should feel guilty—he just doesn’t.

Two ghosts lift their bedsheet costumes to vom enthusiastically off Logan’s balcony, a dark spatter hitting the bushes below. There are too many ghosts here, but most of them are whooping around the bonfire spitting smoke on the front lawn, laughing with all the memories Kai never got to make.

They’re ready to make different ones now. But these are still all they have.

“This isn’t a date, Logan. I’m on the job,” they insist, holding the pizzas outstretched.

His smile is wide, but his voice is tight. “You’re a pizza delivery driver, not an FBI agent,” he jokes, but there’s a hard flatness to his tone that makes Kai’s stomach roil. “You can come in for one drink, right?”

“In fact, I cannot.”

“Then you can help me carry the pizzas inside,” Logan implores, his smile as sterile as a hospital floor. “Right, Kai?”

Next to Kai, some grimy dude in a pink tracksuit wielding a plastic katana turns to look. He’s clearly supposed to be Pete Davidson from Bodies Bodies Bodies. Honestly, even one body is a lot to handle. Kai’s never known what the fuck to do with theirs.

Which is maybe why they find themself moving toward the front porch.

Unease stirs within Kai at the idea of going inside because they know what the other version of themself would be doing at this party—what Logan would be doing to her.

It’s another rule, too, not one Kai’s parents made for them, but one they made for themself. One they had to abide by, out here on lonely roads with creepy men who smile too wide and live just too far off the highway. Never go inside the houses.

But that was always a rule for Kiley. And Kai isn’t—can’t be—her.

“Right.” Kai agrees before they’re sure about it, their hands touching under the pizza box as Kai staggers up toward the house’s open mouth. They tell themself how this is going to go so they can let themself believe it will. They’ll put the pizzas down on some table, get the money.

Go.

But fear grips Kai like the artificial fog leaking over the lawn as they step across the threshold and into the dark of mood lighting where the only mood is dread. Maybe the road is remote and threatening, but if they were in their car now, then they could drive away. The only safe situations are the ones they can control.

They’re not alone here at this party—a fact that might keep a different version of them safe. But in a world that wants them dead, maybe they’d be safer if they were.

Their pulse kicks as they wind through the crowd. The house is a labyrinth of memories and bodies—Kai staggering down the stairwell at last year’s Halloween bash to vomit off the front porch. Kai, peeling their revealing costume off in Logan’s hallway bathroom without caring if anyone saw. They were barely present, barely here, and somehow, memories of them are everywhere. Memories of someone. The person Logan wanted.

Fuck, they feel like they’re chasing a Mario Kart time trial ghost of themself, and they’re not getting out of here fast enough. The walls throb like something alive and as they swim through the thick, sweaty air, they almost feel like they’re being digested.

They know this house, even though they were drunk here so often they only half-remember it, only half-remember the person they were inside it. They should be at the kitchen by now.

But was that ever where he said they were going?

Kai jerks to attention and processes the fact that they’re at the back stairwell.

That leads directly up to his bedroom.

The crowd is thinner here. There’s enough room for Kai to lurch back. Sudden cold grips Kai’s fingers where they’re no longer touching. “Okay. Where should I put this down?”

“I was thinking maybe you wanted to come upstairs with me.” Logan smiles, but in the darkness of the party lights, his teeth glow an unearthly red.

Panic floods Kai’s lungs as they jam the pizza boxes precariously onto an end table.

“Really?” Kai demands, their voice uncomfortably high in their throat. “Or you were thinking you wanted me to come upstairs with you?”

“You drove here, didn’t you?” He tries, hitting Kai with that same charming smile he first gave them at freshman orientation. Back when Kai had no idea what they wanted, so Logan wanting something from them was enough.

It was never love at first sight. It was tolerate at first day of school. The only thing they ever had in common was that they were physically in the same place. But even as close as they are now—too close, Logan’s face a shadow, a hollowed menace of negative space—they’ve never been further apart.

His hands don’t know that.

His fingers lock around Kai’s shoulder; terror beats a desperate rhythm behind their ribs.

“You already came all this way. Why not stay a little bit longer?” His voice is as insistent as his grip, steering Kai towards the bottom step. Their stomach plunges. They’ve walked up these steps a thousand times. A version of them is walking up them now, so close through time that Kai can hear their feet creaking on the stairs.

“I doubt anyone even knows you’re here.” He smiles.

Threatens.

Of course someone knows where Kai is. It just doesn’t matter at all.

Their lungs tighten. Nobody from the pizza shop is driving to get them. No one at this party even noticed them walk in. They might’ve been to Logan’s parties a thousand times, but they’ve never really been present here or anywhere at all. The girl he knows is immaterial, a creak on the stairs, a scream beneath a song.

But Kai’s not her.

She didn’t have a knife.

“I doubt anyone would notice you’re here unless you ran out of beer,” Kai accuses, jerking from his grip. “I notice none of your twenty thousand closest friends have said hello.”

His smile contorts. “Did they say hello to you?”

“They didn’t even recognize me,” Kai shoots back, feeling their anger deep in their throat. “What do you even want from me, Logan?”

“A good time,” he answers, and Kai’s stomach turns. A good time is not what waits for them at the top of the staircase. “You really left me hanging, Ki—”

Kai doesn’t realize they’ve flipped out the blade until Logan gasps.

“I left you,” Kai says, because someone needs to say something. Because Kai is so sick of not having the chance to say anything at all, for the reedy pitch of their old voice to be the only one Logan hears. “I said we’re done. That’s all the closure you need.”

“What are you gonna do?” Logan demands, awestruck. “Stab me?”

“What were you gonna do?” Kai snaps back. “Drag me up the stairs?”

The bass throbs; Kai’s heart pounds with it. Maybe he doesn’t feel like the man he wants Logan to see, but he sure as hell won’t be the girl Logan remembers.

“You didn’t say that we were done. You said you’re a dude.” Logan laughs incredulously, like Kai’s a joke they’re both in on.

