Neil nodded as she spoke. He chewed the same gum he gave for foul balls at Sun Center, blowing bubbles as wide as his face.

Billboards announced Great Bend’s restaurants. The Black Angus, Smith’s Smorgasbord (“Down Home Cookin’ at Rock Bottom Billin’”), Jim-Bob’s, and Country Kitchen (“Free 72 oz. Steak if Eaten in One Sitting”). Neil’s mom leaned into the front seat. “Who’s hungry? Let’s get something in our systems before the wine and cheese and the trek through nature.”

We decided on the Kreem Kup. Its sign sported a towering ice cream cone that twinkled and glittered in white neon even in the blistering daylight. Mrs. McCormick led the way, the licorice still in her hand. The twenty-or-so customers stared as we stepped inside, some literally leaning from their vinyl booths, their heads craning toward us. The waitress scurried away from a frying cage of onion rings and took position at the counter cash register. Neil ordered for us.

“You’re not from around here, right?” the waitress asked.

“We’re exchange students from a small carrot farming community in Iceland,” Neil said, scratching unabashedly at his crotch. He indicated his mom with a nod. “She’s our geography teacher, who joined us to write a book about the flora and fauna of Kansas.” Neil’s lies were amazing.

“Is that right.” The waitress handed us a plastic placard displaying the number twenty-nine. I grabbed it and slid into a booth, across from Neil and his mom. On the café’s opposite side, a group of teenage boys watched us. They were all ugly. Their eyes gave close scrutiny to my haircut, my eyeliner, Neil’s earring, my clothes, my fever blister, and Mrs. McCormick’s breasts. I heard a drawling voice spout the word “homosexuals,” almost cheering it, as if it were the final word in a national anthem.

I mouthed “white trash.” Neil’s mom winked at me. “They’re just jealous,” she said. Neil stuck his chin in the air. He was relishing the moment, having grown accustomed. I feared he would spit or throw ice at them.

The waitress brought the food and plucked the twenty-nine card from our table. Cocktail toothpicks skewered each bun like teeny, festive swords. Mrs. McCormick’s pork tenderloin leaked a puddle of grease, tomato slices and wilted lettuce leaves beside it. “This should hit the spot,” she said.

Under the table, my foot brushed Neil’s ankle. He moved his leg and looked out the window.

We were half finished before the assholes at the neighboring table mustered enough courage to approach. One of them accepted some sort of dare and walked toward our booth. His front tooth was chipped. He wore a studded leather armband, black cowboy boots, ripped jeans, and a T-shirt showing an intricate drawing by some German “artist” who’d been popular with kids in art class at school. In the drawing, stairs spiralled and wound around and between and across each other, creating an optical illusion. The scene was the exact opposite of Kansas’s elementary landscapes.

The lamebrain crossed his arms, biceps flexing. He cleared his throat, and I knew something wounding and sarcastic would spew forth. “We could tell you weren’t from around here.” His chipped tooth resembled a minuscule guillotine, suspended from his puffy upper gum. “And we just wanted you to know”-pause-“this is an AIDS-free zone.”

My mouth opened. I wanted to bludgeon him, but instead attempted to send him an especially damaging telepathic message. Drop dead, shithead was all I could generate.

Mrs. McCormick fared better. She looked him straight in the eye. “You are an evil little man,” she said.

It was Neil’s turn. “Fuck off,” he told the kid. Then he leaned across the table, in full view of the entire café, and placed his tongue between my still-parted lips. He was only doing it for the effect, but I closed my eyes, forgetting the context for a split second, letting the restaurant’s humdrum atmosphere melt around me, cherishing the tongue that hadn’t been inside my mouth in months.

“Fucking faggots,” the kid said, and headed back to his buddies.

I remembered how, before sex, Neil would crunch cupfuls of ice; the chill that emanated from his tongue as it searched my mouth. There, in the Kreem Kup, his tongue tasted just the same, felt just as cold. I wanted him to thrust it past my teeth, down my throat, to choke me.

“Let’s leave,” Mrs. McCormick said. She dropped the remainder of her sandwich, and we scurried off. As we passed the jerks’ table, two legs arched out to trip us. Neil breathed in deep and belched at them, and I remembered the little boy’s voice on the tape I’d heard in his room. I still hadn’t asked him about that.

Without turning to the café’s windows, I could feel their eyes on us. “That was horrific,” Neil’s mom said. She crawled into the Gremlin and started laughing. “And greasy, too. We’ll not come to the Kreem Kup again.”

On to Cheyenne Bottoms. I pulled into a gas station, its green brontosaurus logo painted on a cement wall. Mrs. McCormick leaned from the back window and asked directions. “Two blocks that way, make a right, then two more blocks, watch for the sign,” the attendant said. He fanned his arms back and forth like windshield wipers.

We followed his instructions. I piloted the car onto a road that twisted away from Great Bend’s city limits. We moved farther from everything. Two signs advertised the nature conservatory, one in the right ditch, one in the left, simple black CHEYENNE BOTTOMS block letters against white. The left sign had been tampered with, and the words now read HEY TOM.

When we reached the place, the world seemed to open up and level out. Cheyenne Bottoms was a five-mile-by-five-mile stretch of marshland, a scene that seemed more typical of, say, Louisiana than Kansas. Its air was heavier, smokier. There were few trees; in their places stood tall, rustling grasses and ferns, azure reeds and bracken. Banks of cattails swayed in the breeze, poking from shallow ponds and mud hills. Everything looked scrubbed with bleach. “Amazing,” I said. We left the city behind, going deeper into this new realm.

Birds ran everywhere, their matchstick legs skittering across mud the color of peanut shells. Killdeer mingled about, thrilled, guests at an amazing party. Their forked footprints left zigzagging patterns on the mud. A cream-colored egret stood alone, looking forlorn. “Look there,” Neil’s mom said, indicating a glassy pond where wood ducks swam in figure eights. The scene looked unreal, almost comical. I half expected a crocodile’s jaw to pop forth and devour the birds.

Neil peered into the rearview, then over his shoulder. “There’s no one around for miles,” he said. “We’re alone.”

I parked the car in the road, in a spot I estimated as the exact center of Cheyenne Bottoms. The heat slammed down. Neil and I got out, and a mosquito lighted on my forearm. It left an apostrophe of blood beneath my hand.

Neil’s mom wriggled free from the backseat, the sack snug in her fist. She arranged the wine and cheese on the car hood. She pulled out three chocolate bars as well, all the while staring, mesmerized, at a flowering shrub nearby. The blooms grew close to the earth, thick white-petaled knobs surrounding red centers that stretched forward like the bells of trumpets. A few bees hovered there. Neil walked over and plucked a flower from the bush, then brought it back and tucked it behind his mom’s ear.

A bullfrog began croaking. Neil tugged at his shirt-one he’d stolen from United Methodist Thrift-and tossed it through the open front seat window. He gulped his wine and sat on the hood, beside the block of cheddar. “Aaaaaaah,” he said, arms stiff in front of him. At the sound of his voice, the frog silenced.

I removed my shirt as well to expose my white skin. Mrs. McCormick donned sunglasses and slipped from her dress, revealing a tight bikini. We joined Neil, our legs stretched on the hood, our backs and heads against the windshield. Neil rested between us, where he belonged. For him, New York was eight hours away.