“On your mark, get set, go!” he shouted.

After a single turn, she’d lost sight of him. Two more turns and she couldn’t hear anything but the occasional gust of wind through the dry corn. Another two turns and she hit a dead end. She backtracked quickly. Her heart was going hard, skipping a beat here and there, then trying to compensate, spilling together into a constant thrum. It was too quiet. Even the clouds had stopped moving.

She was seized by irrational fear: what if, somehow, this was all still a part of Shawna McGregor’s dream? What if she had never woken up? What if the conversation with her mom and seeing Connor and all of it was just a subplot, a random spool unraveling in Shawna’s brain? Maybe this was the part where Connor disappeared and instead she found herself alone in a maze with Morgan Devoe or Keith, the bus driver. Or maybe no one would come. Maybe the sky would start melting and the corn would fall down around her like a series of dominoes.

She knew it was stupid, but she couldn’t shake the idea. It was so bright. She started running. She hit another dead end. Not a whisper of breeze. She forced herself not to call out Connor’s name. If it was a dream, it would end eventually. All dreams ended.

She didn’t want it to be a dream, though.

She turned a corner and ran straight into Connor. Same T-shirt, same smile, same hair falling over his eyes. Not a dream, then. She nearly grabbed him to check.

“I found you,” he said.

“I found you,” she corrected him. “I guess we tie.” She realized they’d made it to the very center of the maze. The sun was almost directly above them.

If Connor noticed how hard she was breathing, he was too nice to mention it.

“If I ever needed a place to hide out, I’d come here,” he said, as they wound their way back to the parking lot.

She raised an eyebrow—or tried to. Gollum was teaching her but she hadn’t mastered it yet. “Are you planning to go on the run?”

“Think about it! A maze is even better than a moat. It’s like a built-in security system. No one would ever find you.”

“Except for the tourists,” Dea said.

Connor grinned. “Yeah. Except for the tourists.”

A few miles away from the corn maze, Dea spotted another billboard, this one just after a sign pointing the way to DeWitt: THE RAILROAD DINER: WORLD-FAMOUS MILKSHAKES.

“You hungry?” Connor asked.

“I don’t have to be hungry for milkshakes,” she said. “That’s like asking if I feel like breathing.”

They pulled over and got milkshakes (vanilla for him, strawberry for her). The diner looked like it had come straight out of a billion years ago. There was even an old cash register made of brass. The waitress, Carol, who seemed just as ancient as her surroundings, warmed to Connor right away and even let him open the drawer and press a couple of the buttons when he asked. Dea realized that Connor was that kind of person. He could get away with anything. He belonged.

He made her feel like she belonged, too.

Next up was a fifteen-mile detour to Ohio’s largest rubber ball.

“We’re never gonna get to Cincinnati, you know,” Dea said.

“It’s the journey, not the destination,” Connor said, making a fake guidance-counselor face. “And come on! Indiana’s largest rubber ball.” He tapped her thigh with every syllable. “How could we punk out on that?”

By the time Connor had finished snapping pictures at the Biggest Rubber Ball in Ohio—which, true to its name, was enormous—the sun had rolled off the center of the sky and the fields were striped with purple shadows. As they headed back to the car, a dusty minivan pulled into the parking lot and a family poured out: mom dad kid kid kid, all of them wearing some combination of visor and shorts and flip-flops. Dea imagined, briefly, what she and Connor must look like to them. They probably thought Connor was her boyfriend.

It was after three, and Dea knew they should turn around. But she didn’t want to. She felt fizzy with happiness, like someone had uncorked a giant bottle of soda inside of her. For once, she was glad she didn’t have a real cell phone, except for the crappy pay-as-you-go one she’d bought one winter with the savings she pocketed from scraping off people’s windshields. Her mom didn’t even know about it, which meant that she couldn’t call Dea and bug her to get home.

Miriam owned nothing: no cell phone, no property, no bank account even. She kept all their money in bricks of cash, elastic-banded together, concealed in shoeboxes in her closet, stashed in the passenger seat of the car, camouflaged in a tampon box beneath the bathroom sink. (That was the emergency fund: when even the tampon box was empty, Dea knew, it was time to move.) The money came in spurts, like blood from a new wound, and Dea didn’t ask where she got all of it, like she didn’t ask why Miriam was so afraid and who Miriam thought they were running from.

“We’re like wind,” Miriam always used to say, running her fingers through Dea’s hair. “Poof! We vanish. We disappear.”

It had never occurred to her that someday Dea might grow up and wish instead to be visible. That she might want a cell phone and friends to call, apps and pictures and customizable ringtones. That was why Dea had bought the phone, even though it was plastic and cheap and she hated to bring it out in public and half the time she forgot to charge it: she wanted to feel like everybody else.

But for once, Dea wanted to do exactly what her mom always talked about: vanish. If no one knew where she was, maybe she wouldn’t have to go back.

“Where to next?” she said. Don’t say home, she tried to telegraph in his direction. Anywhere but home.

Connor’s eyes clicked to the dashboard clock. “I bet we can still make it to Cincinnati and back before dark.”

She put the car in gear. Her cheeks ached from smiling.

When they reached the outskirts of the city, Dea turned off the highway and onto local roads with no clear sense of where they were going. Houses clumped together, like water beading into a narrow stream: a blur of dingy white Cape Cods and low-rent trailers and patchy yards and garages fitted with old basketball nets. Connor spotted another sign, this one handmade on poster board, propped against a telephone pole: RUMMAGE SALE!! 249 WARREN, RIGHT ON ROUTE 9. SPORTING EQUIPMENT GOLF CHINA TOYS KITCHEN TOASTERS.

“Let’s stop,” Connor said. “Maybe I’ll find an old toaster.”

“You want a toaster?” she said.

Connor leaned over.

“Listen to me, Dea,” he said solemnly, like he was about to recite a pledge. “You can never, ever, have too many toasters.”

She laughed. “Freak,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, still smiling, touching his fingers to an imaginary hat.

A dozen folding tables, the kind found in school cafeterias and at cheap weddings, were set out on the lawn in front of 249 Warren. Behind one of them, a girl a few years younger than Dea sat slumped in a lawn chair, punching her iPhone with a finger. Two barefoot kids made circles around the lawn, shrieking, smacking around a Wiffle ball. An overweight woman, sweating through her dark T-shirt, was manning a cash box and periodically yelling at them to stop. A dozen people, mostly women, were picking through plastic bins filled with old lamps and lunchboxes, picture frames and plastic toys, with the same attentiveness of children searching the beach for the best seashells.

“Jackpot,” Connor said, gesturing toward one of the tables, where two rusted toasters were wedged next to an old microwave and a grimy coffee pot.

Dea felt a quick lift of happiness, like the soft rise of a moth’s wings in her stomach.

She loved rummage sales—the strangeness of things grouped together that didn’t make sense: children’s clothes next to old smutty paperbacks next to kitchen equipment next to lawn mowers, like a long and glorious sentence full of mixed metaphors. She’d always liked to imagine belonging to a family that dug through its closets and basement and garage once a year, and carted up all the broken and stained and useless things, expelled them like a disease. Dad would complain about giving up his golf clubs; Mom would point out he never played. Little sister and brother would refuse to give up a beloved toy, even though it had long been retired to the bottom of a mothball-smelling trunk, underneath the winter sweaters.