“Pressure to do what?” Oli looks at him, lips quirked up in a sideways smile.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lark says. “I guess I used to think you had a duty to be the best version of you you could be. I mean, that’s stupid. A duty to who, anyway? But like, I feel guilty sometimes, holdover from that. Maybe you should just, like, be nice?”

Oli agrees this sounds like a decent minimum. He’s looking at the next photo, an ominous sky out a car window. It doesn’t look like Lark thought much when he took it. It’s mostly weighted with the sense of duty to record. A reminder: we were on the road west.

“So, you all drove together?”

“Yeah,” Lark says. “We were going to share driving duty.”

“Going to?” Oli asks.

Lark folds up a little, thinking about the drive. “I got really sick. Like, the sickest I have ever been ever.”

“Ugh,” Oli sympathizes. “Being sick when you’re traveling is literally the worst.”

Lark nods. “It was pretty awful. And we didn’t know what to do. We weren’t like adults yet. 18, 19 is a weird age, right? Sometimes, people are literal children with no life experience, or like…you’re an adult with kids and a job and whatever. I’d been living on my own for almost a year, but Max and Dana were away from home for the first time, and we just didn’t know how to take care of ourselves. Or each other.” Lark takes a breath, surprised by a flicker of anger. “They really didn’t have a clue.”

Oli frowns, but he doesn’t ask him anything else about it. He agrees with Lark that everyone, even his friends all those years ago, has a duty to be kind, a duty of care to others. What he also believes, though, is that everyone is already the best version of themselves they can be under the circumstances. Sometimes it’s not such a great best, but it can’t really be helped. If Lark’s friends couldn’t take care of him on that drive, Oli thinks, it was only because they didn’t know how.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Lark says.

Oli can imagine Lark curled in the backseat, asking to go home. He can imagine how it would feel in that moment to be refused by his friends, driving his car into a Midwestern storm.“To be more important than some gig on the other side of the country?”

Lark inclines his head. “Yeah. Pretty stupid.”

We reached the first long stretch of interstate before noon, and I fell asleep with my legs pulled into my stomach and my head tipped back against the window. The directions were folded up in my lap.

What exit? Dana asked when she saw me nodding off.

21? In like a hundred miles. Literally. I didn’t look at the printouts for these numbers, and Dana clicked her tongue. They were right, and I didn’t double-check. I just need a little rest. Twenty minutes or something.

Max snored in the back seat.

I came to forty minutes later. We were just passing New London, the signage sweeping by in the curved windshield. I reached out blindly to turn down the radio, aware already that something was wrong, but not really awake enough to know what. The music was too much to think through.

Can we pull into the next rest stop? I was barely audible. I couldn’t move, and stayed with my eyes closed and knees tucked up to my chin.

Sure. You getting hungry? Dana asked. Her eyes were on the road, cheerily looking forward.

Little carsick, I mumbled. Saying it out loud made it feel truer, woke me up a bit. I straightened up in my seat, opened the window to get some air.

Oh shit. Dana darted a look at me. In the side mirror, I could see that my face had gone white. There’s one in like 3 miles. Will you be okay?

I felt weird but not urgently sick and told her I’d be fine.

I didn’t know you got carsick, Dana said.

I don’t. It was true until that moment, with maybe the exception of the very back of buses in rush hour traffic. Maybe I just need to eat something.

My stomach had been off since I got sick, but I hadn’t paid it much attention. I was too tired to cook, usually even too tired to be hungry. I ate half a bowl of cereal in the morning and forced myself to drink some canned soup for dinner, fell asleep uneasy.

When Dana parked the car, I lurched to a picnic table and sat there with my head on my arms. Dana went and got us all something to eat while Max stayed unconscious in the back seat.

She came back with sodas and a bag of fries, and asked if I was feeling better. I took deep breaths between hesitant sips of Coke. I said I didn’t think I did, and we both frowned.

I could barely speak, feeling locked up by my nausea, and Dana said that she was going to wake up Max for food. I thought he would be too hungover for that, and would start puking or complaining or cursing us out. I thought I’d wait and see before I inserted myself into the situation. If I see him get sick, I think I’ll follow suit, I told her.

Dana rubbed my back, bending forward to look in my eyes, I guessed checking for any pain in my face that might tell her to stop. I was usually the mom friend, practical and not squeamish, always a little concerned. When I was tipsy, I had a tendency to swan around parties, benevolently checking on the lonely and the sick, putting my hands on everyone’s shoulders. I’d held back her hair after too many drinks a few times.

You’re feeling really bad, huh?

I nodded, but Dana didn’t know what to do for me. She drifted off to wake up Max.

I sat alone for a long time, looking at the ground, thinking hard about not being sick. When I looked up, I could see Dana in the car with Max. He looked tired, but not too rough. He kissed Dana on the crown of her head, and she leaned against his shoulder. When he finished rubbing his eyes, she fed him fries from her fingers.

I went into the rest stop and found the bathrooms, went into the stall furthest from the door, kneeled in front of a toilet. I realized I was shaking violently, with the air con and my fever and nausea. I wasn’t sure I would throw up when I came in, but the bleachy nearness of the bowl made me heave almost immediately. I hadn’t eaten much, just the Coke and some toast the day before, so I was empty quickly. I sat on the floor for a long time, though, shaking and tense, waiting for my stomach to settle.

Max came for me eventually. I still felt sick. It had been half an hour, though, and Max said it was time to go.