“Wrong,” Kai corrects, the blade glinting in the mood light. “I said, I’m a man.”

The highway is Kai’s escape. But some things, they can’t outrun.

Logan’s note sits beside them in the passenger seat: thinking of you.

With a defiant kick of their pulse, they open the window and let the note drift out. Night air spills in; Kai’s half-drunk off it. Kai’s only been gone for forty minutes, but it feels like they’ve been gone for a thousand years longer than that.

They used to think that if Logan was thinking of them, it was almost like he was keeping the past Kai alive in a way they didn’t want him to—like their parents’ photo collage—a dysphoria murder board of Kai in dresses across the years. They thought that every time he wrote them a note, it was like chanting their name in a bathroom mirror, somehow summoning back another version of Kai.

But if Logan is thinking of them, it’s because there are so few other thoughts going on in that overprivileged head of his.

Still, something stirs uneasily in their mind.

If on the phone, Logan said Kiley…Then why would the graffiti say Kai?

Suddenly, the car starts to slow down.

They jerk upright, surveying the road. But there’s no smear of blood, no accusatory flash of an animal’s glowing eyes. There’s only Kai and their knife, glinting on the dashboard.

Where the gas gauge is completely, inexplicably, empty.

The billboards changed one night.

Maybe it was the liquor Sam used to stash under his passenger seat or the god he forgot how to pray to. But when Sam got behind the wheel a little too liquored up, something was wrong with the words on the signs, or something was more wrong with him.

Back when he lived in New Jersey, he drove a choking stretch of highway, traffic crawling and the thickness of industrial air almost tangy even through closed car windows. All the billboards shouted at him. Billboards for lawyers that probe ARE YOU HURT? Religious billboards that promise IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO SAVE YOURSELF.

The night of his grad school graduation, Sam’s party trickled slowly into a party of one, even though the drinks flowed faster and faster. He got his latest rejection from a teaching position right before he was supposed to walk—so he didn’t. No pictures were taken. Fireworks exploded then fizzled on the field, like every dream he had for the future.

He felt eyes on him as he staggered to his car that night, the thousand smiling eyes of all the previous graduates in the photos that lined the entryway to the literature building, laughing and drinking champagne. But Sam was only doing one of those things.

Sam hadn’t let himself be in the photos they took of the grads. He wouldn’t ever be one of the students lining the hallways of the lit building, and he wasn’t there now, walking too many paces behind himself, forever unable to catch up.

He took the highway, or the highway took him.

The guardrails. The taillights. The billboards. They swam and swam until he wasn’t sure if he was driving the car or simply remembering how to do it.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE, he told himself, waiting for his sign, for a billboard to tell him that there was still another chance, to promise that he was on the right fucking road, to make him believe he was somewhere he could still come back from.

But the billboards were empty—except the one that wasn’t.

The highway went suddenly strange as he strained to read the billboard through the warp of his own consciousness, his fear blurring his vision like condensation on glass. Moments before, the road had been full of people, but now, there was only him.

Except that was impossible. Except that this was one of the busiest roads on the East Coast. Except that it was only nine p.m. Except that Sam had been dissociating into the license plate on the car ahead of his, wondering what the odds were that it read S-A-M.

A chill doused him like a splash of cold water.

This was the same road he always took. He was in the right place.

But the billboard only read:

TOO LATE.

That was when he hit the guardrail.

The road was a series of adjectives: loud, fast, instantaneous. He slammed on his brakes. Swerved. Dodged. There was a squeal of tires and a hiss of breath and then he was back on the same road he’d been on before, alive and afraid and allowed to leave by the grace or whim of whatever had chosen to see what he’d do next.

He always wondered whether he really passed out at the wheel—the only explanation he could come up with, since he never told the story to anyone else—or whether something had warned him. If something might warn him again one day.

Sam drives the wooded road the next night.

He doesn’t even need to take it, should probably have taken his customer, a red-faced, angry man who won’t stop yelling into his phone, the faster way, but he needs to know.

He needs to know if this road has something to tell him.

It doesn’t, except that he probably should’ve gotten a different second job. The not-so-upstanding businessman doesn’t tip him and leaves an actual three-star rating, probably for Sam’s reluctance to enthusiastically agree with him when he finally hung up and called the person on the other end of the line the asshole.

But the headlights don’t appear, and Sam’s not sure why he wants them to.

He knows the headlights shouldn’t be there. He looked it up on a map. There are no stores. No houses. No ways onto the road besides the one he and Emily and June had taken. And he doesn’t know why it’s bothering him so much, but it is.

For headlights to appear halfway down the road, someone would have to be lying in wait, their car parked on the side of the road, the seconds counting down for some unlucky passerby to blaze past. Someone was following them. Or no one.

The radio static crackles, the whisper of an almost voice dipping into the space between the stations. But it’s gone in a breath, and he’s left feeling as though he’s been picking at a wound, leaving himself raw.

This is irrational. He was clearly caught up in June’s story, or he could tell himself that, but he knows he won’t listen. Something happened on this road.

Or maybe something will happen.

The night he saw the billboard was the worst night of his life. The years ahead of him a stretch of black road, potential that leaked from him like champagne glug-glug-glugging onto the floor. More than anything, he needed a message. He needed a sign.

What does he need now? For Aaron to forget about New York?

Anger grips him in its fist. He lets out a long, slow breath, hoping the sudden heat will eke out with it. It’s not his place to be frustrated with Aaron for following his dream.

You’ll get a job there too, Aaron had promised, the ghost of his grin dissipating as he took in Sam’s expression. We’ll go together.

Like they need children’s literature professors everywhere. As if he’s a trauma nurse instead of some guy who found five separate occasions to cry while reading Charlotte’s Web.

As if he’d ever go back.

He barely notices when he makes it to campus, the sky overhead a dusky purple even though his dash clock reads four p.m. He sleepwalks his way into the building, teaches his class without eliciting a single laugh (except one at his expense when he practically tripped into the table). But who’d be laughing at a surprise in-class essay, the only thing he can force himself to make them do?

