Next to it, the woman in the stone-washed jeans says, “Hey. Are you okay?”

Charlie’s not sure how to answer that one. She just saw her dead best friend in the bathroom of an interstate rest stop. Of course she’s not fucking okay. But the woman didn’t see Maddy. As always, the movie in her mind played to an audience of one.

“No,” Charlie says, conceding the obvious truth.

“Have you been drinking?”

“No.”

Charlie says it the way a drunk person would. Too loud. Too emphatic. Overcompensating in a way that makes it obviously not true, although in Charlie’s case it is. But she knows that’s not the vibe she’s giving off and tries to course correct.

“I just need to get home.”

Charlie moves to the woman. Quickly. Closing the gap between them in three big strides, which only makes things worse. The woman shrinks away, even though she’s backed all the way up against the sink with nowhere to go.

“I can’t take you.”

“Please.” Charlie reaches out to grab her sleeve, prepared to tug and beg, but thinks better of it. “I know that this is going to sound weird. But that guy out there? I’m not sure I trust him.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a chance that he might have killed people.”

Instead of surprise, the woman gives Charlie a wary look. As if this was exactly what she expected and is now disappointed to be so unsurprised.

“Might?” she says. “You don’t know?”

“I told you it was going to sound weird.”

The woman huffs. “You weren’t lying.”

“And no, I don’t know if he killed someone,” Charlie says. “But the fact that I think he might have—even a tiny, little bit—means I shouldn’t get back in the car with him, right? That I should be worried?”

The woman, done with it all, including the idea of using the stall she’d been eyeing, pushes past Charlie and heads to the door.

“If you ask me,” she says, “he should be worried about you getting back in that car. Whatever shit you’ve been drinking, I suggest switching to water. Or coffee.”

The woman pushes through the door and, just like that, is gone. Alone again in the foul-smelling bathroom, Charlie looks around, checking for any signs Maddy might still be there. The faint idea that she could still be around—that what Charlie had seen was something beyond a mental movie—proves to her just how unmoored from reality she’s become.

She goes to one of the sinks and stares at her reflection in the mottled mirror above it. Each flash of the overhead light brightens her skin, washing out her complexion, as if she were ill. Or maybe, Charlie thinks, maybe it’s not the light. Maybe this is how she really looks. Sapped of color, turned pale by uncertainty.

No wonder that woman fled the bathroom. If Charlie saw someone looking the way she does, saying the things she said, she’d leave, too. And she’d likely think the same things the woman thought of her.

That she’s drunk. Or crazy.

But she’s uncertain. And anxious. And no longer capable of trusting what she sees. That’s what she should have told the woman instead of saying she didn’t trust Josh. She should have flat-out stated that it was herself she didn’t trust.

Tired of staring at her reflection, Charlie splashes cold water on her face, not that it helps, and hurries to the door. She wants to leave the bathroom before Maddy has another chance to reappear. But Charlie knows that no matter how fast she leaves, there’s a chance Maddy will show up somewhere else. Or that she’ll think something’s happening when it’s actually not. Or that another movie in her mind will spring up out of nowhere and she won’t even be aware it’s happening.

For all she knows, it’s happening right now.

Movie after movie after movie. Like they’re on the bill at a mall cineplex so tightly scheduled the ushers don’t even have time to sweep up the spilled popcorn between shows.

The frequency of these visions worries Charlie. For the first time in her life, she thinks it could be a sign she’s slipping deeper into psychosis and that one of these times she’ll never snap out of it. She’s heard of such things happening. Women who disappear into their own worlds, lost in a land of make-believe.

Maybe she’s already there.

Charlie pauses before opening the bathroom door. She needs to compose herself a moment before returning to Josh and the Grand Am, which she has to do. She went into the bathroom knowing she needed to make a decision.

It turns out the decision was made for her.

If she can’t trust herself, then she needs to trust Josh.

