Water blurred the pavement. Clouds blurred the sky. Condensation blurred the car windowpanes. Fatigue blurred my thoughts. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon but it felt like midnight. Four o’clock . . . that meant it had been—hmm, let’s see . . . five hours on the road so far. Or wait—this should be Eastern Time, now, not Pacific Time. Three hour time difference. So that would make it two hours? No, that couldn't be right. . . I groaned internally, and decided I should start my own system of time. By Megan Standard Time, we had officially been on the road Way Too Long. And we still weren’t even to Boston yet. This was going to be a long drive.

Even if I had wanted to move, it still would have felt like the world’s longest car ride. Funny how things always take longer when you hate them. I tried not to hate moving. Wasn’t easy, though. It was just much too easy a thing to hate. The hassle, the frustration, the good-byes. The more we moved, the less we seemed to own—as if Cynthia was preparing to move on to the next place right when we got there, and subconsciously refrained from obtaining new things we would only have to pack up. So it wasn’t so much the packing and unpacking that I hated. It was the good-byes. There are only so many good-byes a human being is programmed to handle. After reaching that threshold, you can’t make any more. So you stop making friends that you know you will one day have to say good-bye to. And that makes a person lonely.

Especially a twelve-year-old person with one living relative: a very probably actually insane Aunt Cynthia.

You couldn’t tell it just by looking at her. She looked about as boringly normal as you can get: short brown hair, going grey and dull brown eyes with contact lenses stuck in them. She talked little and sometimes stared blankly ahead for hours on end. She never appeared to have a job, yet we always had food on the table and a roof over her heads. Sometimes I pretended the explanation for this was that she was secretly an out-of-control criminal robber, just to make her more interesting. That wasn’t a very convincing explanation though, because she never seemed even remotely suspicious or crafty, and besides which, she was afraid of everyone but me.

Sometimes I wondered which of us was doing the raising: me or her. Cynthia had adopted me when I was four, after my parents and grandmother where killed in a car crash. But sometimes it felt like I was the one who was meant to raise her. I was the one who did the errands. Every place it is essential for a successfully balanced and healthy American citizen to go— grocery store, post office, bank, you name it—Cynthia was afraid of. Cynthia cooked, did the housework, and drove, and that seemed to be the extent of her capabilities. When a soapy plate slipped and shattered on the floor, accidentally cutting her toe, she shrieked and would not stop crying until I ran and got Band-Aids from the bathroom and cleaned off the blood. Even then, I was the one who had to sweep up the broken plate and finish washing the dishes, while Cynthia went to bed.

Perhaps I should be grateful that Cynthia demonstrated such generosity and caring by adopting me. But one cannot help feeling at least a little bitter when one has had to look after one’s supposed caretaker for the majority of one’s scrambled and lonely existence on this planet Earth.

“Megan,” Cynthia said abruptly, startling me out of the disgruntled wanderings of my thoughts.

“Yes?”

“Where is Boston?”

I looked sideways at her from the passenger seat. “Massachusetts. Why?”

“We’re in Colorado.”

“So keep driving.”

And we did. But we never got to Boston. I didn't know if I was more relieved or infuriated. Cynthia hadn't known Boston was on the other side of the United States. Even if she had, it wouldn't have mattered. We ran out of gas halfway through Kansas. And money. As if my life couldn't get any worse. Now stuck in Kansas with no money and no way out, we sat and stared out at the rain together.