Heart pounding, he stares at the clock watching the time run down. He doesn’t get forever before Aaron makes his decision about the job offer. Sam himself doesn’t need a single second. He’s not going back. Not anywhere near where Old Sam still haunts those roads. What Aaron wants is to hear that Sam’s coming with him.

Sam hopes he’s strong enough to tell Aaron, go.

“Sam?” June asks from the front row, her pencil tap-tap-tapping like his pulse in his neck. “Professor? Class ended five minutes ago.”

“Right,” Sam answers, startling back into himself. “Now, I want you to trade papers with the person sitting next to you. For your homework, you’ll use their thesis statement to craft your own outline using as many different points as possible. See you next week!”

Sam pretends he doesn’t hear the collective groan (what collective groan?) and is ready to return to his existential malaise when there’s a little knock on the edge of his desk.

“Emily,” he says, pleasantly surprised that anyone would willingly stay in his classroom after that show of complete whatever-it-was. “I see the hook-handed man didn’t get you.”

A smile flashes across her face and straight into his heart. “Well, the very idea of the hook-handed man isn’t only puritanical, it’s also probably ableist as well. What’s wrong with having a single hand? Tell me anyone would go around calling you two-handed Sam.”

He answers with his own appreciative smile. “I don’t think anyone wants to call me anything nice after an in-class essay.”

She stalls for a minute, her eyes skimming over the mess of his desk as he gives her the space she needs to ask whatever it is she needs to ask. He wonders if it’s related to QSA or to June, who Sam can see waiting just beyond the door.
“Do you want to talk later?” Sam probes gently.

“It’s…” she trails off, her cheeks suddenly red. “Are you working again this weekend?”

He laughs. “I work every weekend. Your quizzes don’t grade themselves.”

“Your other job.” She hesitates. “I…I need a ride.”

Sam stares at her curiously, trying to process if there’s something else she’s really asking. Of course he cares about all of his students—Emily maybe among the most. Their lips twist as he sees them go deep into thought, and he remembers the way they barely swallowed their sob when they told the group that this was the first time they ever came out to anyone in person. That the first time they tried to buy a book from the LGBT+ YA shelf at the Barnes & Noble in town, they felt so exposed that they left the store empty-handed.

But as much as he cares about her, they can never be friends. She’s eighteen, he’s nearly thirty. He’s her professor, even as young as he is. Maybe she needs a ride, but he can’t always be the one to give it to her—especially not to a bar.

“I’m not sure I can,” he says apologetically, then backtracks to make sure he’s not misunderstanding her request. “Are you…is everything okay?”

She lets out a long, slow breath. “I’m tired of creeps on these roads.”

Sam’s suddenly alert. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened,” they answer on a sigh, their fists tightening at their sides. “There’s just a thousand things that could’ve. The other day I had a driver refuse to pick me up in the right spot. I was just wandering down the side of the road and I felt like…headlights were following me. But when I turned around, I didn’t see the car. Or the other day when I was grabbing groceries in town and I swear—” she breaks off, her voice tight. “I swear I saw something move under my car. I know it must’ve been an animal, but…”

“Did you report it inside the store?” Sam presses, every bit the responsible adult these kids turn him into—the one he wants more than anything to be.

She shakes her head. “It was so dark. I don’t know what I saw.”

But she saw something.

“Listen…” Sam starts, wondering if he’s making a mistake. “For now, I’d recommend setting your app so you can match exclusively with women drivers. But if you’re ever seriously in trouble and you need someone you trust to help you, you have my number at the top of your syllabus. If you don’t feel safe, you can give me a call.”

Her eyes brighten, and she nods vigorously. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me too much,” he jokes, trying to keep his voice as warm and comforting as he can. “You don’t know what homework you’re all getting next week.”

She strides from the classroom and he makes for his car. For the thousandth time, he wishes he were the version of himself that Emily knows: someone who appears with a smile in the classroom and is gone when the lights turn down.

Outside, the darkness is as complete as Sam’s desperation. When he climbs into the car, his phone lights up in the cupholder, the message repeating itself as if Sam hasn’t thought through the words again and again since it came in a few minutes ago:

WE NEED TO TALK.

Maybe Aaron needs to talk—Sam needs to run.

The night air chills his face as he drives the wooded road with the windows down, the wind bitter with cold. Bare branches leer at him, jagged as his own thoughts. Maybe he’s right to feel like someone’s along this path, watching.

That he isn’t the worst person on this road.

Kai’s mom always said pretty girls can’t pump their own gas at night.

It was always a can’t instead of a shouldn’t, their mom’s bad ideas transubstantiated into fact like wine into blood. If they pumped their own gas at night, she said, then someone would hurt them. But after carefully navigating to the station they pump the gas just fine—the only threat the memory of her voice, closing around Kai like the darkness encroaching at the edges of the parking lot.

Do you want to end up alone?

It’s what she asked Kai when they told her they started injecting testosterone since they figured asking forgiveness and not permission was as divine as two nails through the palms.

But Kai’s not alone now; there are two other vehicles in the parking lot.

Unease pricks like goosebumps at their skin as they listen to the whoosh of gas, glancing over their shoulder. It’s not that they think anything’s going to happen to them, when so much already has. Kai just knows that something could happen, not tonight, but always.

They check their phone and shoot River a text—barely survived Logan’s party—as their stomach roils with dread. There’s nowhere they want to be less than back at the party pinned under Logan’s leering stare, memorizing their body like a poem he can’t wait to recite to the class. But Kai wishes they were going to any party of the non-pity variety. River might be only a phone call away. But they’re also a thousand miles away.

Kai swallows. The man they want to be feels more out of their grasp than ever.

There’s a click, and they pop the nozzle back before climbing into the car and turning the ignition. Then they hit the accelerator.

The car lumbers awkwardly forward.

Something’s wrong. Cold fear ensnares Kai as they open the car door once more, glancing around to make sure no one is approaching the car before they step onto the asphalt. For a second, they’re seized with childlike fear, the terror of dangling your feet over the edge of the bed and knowing something could reach out to snatch you.

