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conversation. I hadn’t even anticipated it, and there she’d saved me from having to decide if they wanted my head there between them.
    The straight, barren road ran along the canal with its immobile water. We passed my bus stop and then we passed this one vibrating yellow building we passed every time we got in the car and went anywhere. The building was all by itself, windowless, with one tiny door. A series of animals cut from plywood were tacked on the side in a line: a red crab, a pink pig, a green alligator, and a green-and-brown chicken, all the same size, each as big as Ted’s little car. Then we drove past a couple orange groves and a few abandoned appliances, and into the busy part of town, crammed with billboards like a giant had spilled a giant deck of cards. Lots of the billboards advertised Seminole cigarettes, but we weren’t quite in the area with all the cigarette trailers.
    CiCi braced one knee against the back of Ted’s seat and stuck her other foot out the window.
    â€œGet that out of my face,” Ted said, but she left it there, rolling her eyes about him to me, confidentially, the way she might flirt with a buddy of his, testing her ability to make him feel something. Her sneakers bounced around the footwell on the floor. Her legs were everywhere I looked in the backseat, coltish. The wind made it too noisy to talk, so I watched her hair swirl around her soda and thought about what I might tell her about later, in a quiet moment between the two of us. I tried to think how I could get them to let me spend the night, and then there’d be hours and hours.
    â€œDid you know,” Ted said, slowing down, “that Seminole means runaway in some translations?” He parked in front of a quiet series of little shops: a flower shop, a haircutting place, and a gift shop, which is where we went in. Ted walked behind the racks of t-shirts to the narrow area with bongs and pipes and a curtain that led to the back storage room. He went behind the curtain. CiCi and I looked at the rows and rows of stickers displayed on dowels, all variations of hearts and rainbows, unicorns and yellow stars, some translucent so you could stick them on a window. They had a glass case of leather wallets and snap-pouches and bracelets, stamped with animal designs and dyed in shades of green, blue, or red. They had a rack of posters I flipped through—various motorcycles, rock bands, and one of a gray Arabian horse galloping along a blue ocean with its mane flowing. The girl riding the horse looked a lot like CiCi, except with blond hair instead of chestnut. I showed it to her, thinking she’d say Wow, that really does look like me except for the hair. Instead, she said, “It’s nice, but posters get wrecked really fast.”
    Then there were a whole bunch of little boxes you could buy: decoupage papier-mâché ones and wooden ones, some painted, with carvings, some inlaid with sliding lids. I picked out a smooth wooden box, mahogany I think, a dark reddish wood, with a lid that fit into place without hinges so you couldn’t tell what part was the lid without looking carefully. The rounded edges of the box made it feel like a warm worn stone in my hand. I didn’t like any of the earrings so I decided I’d think about what to put in the box later. It cost seven dollars, but it was a really pretty box.
    I couldn’t decide how to buy something for CiCi, though. I’d have to do it right in front of her, for one thing, and for another, it might be saying Why didn’t you bring me a gift, or it might be showing off about money, which I was already worried about with the box for Julie, whether it was extravagant or presumptuous to spend so much of my savings. People didn’t seem to get each other nice presents in this town. I deliberated in front of the rows of stickers and finally I bought just the wooden box from a guy with alligator clips clipped to his hair and