Page 54 of Our Last Resort

18The Only Town We Knew, Hudson Valley, And Outside-Outside

Eighteen Years Ago

We learned to optimize our trips. As soon as Émile’s world was out of sight, we ran. I taught Gabriel how to look at the bend in the road and find the tangent, that invisible line at the top of the curve that meant you ran the most efficient course.

I retrieved Émile’s money from my mattress before every trip and put it back when we returned. Except the dollar bill with the kissy lips. That one stayed hidden, always.

Our initial twenty minutes stretched into thirty. The first time we reached that duration, we found a pharmacy, a couple of side streets off the main road.

The store was an explosion of colors and letters, a treasure trove of unfamiliar items. For the first time ever, we felt the artificial breath of AC, an unnatural cold snaking up our sleeves, down our collars.

My eyes landed on a sign markedPain Relief.Gabriel and I spent ten minutes trying to decipher brand names and dosages.

“Can I help you?”

An employee, “Max,” according to his badge, appeared next to us. He was probably—I realized years later—trying to figureout why two kids wanted to shoplift a bunch of ibuprofen, and how we could be so bad at it.

“No, thank y—” Gabriel started.

I cut him off.

“He gets headaches,” I told Max.

“Okayyy,” Max said slowly. “What…kind of headaches?”

Gabriel shrugged.

I answered for him: “The…bad kind, I guess.”

I told him how Gabriel had collapsed, how he’d thrown up. I repeated what Gabriel had said about feeling like a hammer was beating against his skull, a hammer on fire.

“For migraines, you’ll need the prescription stuff,” Max said. I had no idea what he was talking about. “But in the meantime, you could try these. Take them as soon as you start getting symptoms.”

Max picked up a bottle of vermilion pills. He went to hand it to me, then took his hand back.

“You two aren’t from that…cult, are you?”

Émile had warned us about people saying stuff like that. They were to be avoided. But we wouldn’t encounter them, Émile assured us, as long as we stayed where we were supposed tobe.

Max was one of them.

And he held the pills.

“We’re not,” I said too fast, my cheeks burning.

Max studied us for a couple more seconds, then shrugged.

“Cool,” he said. “Heard the guy who runs it is a real freak.”

Gabriel opened his mouth. I spoke first.

“Total freak,” I said, blocking the word from my brain as I repeated it.

Max handed me the pills.

I forced myself to walk, not run, to the register. The lady behind the counter announced that I owed her twelve dollars and ninety-six cents. I reached into my pocket and handed her Émile’s ten and three singles.

The lady took the cash like it was nothing. She counted mychange and waited for me to extend my palm so she could drop coins onto it.

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