No one’s there, but fear still catches Kai in its grip.

There’s a nail in the tire.

Kai’s pulse triples as they take in the sight. They don’t remember the feeling of hitting anything on the drive over here, when they were too focused on the feeling of running away. But the nail is here regardless, and they don’t know if it’s by accident.

Panic wafts off Kai like the ghosts of their breaths into the chilly October air. When would Logan have the opportunity to jam a nail in the tire? He could’ve done it when they were talking outside of Kai’s car…but Kai would’ve remembered him bending down, wouldn’t they? And who carries nails in their pocket?

Someone with a plan.

Their blood freezes like rain into asphalt. Logan’s never had a plan more complex than being the kind of guy that girls inexplicably fall for. Some of the notes were definitely his—but what about the one in the bathroom, the handwriting unfamiliar with haste or rage?

What about the sinister wave in the rearview mirror?

Kai shudders. That wasn’t Logan. And this doesn’t feel like Logan either. Every burst of headlights on the highway is suddenly a threat. They have to get out of here…

But they have absolutely no fucking idea how to change a tire.

Tears threaten but don’t fall, the parking lot blurring into a haze of light. This is Kai’s actual, big-time nightmare scenario. What the hell are they supposed to do? Go in there and ask for help? The attendant won’t know if Kai’s a man or a woman when he looks at them.

Or even worse, he will.

An obviously queer man, incompetent and helpless. A woman, alone and crying.

Whatever Kai looks like tonight, it won’t keep them safe.

They swipe at their eyes with their hands, stand up tall. Young boy. That’s the best they can do right now. Someone that a stranger might want to help without expecting anything in return. If people want to write off the fact that Kai’s forearms are covered in tattoos no kid’s parents would allow, then let them.

Even if it’s one more thing that makes Kai feel like a drawing of a man, poorly recalled from memory. An all-too-obvious forgery.

Kai shakes the thought from their head. This is a run-down, twenty-four-hour gas station, not a museum. If they go inside the store, they can at least sus out the vibe, and see if anyone might be willing to help. And it’s safer in there than out here.

Apprehensively, Kai crosses the parking lot. The automatic door whooshes open silently, no chime alerting anyone to their presence. They might as well not be here at all.

The gas station is almost liminal in its brightness. Hot Cheetos and Hostess Cakes paint a dizzying palette in the fluorescence, all the colors of a lucid dream. Head swimming, Kai stares out at the black expanse of asphalt.

Kai can’t help but remember a story their mom told them: the one where a woman (it’s always a woman) goes into a gas station (it’s always a mistake). She’s scared of the man behind the counter, and as she leaves the store, he starts to follow her toward her car the way she knew he would—knew someone would—so she sprints for her door. She’s scrambling so desperately for the keys that she doesn’t realize that last horrible second that he’s mouthing something, a warning:

He’s in the backseat.

Kai tears their gaze away from their car in the parking lot, a shudder erupting down their spine. They may not be a woman, but the world doesn’t know that—even if it did, it’d do that much worse.

Then Kai meets someone’s eyes and freezes.

A man leers from the next aisle over.

Foolishly, Kai turns to look behind them—as if this is a sitcom where his gaze is an embarrassing wave at the wrong person and not something infinitely more sinister. He stands motionless but clearly staring like a haunted house actor, waiting like he’s a part of the scenery until the moment he won’t be.

Slowly, slowly, the man smiles.

The world tilts sideways.

This is Kai’s warning that there might be something more wrong tonight than Logan’s gaze lingering on all the places their curves aren’t anymore. That notes might come from people who want to scare you, but nails are from those who want to hurt you. That there’s always someone in the backseat.

Step by staggering step, Kai moves towards the parking lot.

They can’t look afraid. And if they have to be afraid, then it has to be the type of fear that makes them think. They amble out of the gas station like any other unassuming man, and their assumption is this: they don’t have to belong on this road at night; they just have to drive it.

They need layers.

Yanking an oversized flannel from the trunk, which they check for any disturbances, they bulk themself up, standing with their chest out. They don’t usually think they look like a man, but they don’t look enough like a woman that anyone would notice now, their body bared like a weapon in the dark.

If gender is a performance anyway, then this is Kai’s: pulling up an article for how to change a tire and getting it the fuck done. They can do this.

Step one is finding a safe location, an irony that’s not lost on Kai as they skip step two—turn on your hazard lights. But as they remove the hubcap and wield their wrench, an inexplicable feeling of power overtakes them. They didn’t need anyone’s help.

Maybe the world doesn’t need to be safe for them to feel safe in their own hands.

Kai texts their boss (contact name: HATED ENEMY) that they’re going to be an hour late getting back before they get their hands dirty. His only response is a thumbs-up, which is both a confirmation that he’s dickishly indifferent to basically any bad situation Kai can find themself in and that someone knows where they are.

And for the first time in as long as they can remember, they feel like they’re right here.

They move on through steps two through twelve, easier than they thought it would be. Grime streaks the patchwork tattoos snaking up Kai’s forearms as they screw the new hubcap back on (step fourteen) sweating and grinning and ridiculously pleased with themself.

Letting out a long breath, they stand and survey the parking lot. Maybe something bad could’ve happened tonight. But because of Kai, it didn’t.

Yet.

The word hangs like a breath half-caught in Kai’s throat when they realize that the same two vehicles are still in the parking lot.

Kai’s pulse quickens, their fingers tightening around the wrench. It’s been nearly an hour, the deepening night a weight they can feel pressing down even without checking the time. One of the vehicles might belong to the attendant, but—that means the other one’s his. The man from the store.

There’s only one thing he’d still be here for: Kai.

Kai’s eyes shoot up to the gas station window, where rows of snacks glow ominously in the harsh white lights like the opening scene of a nightmare. The store is bright, too bright, an overcompensation. There’s less out here in this flat expanse of parking lot, but what there is, is more real and infinitely more dangerous.

The man’s not in the store.

