at me right now, Elias?”
“Absolutely. You should have seen your face!”
“Okay,” he said. “It’s fine, go ahead. Make fun of the skinny ace Jew.”
I suppressed a manic giggle. “You’re Jewish?”
“Well, my dad’s about as Jewish as a ham-and-cheese sandwich.” He smirked. “But it comes down on your mom’s side, and her maiden name was Adelstein.”
“And she named you Ripley?”
“Believe it or not.” His smiled faded, and an instant later he wasn’t the best friend I’d known for years; he was the alien who had loped down the walkway next to me. He fidgeted with a small black ring he was wearing on the middle finger of his right hand. I needed to say something to puncture the uncomfortable silence.
“Joking aside, what did you expect?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Someone more gothy, I guess? Pixie cut, winged eyeliner. Maybe those vampire contacts.”
I crossed my arms. “So basically, you saw me as a character on a CW show about high school Wiccans.”
“I would totally watch that show!”
“I would, too.”
He smiled. “How about me? Am I what you expected?”
The truth was I had expected someone geekier, less put together. But I was ashamed to admit it, so I said, “Almost exactly.”
“Suuure,” Ripley said, rolling his eyes. “Well, anyway, my look has its perks. I’m going as Mark Zuckerberg for Halloween.”
We both smiled.
“Epic hair,” he said. “You could play guitar for Seven Seize.”
“At public school they used to call me Homeless Hermione.”
He grimaced. “That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah.”
My gut felt full of hot rocks; we weren’t supposed to meet like this. We weren’t supposed to meet at all. And now Ripley had showed up at my lowest point ever. I didn’t want him to see me like this, when I couldn’t hide what a mess I was.
He must have noticed a change in my expression, because he asked, “What’s wrong?”
When I answered, it was almost a whisper. “I thought we promised we’d never meet in person.”
He looked suddenly miserable. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. “It was a stupid promise.”
Ripley smiled and let out a relieved laugh. “Yeah, it was.”
My phone buzzed. I assumed it was Dad wanting to know why I was taking so long—but the name on the screen was Liam Miller.
I felt suddenly dizzy. Too many emotions were rushing through me at once, and I couldn’t track them all. I couldn’t take the call, not with Ripley standing right here. What would I say? In a slight panic, I sent it to voice mail.
“Who was that?” Ripley asked as I stuffed the phone into my pocket.
“One of those stupid robocalls.”
Ripley seemed skeptical but didn’t press it. “Now that I’m here, how can I help?”
“We have to get to Las Vegas.” I tugged on my hair. “There’s a bus every eight hours. We should have enough to get there.”
Ripley shook his head. “I have a better idea.”
He grinned and held up a set of car keys.
Once I explained that we were due in LA for a tech rehearsal in three days, Dad reluctantly accepted Ripley’s offer of a ride—though he insisted on driving, since Ripley had been awake for twenty-four hours and I was still shaken from the accident. We bought road food and filled up Heather’s Hyundai, and it was a little after five p.m. when Ripley curled up in the back seat, Dad took the wheel, and we set out northwest on US 60.
While Dad drove, I paged through his journal, reading every entry, examining every diagram, absorbing every detail of the theory and technique behind the Truck Drop. I went through the execution step-by-step, looking for ways to expand it, to make it more surprising. After three hours, I was carsick, my eyes stung, and I had zero ideas.
I closed the journal and looked up. We were crawling along the highway, pursuing an endless snake of red lights.
“Where are we?” I asked Dad.
“About two miles south of Kingman. There’s some kind of pileup ahead.”
I glanced into the back seat and saw that Ripley was still asleep.
“Pull over,” I said. “I’m going to drive for a while.”
“Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I might be coming out of it.”
And despite the carsickness and my burning eyes, I thought I was coming out of it. A lightness had stolen over me during the ride, and I felt my mind clearing, shifting into a higher gear.
Dad glanced in the rearview mirror, possibly to check that Ripley wasn’t eavesdropping.
“It’s okay, Dad. He knows.”
Dad nodded. “You know, Ellie, it’ll be