Read Kiss the Morning Star for Free Online

around the diner to make sure nobody witnessed the spectacle. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I don’t want…” I trail off, not sure exactly what I want. I know I don’t want to end our trip, not yet. Still, the headlines rise up in my brain— Drugged-Up Teens Kill Three in Hit and Run: Police Say Illegal Firearms Involved .
    “So let’s make a plan.” I take out a map from my backpack and spread it out on the table. I don’t handle uncertainty very well. Kat slides into the booth next to me—to see the map better, I suppose—but instead she puts her head on my shoulder and sort of burrows her face into my neck. My cheeks grow warm, and I pull away, embarrassed.
    “So here we are.” I point at South Dakota, trying to make this fact expand enough to push all the other thoughts out of my brain. “We can go down to Nebraska or keep on west into Wyoming, I guess.” I trace my fingers along the corresponding routes.
    “Do you want to do any of these touristy things? Mount Rushmore? Devil’s Tower?” says Kat, pointing at the map.
    “Well, we could pretend to be in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .” It makes me smile to think of that movie, one of my mom’s favorites. She loved alien flicks.
    “I suppose it would be sort of cool to see it. Even though it seems hopelessly cliché,” says Kat, “but who knows? Maybe God is in the clichés.”
    I roll my eyes, but this whole thing…it’s just a road trip. God is not a real variable in this equation. Or if he is, where would we even look? My brain reels. “I need to make a list. WHERE TO FIND GOD’S LOVE.” I take out my journal and open to a clean page, writing the title neatly across the top. “So where do we start?”
    Kat doesn’t even hesitate. It’s like she was waiting for me to ask. How far behind am I, anyway? I fiddle with the rubber grippy thing on the end of my purple pen and write down what she says.
    “Art. Creative stuff. You know, he’s the Great Creator or whatever. We should try to catch a few concerts and visit galleries and make a point of talking to people. Put that down, too. People.” She sips her coffee.
    “And Nature,” I say, adding to the list. Katy’s not all that crazy about my backpacking idea, despite her fondness for Kerouac’s “rucksack revolution.” I love the idea of getting way out in the wilderness, nobody around for miles and miles. I don’t even really know where this longing comes from; it’s just that ever since the fire and everything, I’ve had this urge. You know when you step in the mud with boots on, and there’s that satisfying sound? A squilsh , my mom used to call it—the way it tugs at your boot when you try to lift your foot, but not in a scary way like you might lose your boot forever—that nice little tug that reminds you you’re solid. That’s how I imagine it would feel to sit in the middle of the woods and close my eyes and do nothing but breathe and listen and let myself squilsh right into the world. Solid but not scary. Alone but not lonely. Missing but not lost.
    I doodle in the margin. “What else?” I pretend like I’m thinking about the question, but really I’m just sitting there, taking up space. It’s how I spent all of my senior year of high school.
    “Drugs.”
    “For serious?” I write it down, but I have to fight this ridiculous urge to cover what I’m writing with my other hand, like when you’re taking a quiz next to someone with wandering eyes.
    Kat nods. “Acid, peyote, mushrooms. Stuff like that. It would be an adventure.”
    Adventure indeed. Is it the kind of adventure I’m ready for? I’m not sure. “Okay, I wrote that. And?”
    “Church?”
    “As if I haven’t had enough of that to last me all my life,” I say, but I write it down on the page. “Oh, and meditation. Prayer, I guess.”
    “Sex.”
    I wish the sound of the word wouldn’t make me blush. “You think so?”
    “It’s at least as possible as finding God in a tree. I don’t