Kai surveys the lot, pulse spiking in their chest as their mind flickers through the possibilities like headlights through guardrails. Maybe the man knows the owner and he’s loitering in some breakroom waiting for him to get off his shift. Maybe he’s an employee, too. Maybe he’s been in the bathroom. Maybe Kai’s paranoid, paranoid, paranoid.

And maybe they’re not.

They gather their gear, jump in the driver’s seat, fling their shit in the back. Too much has gone wrong tonight for Kai to believe more isn’t coming. In the span of a single breath they’re back on the highway, not a soul in sight.

Just a pair of high beams too close in the rearview mirror.

Sam’s still thinking about the road when Aaron answers his question.

The question had been how long did this take you to make? The dinner spread between them decadent and colorful. There were only a few possible answers.

“I’m going to New York” wasn’t one of them.

Sam freezes, a deer caught in the rapture of headlights.

Aaron sighs, pushing his plate aside to take Sam’s hands across the table. Panic climbs Sam’s throat, but he tries not to show it on his face. He must show it everywhere else, because Aaron says, “There we go. You’re completely freaking out.”

“That’s not fair,” Sam answers. “This is a huge decision—”

“It’s the only decision,” Aaron answers.

And Sam has to agree.

He breathes in-in-in, itchy apprehension of a terrible inevitability skittering like insect legs across his skin. Aaron’s a dancer who’s always loved the city as an idea, who tried to make it there as a teenager for a few months and left empty-handed. He was never going to stay here.

At least now, Sam doesn’t have to be the one to tell him to leave.

“I understand,” he says, fighting to keep his voice as level as possible. “This is your dream. You can’t say no to everything you’ve ever wanted.”

Even if that doesn’t include me.

“I’m not saying no to you,” Aaron insists, kneading Sam’s palm. “I meant what I said. You can come with me, Sam. I want you to come with me.”

Sam sucks in a sharp, dizzying breath, his head swimming as he stands up. Their house is open concept, so he sees straight into the living room, to the photo of them holding each other beside the creek at Nockamixon State Park, water from the creek splashing the lens as they beamed up at the camera. To the photo of them on the first day of school, standing proudly on either side of the Cardale College sign as if they were ten years old but ready to take on the world together.

“You can take some time to think about it,” Aaron interjects, his stare nakedly hopeful. “I won't go anywhere until the end of the semester.”

Heat builds behind Sam’s eyes. It seems unfair somehow that Aaron should be the one to start this, but Sam is the one who has to deliver the final blow.

Inadvertently, he thinks of June’s story—the second Lover’s Lane, the rows of identical, white-painted houses. Sam wouldn’t mind driving somewhere he didn’t have to answer Aaron’s pleading eyes. It doesn’t sound so bad, hanging in suspended animation.

His phone buzzes on the table.

He’s itching for an out. An excuse to leave. To run. Shame eats at Sam fingertips first as panic buzzes through his body. He knows the feeling too well—the feeling of wanting to hit eject on his own body, to let someone who cares less stare out from behind his eyes.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Aaron says, pushing his chair into the dining room table and crossing the living room to Sam. “We can’t talk about this if you don’t say anything.”

But what is there to say? No amount of talking will get Sam any further from the truth—that he’d rather be anywhere else than the place he fled.

“I’m thinking…” Sam panics, gesturing to his phone. “I should answer that.”

This time, Emily’s alone when she leaves the bar. She’s drunker, too, her body language in italics, her forward slouch a single word: Help.

She staggers across the parking lot, where lights reflect from the bar on rain-soaked asphalt like pink and blue puddles she could step in. Sam climbs out of the car, holds the door open for her as she slumps into the passenger seat. He can see the deliberate, stilted way she’s moving, like she’s trying to keep a grip on her body but it’s slipping through her fingers. She doesn’t want to be this drunk around him. He can tell from the way she stares out the car window instead of at him, her head bobbing as she fights to hold it up.

“Emily…” he asks gently, once he started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “Is everything okay?”

“Thank you for coming to pick me up,” she manages, her voice liquor thick. “I didn’t know if you would. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

There’s the real answer to his question.

An ache blooms in his chest as he looks at her head slouching against the window, ragged breaths drunkenly fogging the glass. When she speaks, her voice almost sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else, a ventriloquist’s act on her own body. She doesn’t have to feel alone on Thanksgiving. She doesn’t have to be alone at all.

“You don’t have anywhere to go?” he asks, already knowing the answer. It’s Wednesday night. If she had anywhere to go, she’d be there already, and the bottom of a bottle is no place at all.

She shakes her head limply, staring through the windshield at the grasping trees.

Sorrow rises in his throat, and he stifles it with a sharp breath. His home isn’t only his to offer—and it’s certainly not his to offer now.

He tightens his grip on the steering wheel, silently warring with himself, winning and losing at the same time. He feels suddenly exposed in the moonlight, as if he might glance in the rearview mirror to catch the same vulnerability he sees on Emily’s face reflected in his own. He’s always been afraid that he wasn’t good enough: not a good enough professor, a good enough boyfriend, a good enough person. At least tonight, he can pick one if he can’t choose all three.

“Have dinner with me,” he offers, his voice cracking on the offer.

She’s silent.

Shame weighs his body to the floor, so heavy it’s as if his own self-loathing is what’s holding down the gas. Why would he be able to help her, someone who can barely help himself? He looks at Emily and wants to fix her and wants to be her—face slack against the fogging window, someone else driving him home. He wishes he could be so drunk that someone else would be having this conversation—that some other version of him could take all the hard parts, even if they got all the good parts too.

“Cookie and Cream make a fantastic green bean casserole.” He labors for the joke, feeling inexplicable heat burn behind his eyes. “Considering they don’t have opposable thumbs.”

And then, in spite of everything, she laughs.

His heart soars.

“Is that a yes then?” he asks.

“This is so embarrassing.” She presses her hands to her face, murmuring through her fingers. “This is like, the drunkest I’ve ever been in my life, and I’m inviting myself to my professor’s Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t even have anything to bring.”