EXT. REST STOP PARKING LOT—NIGHT

He was still stretching when the woman arrived. Arms over his head, fingers laced, trying to ease out some of the tension tightening his neck and shoulders. Then the car arrived. An Oldsmobile with a lousy muffler and a tailpipe that looked like it was about to fall off.

The car parked on the other end of the lot, under a streetlamp exactly like the one where the Grand Am sits. The woman got out and gave him a nervous glance before hurrying up the sidewalk to the restrooms.

She needn’t have worried. She’s not his type.

Charlie, on the other hand, is very much his type, which poses a problem.

Another problem: that the woman in the Oldsmobile entered the restroom five minutes ago. Now he’s concerned she and Charlie have got to talking. He shouldn’t have let Charlie go off alone like that. He should have followed her inside and pretended to peruse the vending machines while she went to the bathroom.

There’s a lot he should have done tonight. Starting with keeping his damn mouth shut.

Twenty Questions was a mistake. He realizes that now. But Charlie was asking so many questions and he was getting annoyed and he thought it would be amusing to make a game of it. But making his object a tooth, well, that wasn’t the smartest move. Curiosity made him do it. He wanted to see Charlie’s reaction when she figured it out. He should have known it would set her off a little, make her suspicious. Now she and the Oldsmobile chick are in that bathroom, talking about God knows what.

That’s all his fault. He’s man enough to admit it.

Until tonight, everything had been easy. Staggeringly easy. An easy he wouldn’t have thought possible if he hadn’t experienced it firsthand. He’d been on campus less than an hour before finding her. When he showed up sporting a university sweatshirt to try to fit in, he thought it would take days to track her down and a bit of old-fashioned force to get her into his car.

Instead, all it took was a Diet Coke in the campus commons. There he was, sipping his soda and scoping out the crowd, when she appeared at the ride board with her sad little flyer. It only got easier from there. Lie about going to Akron, flash her a smile, let her size him up and think she knew exactly what type of guy he was. It’s a gift, his looks. The only valuable thing his father ever gave him. He’s handsome, but not memorably so. A blank slate onto which people project whatever they want. And Charlie, he could tell, just wanted someone trustworthy to drive her home. She practically jumped into his car.

So incredibly easy.

He should have known things would eventually go wrong after that. That always seems to be the way. Sure, he messed up with Twenty Questions. But shit luck is to blame for everything else that happened tonight. So instead of cruising to their destination—which isn’t Ohio; not even close—Charlie’s with a stranger, maybe right now sharing her suspicions.

And she is suspicious. She got that way as soon as his wallet flopped open in her lap. He knows she saw his driver’s license because she got all nervous immediately after.

Honestly, the only thing that’s gone his way tonight is Charlie’s mental state. He knew she’d be a little messed up. After what she went through, it would be weird if she wasn’t. But this—this was unexpected.

Movies in her mind?

Talk about serendipity.

It allowed him to get out of the sticky situation caused by that game of Twenty Questions. Again, his fault. But he recovered quickly. He’s good at thinking on his feet. He has to be.

When he saw that Charlie was about to jump from the car at the toll plaza, he decided to turn the stereo back on, restart the song, and pretend everything in the previous ten minutes—Twenty Questions, the mention of the tooth, those tense taps on the brakes when that damn state trooper came up behind them—hadn’t really happened.

It was a wild, ridiculous idea. More of a Hail Mary pass than a rational plan. Yet he thinks Charlie really might have bought it. Thank God for small miracles, as his mom used to say.

Opening the Grand Am’s driver’s-side door, he slides behind the wheel and opens the center console. Inside, sitting among the empty plastic case for the Nirvana cassette, a scattering of loose change, and a pack of Juicy Fruit gum with one stick remaining, is his wallet. He grabs it and flips it open, coming face-to-face with his New Jersey license, which bears the same fake name as his New York and Delaware ones. He slides it out of its plastic sleeve, revealing another license behind it.