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I can still see Adrienne in heels, bearing our coffees back under the gas station lights—the cube of light made by the Texaco canopy. I had parked with our back to the highway’s sound barrier, and Adrienne’s heels echoed like in an empty auditorium. I smiled from behind my windshield, and Adrienne smiled back. She had a coffee in each hand.
    We sat parked in the car, facing the station. On the highway behind us we heard the rigs whining, each onelike it was about to slam into us, coming at a high pitch, and then muttering off into the night. That went on the whole time we sat there. “He’s waiting for us to make out,” Adrienne said. The station attendant, trapped in his control booth with the lottery telemetry, was staring at us. He wondered if we were Bonnie and Clyde, come to kill him.
    I cleared my throat. “
Aren’t
we going to make out?”
    Adrienne looked at me. Then she said, “You get points for that.” She lunged for her purse. “Can I smoke in here?”
    She had depressed my car’s cigarette lighter, and now it popped.
    “Wait, can I see that?” I had to wait for her to get her cigarette burning, and then she handed it over. The lighter’s coils were glowing orange. “I never knew how these worked before.”
    “Do you want a cigarette?”
    “No.”
    She lit one for me.
    I tried to give it back.
    “It’s already lit. You have to smoke it.”
    I held the cigarette out the window, but stopped short of throwing it away. There were those warnings, I knew, posted by gas pumps.
    “I thought they weighed more than this,” I said. I waved my cigarette around in the air, light as a butterfly.
    “Hrmf. You’re too good for me Jim.”
    She sucked on her cigarette, apparently thinking. I leveraged over on the emergency brake and kissed her. She had moved her cigarette out of the way—but she made it a short kiss, and I had to sit back down on my side of the car.
    “You could find a better girl than me Jim.”
    I peered back. “You don’t even know me.”
    “I know myself. I’m
old
.” She sniggered and drew her cigarette to her mouth.
    “We’re the same age.”
    “Yes, but—” And here she made a self-upwelling gesture.
    I was sitting with my armpit clamped over the steering wheel, regarding her. “You know—part of what I like about you is the possibility that you actually are this arrogant.”
    “Oh,” she said, “yeah.” She shivered. “I wish I was.”
    “You are.”
    “Jim—you know I don’t go to school?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like I’m not going. Some people never go to college. Are you shocked? You’re shocked.”
    “No, no—I’m not. Did you not get in?”
    “Oh, wow. You get points for that too.”
    “With your art and with this—the way you have—you could write an
amazing
essay—”
    Adrienne had never even finished high school. “When I turned sixteen I went to the guidance counselor and said, ‘I want to drop out now.’ And the counselor looked at me and said, ‘Are you asking me to talk you out of it?’ And I was like, ‘No, I just want to do it right.’ And the counselor was like, ‘You just stop coming.’ So I did. Theonly person who even tried to stop me was Chase. Whom you know?”
    “Yeah—yes. But you just said
whom
. I don’t know, in a weird way I think all that would impress colleges—your just doing that, as if you’ve had this plan all along. Outside the box. It’s ruthless. And that you’ve actually done something with your time.”
    She was annoyed.
    “You do things,” I said.
    “You haven’t seen those things.”
    “Yes but I can tell that you are for real.”
    “Jim,” she said after a minute. “Tell me a story.”
    “What kind of story?”
    “A story that’s sacred to you.”
    It had never occurred to me to have a story that was “sacred” to me. It was like college application essays—mine at least, which I had almost had to make up. We were asked about an experience that changed our lives. An