“How about…” Sam hesitates. “How about we call it even if you tell me what’s wrong?”

“It’s me.” Emily dissolves. “I am.”

His pulse knocks within his chest on a door he tries so hard to keep closed, his own shame desperate to answer hers.

Gently, he grips her forearm, pulling ever so slightly so she’ll look at him. “Emily,” he insists, pulling all the authority he can into his voice. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“I can’t even get a haircut,” they whisper, liquor and tears mottling their cheeks as they rip their hat off their head. Hair falls in layers around their face—choppy and short at the front, longer at the back. “I mentioned to June I always wanted short hair and she told me I’d look fantastic. But when I got to the salon…” She hiccups out a sob, shoving her hair back under the hat. “I couldn’t do it. I kept imagining people looking at me, my family looking at me, and knowing I’m like this. Knowing I’m some…some deluded freak who doesn’t even know what gender she is. If I don’t know, how am I supposed to explain to them?”

“You don’t have to know,” Sam assures them. “And you don’t have to explain.”

“But I have to do something,” they answer, their breaths ragged. “I feel like the guy in that creepy story June told. Like I’m just walking down a street full of houses that I can’t go inside. No place is safe. No place is right.”

“This place is safe,” Sam answers, gesturing beyond the trees to where the campus lies miles down the road, waiting for them. “This place is right for you.”

“Then why does everything feel so uncomfortable?” they ask.

“Because it is.”

Emily looks at him, confusion glistening in their unfocused eyes.

“That’s what a school does,” Sam murmurs, turning onto the same road where June told her story, where the headlights materialized from nothing. “It challenges you. It challenges me. It makes us into the people we really are, and that’s not always the people we’ve been.”

“Who are you?” Emily asks, their voice breaking. “The best professor anyone’s had?”

Her eyes are brimming, but tears leak from his own.

That’s when the headlights appear halfway down the road.

Chills creep through his body with every drop of the white light that pours into his car.

“Just a guy who hates these dark roads sometimes,” Sam tries to laugh it off. “Especially after June’s story. She should really be a writing major.”

“I’m sorry,” Emily murmurs, and Sam can tell in the weariness of her words that she’s apologizing for more than the phone call.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Sam insists, even as panic grips him and tightens its fist. “Least of all yourself.”

But Sam’s sorry he took this road.

There shouldn’t be anyone here.

The trees hang over the road through the woods like a cupped palm, ready to press in and crush him. There were no cars behind him when he pulled onto the road. There haven’t been for the minutes he’s been counting, breathless. But now—

Headlights grip him like a tractor beam, pulling in, in, in.

His car slows. He can’t help it. He’s suddenly so scared it feels like he’s driving through glue, every inch of pressure he puts on the accelerator too much of an effort.

He checked on a map—there are no other roads that turn onto this one. No stores. No houses. No anything at all but him and the road and the blaze of light behind him, engulfing the safe bubble of his car. No one but the driver.

And whatever it is he wants.

Foolish panic seizes Sam, and he fights to keep his hands on the wheel. Why did he want to know so badly if there was something out here? Now he knows that something is happening.

It’s happening to him.

“Let me be the one to apologize for speeding,” he forces out, hitting the accelerator. The car lurches forward, just like the pickup truck behind him.

He wonders if she’s too drunk to feel his panic or if she’s drinking it in. Tension clutches at every muscle in his body. Nothing’s happening at all, but his pulse kicks into overdrive as his own nightmare overtakes him. Someone’s in the driver’s seat of the truck behind him, someone whose gaze he can’t meet. What if it’s me? A voice inside him demands—loud, louder than the engine’s asthmatic rattle as he presses the gas pedal harder.

He knows it’s impossible. But he’s always been afraid of ghosts.

He’s seen his own too many times not to be.

“What’s that guy’s problem?” Emily demands, glancing over her shoulder. But Sam knows that it’s really his problem. That whatever’s out here is his to outrun.

“It’s just some asshole,” Sam states it into being, trying not to believe his own worst fears. Trying not to wonder if it has anything to do with the rainbow sticker of Pennsylvania on his bumper. He’s not sure which is more terrifying and dangerous, if the truck behind him isn’t real, or that it is.

But there’s a horrible sound, and he knows one thing’s real: The thunk of metal on metal.

It reverberates through his skull, his teeth grinding together like bumper into bumper. Emily lurches in her seat, and Sam throws an arm in front of her. This is real. This is real, and he’s the one in charge, when he spent so much of his life in the passenger seat, letting another version of him drive.

Tonight, it’s Sam at the fucking wheel.

He bounces down the narrow back road like he’s been launched out of a pinball machine—all bright lights and dangerous speed. The headlights accelerate behind him; his pulse races in his chest. This campus is safe. He said it himself. He’s safe, he promised. He’s not letting anything happen to Emily tonight.

He jerks the wheel as they pass the long access road to campus, the white letters of the Cardale College sign leaping out phantasmal in the darkness. And the truck behind him tears on into the night until it’s one more bad memory. Sam finally lets himself breathe.

It’s the last breath he ever takes.

A man lunges from the backseat, his knife glinting impossibly in Sam’s dashboard lights. Sam and Emily start to scream, but only one of them finishes. Sam’s words become a choked gurgle as the knife digs into his throat. Cutting. Sawing. Unmaking.

The pain is unbearable, his vision narrowing to a single point: Emily raising her bag to strike the man in the face. Emily grabbing Sam’s face and saying words he’s only distantly afraid to realize that he can no longer hear.

Save yourself, he tries to say as the knife strikes again, shreds of her hair falling to the floor of the car as she lurches back, back into the door handle. It springs open into the night, and she falls out, practically rolling on the ground before leaping up and sprinting from the car.

Save yourself, Sam thinks to the beat of her pounding footsteps.

But in the second before the darkness swallows him, he allows himself to think that maybe he saved her after all.

They aren’t Logan’s headlights.

