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junk food—had refreshed Reese. Plus driving the well-lit streets of San Francisco was completely different from this lonely two-lane road in the middle of nowhere. The empty highway at twilight had an eerie feel, and her hands were sweaty from clinging to the wheel.
    After the sun set, darkness descended quickly, and she turned on the car’s high beams. The center yellow dashes in the black road flashed past like Morse code. She heard David breathing in the passenger seat, and it felt as though the two of them were the only humans left alive in the world. She missed, fiercely, streetlights and skyscrapers and neon. There were dangers in the city,of course, but those were dangers she understood. She had no idea what was out in the middle of the desert. The blackness could be a beast that wanted only to swallow them whole.
    When the road forked, she barely remembered to stay left in order to turn onto 375. She sped past a green sign that read EXTRATERRESTRIAL HIGHWAY and wondered what Julian would think about her driving down this road. He would probably be jealous. A couple of months ago he had tried to convince her to help him start a conspiracy news site called Black Mailbox, named after the object that was located off the side of the road near Area 51.
    “That’s super geeky, Jules,” she said. They were in the journalism room after a deadline, drinking Diet Cokes and playing basketball with crumpled-up sheets of page proofs.
    “Geeky is awesome,” he said, and emphasized his point by expertly tossing a paper ball into the trash can, which they had hooked onto the back of the door.
    “The mailbox isn’t even black—you said it’s white now. If it’s going to be the name of a
news
site, shouldn’t it at least be accurate?” Reese crumpled up the proofs of her most recent story, “GSA Launches Anti-Bullying Awareness Week.” It banged off the edge of the trash can and fell to the floor. She groaned.
    “It doesn’t matter what color it really is. It’s known as the black mailbox. And it’s not an
alien
mailbox—it’s just a regular mailbox where you go if you want to see UFOs over Area 51.”
    “But the UFOs are
alien
spacecraft, aren’t they?”
    “Maybe, maybe not. They could just be top-secret military fighter planes or something. Like the B-2 bomber. It was tested at Area 51. Black Mailbox is an awesome name.”
    She had agreed to help him—they even discussed how she would play skeptic to Julian’s believer on their site—but shortly afterward she and David had qualified for nationals, and all her time was taken up with debate practice.
    And then she had gone and messed up during the semifinal round. All that work for nothing.
    Reese glanced over at David. The dashboard lights didn’t illuminate much; he was mostly a shadow in the seat beside her, his head lolling against the passenger side window. In the dark bubble of the car, her thoughts drifted back to the night before semifinals. She had tried to stop herself from thinking about it too much—it wouldn’t do her any good to obsess over it—but she was all alone with David in the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t help herself.
    They had won the quarterfinal round decisively. Mr. Chapman took them to dinner at a Southwestern restaurant to celebrate, and Reese remembered the blue corn enchiladas and garlicky guacamole with an audible hunger pang. After dinner they returned to the Holiday Inn, where most of the debaters were staying, and Mr. Chapman went to bed, telling them to get some sleep before the big day. But she and David were too excited to sleep. They bought sodas from the vending machine by the pool and staked out two deck chairs, spreading out their notes to quiz each other.
    The pool area was crowded with other high school students. Some were swimming, but most were debaters like them, cramming in last-minute research before the big event. It was only the Holiday Inn—thoroughly and efficiently pedestrian in its decor—but