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in for over a month. Maybe she can offer him some sense of comfort, and maybe he can tell her it’s not too bad being the last person in an entire city.
    She is usually careful in crafting her e-mails, strict about being grammatically correct, using the active voice instead of the passive, sounding like she has everything under control. Tonight, though, she is too restless to have someone to communicate with, too eager to send her e-mail so she can receive another message from him. And so she doesn’t even check for misspelled words or run-on sentences, she just types it up and clicks SEND as quickly as her gnarled fingers will let her.
    She does not ask him how he thinks life is measured. Nor does she ask if he ever thinks about what happens after you die. Those things can wait for another day. Tonight, she merely wants to know how he is getting on by himself and what it’s like to know there is nobody else—she corrects herself: no other regular people—around for hundreds or maybe thousands of miles.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    7
     
     
    Following her high school graduation, Morgan went on a road trip across the country. Now, as her days come to a close, she thinks about that trip more than any other part of her life.
    For two months, Morgan and her best friend drove from city to city, state to state, to see all the things America is known for. Her best friend, Anna, was two years older than she was. Being that she was the youngest normal person in her town, all of Morgan’s friends were older than her. All the girls her own age were Blocks.
    The roads were still good enough back then to travel across the country. Such freedom. This was before the migrations really caught on and a flow of people moved continuously south across the lands until there was no place further they could go. Only Maine and parts of Canada had begun trickling downward as Morgan and Anna made their way through the states. They saw lines of vehicles, hundreds of cars long, filing from one city to another.
    “Wouldn’t you rather go to the beach for senior week?” her mother had asked before the trip ever started.
    “No, I’d rather get to see everything before it’s too late.”
    It helped make the decision easy for her when her friends all heard from their older brothers and sisters that beach week had lost its appeal many years earlier. There was no point going to Ocean City just to cry over how the world was changing. She imagined herself as the only person on the boardwalk, the only kid on a roller coaster, and didn’t want that thought to become a reality.
    Planning for the trip had almost been as much fun as the trip itself. For a few weeks, at least, the entire world seemed open to her, like she could do anything she wanted and there were no limits. The maps laid out in front of her, full of highways and cities, reassured her that this was true.
    “I want to make sure we see Seattle and Los Angeles and all of Texas,” Anna said.
    “I want to see Mount Rushmore, the St. Louis Arch, and the Statue of Liberty,” Morgan added.
    For an entire week, they did nothing but point to various places on a map and add destinations to their wish list. Their proposed agenda, by any standard, was impressive. Except for Kentucky, Iowa, Utah, and Maine, they planned to travel through every state in the continental United States. Even at eighteen years of age, Morgan knew she would never get to see Hawaii or Alaska. That portion of the world, like Europe, was already closed off to her.
    Her parents had allowed the sightseeing trip through the country, but they wouldn’t let her entertain the thought of an adventure on another continent. Even though both of her parents had backpacked through Europe during their younger years, there were too many rumors of tourists getting stranded over there when an airline or cruise ship closed their doors and people didn’t have a way to get back home.
    “But, Mom.”
    “No. Do you know how often they have