Kai knows Logan’s car as well as they know Logan, better than they’d like to. The vehicle behind him is a black pickup truck with newer, slicker headlights, the kind of searing white that pierces the night around them.

Kai turns the music down until all they can hear is the thrum of tires on asphalt and their own ragged breaths, so thick they can almost imagine someone breathing alongside them. They don’t know these headlights are following them. But they’re too close behind—a distance that would amount to almost anything, given how on edge Kai is tonight.

A distance that amounts to three feet,

two,

one.

Their pulse spikes as they step on the gas, relief flooding their lungs when the move puts some space between them. But it’s still not enough. Kai can’t be paranoid like their mom. If something bad is going on, they need to know in some place other than their gut.

The exit signs looms, glowing luminescent in the toothy gleam of the white headlights blazing behind. Kai speeds up, up, up and cuts across the lanes without using the turn signal.

There. They squeal into the exit lane.

Kai rockets around the curve onto the backroads, traffic lights bobbing menacingly with their red lights like apples in a tub. Their body goes cold and airless. They’ve plunged their head into the water and are being held under. The pickup truck is barely a whisper behind them, its tinted windows revealing nothing but the danger they already know.

They slam their foot to the floor. The shitwagon squeals through intersection after intersection, the stoplights strobing like Kai’s pulse in their ribcage as the truck behind them follows through every single one.

Their breath hitches in their chest. The test was supposed to be getting back on the highway. They take the next exit going in the same direction as before and see if the truck followed. But there’s nothing else to see.

There’s only what to do next.

Kai forgoes the highway and hits as hard a right turn as they can.

Suburban sprawl leers as Kai turns right, right, right again, the opaque windows of darkened houses as impenetrable as the tinted windshield pressing in closer. They loop in a square around the same street of ranch-style houses, lined up so orderly that the impossible closeness of the headlights boring into their car feels dreamlike and without logic.

So much has happened tonight, and this is what he can’t believe: They actually want him to know they’re following.

“Fine, assholes,” Kai spits, trying to sound braver than he feels. “I know.”

But what they didn’t stop to consider is that Kai knowing they’re following them makes things fucking harder for the mystery driver.

He blows through the red lights.

They flash as Kai passes under them like prizes in a video game, putting a few extra feet of distance between him and the truck as he turns down the lightless, winding road through the trees. They can certainly try keeping up with him here.

They know these roads like the back of their goddamn hand…

They burn through at such speed that Kai’s gasps are loud. So loud they nearly echo, breath-breath-breath like the thud of their racing heart. The headlights are so white he can barely see the road, a narrow, almost one-lane nightmare that skirts precariously through the trees. But he chose it because he knows it.

And he’ll have to know the road to survive.

Those fucking LEDs. They’re so bright he can hardly make out the truck behind him. He can’t see the road ahead of him. He feels for it, his memory reaching like outstretched fingers in the dark. Halfway down the road, there’s a one-lane covered bridge. That’s where they’ll have to slow down. That’s where Kai will have to outrun them.

They gain on him, he speeds up. His stomach dips as the car plunges downward into the road’s open, ready mouth. Their vehicles wobble closer together and further apart—two hands that won’t touch, almost applause for the feat Kai hasn’t yet pulled off.

He turns so hard his teeth crack together, a squeal of tires piercing the night as the truck turns behind him. There’s a heavy thump in the backseat, and he can’t take the time to think about what it might be. He hasn't been able to search for his phone this whole time, one more bullet point on a list of things gone wrong.

His buzzer blaring in the middle of the night.

Logan’s note tucked into his windshield.

HERE FOR A GOOD TIME.

His thoughts twist like the road beneath him. Maybe he can’t call for help. But he doesn’t need help. He needs to see the license plate.

He rockets the car down forks in the road, through trees that menace in ghostly night vision in the sweep of headache-white headlights. It doesn’t matter if he escapes this truck if whoever it is could just come after him again. That’s not safety. It’s running.

And Kai already knows what that’s like.

What he doesn’t recognize is the sudden darkness.

His stomach flips, spots burning in his vision. Did they turn off the road? Turn off their headlights? That’d be suicidal on a road this narrow. They’d have to be—

Beside him.

The truck edges closer to Kai’s shitmobile, as if preparing to push him off the road. His stomach prepares for a much steeper drop, a fall into nothingness. It’s obvious what they want: to pull ahead of him, to slam on the brakes. He’ll ram them or he’ll stop, but it won’t matter. Backing out, turning around—it’s not going to happen here. Whatever they want from him, they’ll get it.

Unless they hit the bridge first and crash.

Kai’s heart hammers in his chest, blood roaring in his ears. He’s been trying to count the minutes, but time is wrong out here, the night oozing around them like tar. He doesn’t know how far the bridge is at all. He just needs to get there first.

He wills his shitwagon forward, edging up, up, up. Squinting, he can make out the first few letters of their license plate, but it gives him no relief. He hears it. A second set of breaths in the dark. It’s the man driving the truck. He’s closer, realer than Kai can stand for him to be. And he wants Kai fucking dead.

His vision goes spotty as he presses the car forwards, his thoughts pounding—the bridge, the bridge, the bridge—in time with his pulse. He’s imagined his death a thousand times. Dragged out of the wrong bathroom and slammed into a wall. Eyes moving up and down his body in a bar, locking on whatever part of him that makes him wrong.

He knows what it’s like to know that people want him dead. But he’s never, ever felt like this—what it feels like when someone wants to kill you.

In a flash of headlights, the bridge looms.

He’ll cross it. Or he’ll die.

There’s only one fucking option.

A scream rips from his throat as he slams his foot to the gas as hard as he can. Flies across the bridge. Hears the scrape of metal on metal, flashes his eyes to the rearview mirror. Their headlights fade like a bad memory and he doesn’t know why his heart won’t stop racing until he realizes tears are pouring down his cheeks.

All he has is the first few numbers of the license plate, but that has to be enough. Besides, the truck hit the bridge. That’s evidence enough that the story he’s telling is true, even though his head swims at the thought of telling it to anyone. What would they do?

Why would they listen?

That thought is enough for him to slow the car down.

Spots from the LEDs still flood his vision. His fingers tingle as panic crushes him in its grip. It’s over. It’s over, and he’s supposed to feel relief. But instead, all he can feel is that no one will care that this happened to him.

Not when he’s the person it happened to.

He faced his ex. He fixed the car. He outran the bad guy. But survival isn’t something he’s won. It’s only all he gets. As a trans person, it’s all he’s ever been allowed.

But Kai has always wanted more than he was ever supposed to have.

He’s calling the cops. They don’t have to believe him. He just has to believe that he deserves for them to. Determination tears open in his chest like the snick of a switchblade. What comes next will be so much less impossible than everything else he’s been through tonight. He’ll call them. He’ll tell them the license plate number. All he needs are the guts he’s had all evening. All he needs is to find his goddamn phone.

Thinking it’s fallen behind him, he glances in the rearview mirror.

And

his

pulse

skips.

The man from the convenience store is in the backseat.

And Kai’s own knife is clutched in his hands.

They don’t scream. They can’t scream. They’re so scared that they can barely see him; he’s more shape than person, ghoulish in the moonlight leaking through the grasping arms of tree branches. He’s close, closer, too close, his grip tightening on the handle of the blade as he unbuckles his seatbelt.

“Are you ready for a good time?” he asks, his voice ragged like gravel crunching under tires.

The dark closes in on either side of Kai and bile climbs their throat. FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL KAI AINSLEY. They don’t know why he wants them dead, but he doesn’t need a reason. No one ever had a good one. Now they have only an instant before he lunges. Before he does what the world has always tried to do.

But if the world didn’t succeed, this motherfucker certainly won’t.

Kai slams the gas pedal to the floor. For only a second the speed pins the man to the backseat. There’s no way to outrun what’s in the backseat. Kai’s been riding around with the threat of himself for years, a tick, tick, tick countdown to death or survival. There’s no way to escape something that’s so close you can feel it breathing down the back of your neck.

There’s only an inevitable crash.

It occurs to Kai then: the man’s seatbelt is unbuckled.

Fear crystalizes into icy clarity.

It’s the same feeling they got the first time they approached Planned Parenthood to find picketers already there. The same feeling they got when their mom said hello? on the other end of the phone and in the silence once she hung up.

Kai doesn’t know if they’ll survive this. But they’re willing to die trying.

Before the man can lunge—before white-hot pain tears into their neck, before hot blood rolls down their collarbones, before their vision narrows to a pinprick—Kai wills the man to go through the windshield and floors it. Directly into the nearest tree.

The last thing they hear is the crunch of metal on bark. They have a second to think I did it.

Then comes the pain and darkness.

BREAKING: One dead in car crash that lead to capture of possible I-80 serial killer

Investigators have announced a major breakthrough in their pursuit of the vicious I-80 serial killers. Married couple Taylor and Taylor Shore, now colloquially known as the “Good Time Killers,” are facing allegations that they killed eight LGBTQIA+ identifying men beginning in Spring of last year. The first victim has been identified as Nathan Hardwell, twenty six, a lifelong Iowa native and dairy farmer. These killers have been linked to the murder of beloved local professor, Samuel Slate, twenty eight, who taught children’s literature at Cardale College in Butler County, PA.

Cardale College held a candlelight vigil Saturday night to honor the memory of Samuel Slate as well as the other victims. One of Slate’s students, a witness to the crime who wishes to remain anonymous, calls Slate’s murder an “unspeakable tragedy” and asserts that “queerphobia destroys lives, including the lives of everyone who holds hate in their hearts.”

Taylor L. Shore and Taylor W. Shore, now deceased, have been identified as a New Jersey based couple whose alleged killing spree began when their oldest child came out to them as a gay man. For the past year, Taylor and Taylor Shore are accused of having targeted men within the LGBTQIA+ community on and around I-80 in what police describe as an attempt to punish their own son, who left home and made efforts to hide his location upon being rejected by his parents. Taylor L. Shore is now in police custody pending her upcoming trial.

Kai Ainsley, a nineteen-year-old pizza delivery driver, is believed to be the sole survivor of the couple’s trail of carnage. Although Ainsley suffered severe injuries upon crashing his car with Taylor W. Shore inside, he has since made a complete recovery.

Investigators report that Ainsley was driving his car from a gas station on I-80 when he was allegedly tailgated by Taylor L. Shore, who attempted to run him off the road. This detail is consistent with other victims, including Nathan Hardwell, whose pickup truck crime scene photos show was rammed repeatedly in a high-speed chase before his death. Police now believe that while Taylor L. Shore would tailgate victims in order to arouse fear, Taylor W. Shore would find an opportunity to enter the victim’s backseat while the driver was disoriented.

Although it’s believed that Taylor W. Shore would typically wait for the driver to stop their car in what they believed to be a safe location before carrying out the crimes, Ainsley discovered Shore in his backseat before Shore was able to attack and kill him. Acting quickly upon seeing that Shore’s seatbelt was not fastened, Ainsley reportedly drove into a tree in an attempt to save himself. Taylor W. Shore did not survive the crash.

Thanks to Ainsley’s ingenuity, investigators across several states have been able to link the crimes and identify the patterns with which these murders were carried out. When asked if he would share what he would say to Taylor L. Shore, Ainsley told journalists, “Absolutely, I’m here for a good time. You never could have taken it from me.”

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YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF THE CHAIN.

Come back every Tuesday … if you dare.

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About the author

Kade Dishmon is a queer and trans acquiring children's book editor and a graduate of The New School's Writing for Children & Young Adults MFA program. He resides with his fiancée and two fluffy cats in Manhattan, a move which led him to sell his beloved yet profoundly janky car (lovingly named The Swag Wagon). While he enjoys eating bagels and speed walking in the city of dreams, he still regularly hears the call of the open road goading him to break all kinds of limits. His writing is represented by Daniele Hunter at McIntosh & Otis.