The first hour of the drive was filled with Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell's quavering harmonies. Lily switched out Jar of Flies for Dirt once the last chords of Swing On This had faded into the sound of the wheels on the pavement. She didn't ask Evan if that's what he wanted, she just hit eject and took out Jar of Flies and flipped in the new CD without a word.

The startling crunch of Them Bones detonated outward from the speakers, making Evan jump.

"Wasn't expecting that," he said.

"What?" said Lily.

"I wasn't expecting that!" Evan repeated, louder.

"What?" Lily reached and turned down the volume, her fingers still on the knob.

"I wasn't expecting that sudden intro," said Evan.

Lily cranked the volume again without responding. She went back to her phone. She had gotten noticeably fussier as the trip had gone on.

"You must have unlimited texting," Evan said, again drowned out by the music.

Lily nodded without looking at him.

They didn't talk much for the first leg of the trip. Evan would look over at Lily from time to time. Lily would look at her phone. She asked him if she could plug it in.

"I brought my own charger," she said, producing a spiral cord that plugged into the cigarette lighter. Evan said yes and she removed his ancient charger from the cigarette holder and inserted her own. Then she went back to texting.

By the time Dirt ended, they were well into Ohio. The woods and towns and wetlands of Michigan had given way to flat fields and farmhouses some miles back. The sky seemed to widen above them, big and blue and cloudless.

Spinning rubber hummed on cement. A semi barreled past them on the left.

Evan struggled to find something to ask Lily.

"So why did you decide to come with?"

Lily shrugged. She held up a hand and ticked off reasons.

"I didn't want to work this weekend, I've never been to Nashville, it's pretty much free cause you said you're paying for the hotel and everything, I've known you and your family for years so I trust you..." she trailed off, glancing over at him, her eyes regarding him languidly behind her sunglasses. The glasses were large and thick, and the frames were studded with fake diamonds. "...yeah, so that's why."

"You still consider me a friend? Even though I haven't seen you in years?"

"Yeah, I mean, I remember you and my brother hanging out, like, all the time. I remember you guys playing street hockey almost every fucking day in the summer."

"What should we listen to now?" said Lily. "You should pick, cause I picked Alice In Chains."

"Let's listen to Smashing Pumpkins, if you have them," said Evan. "They always remind me of summer."

"Works for me," said Lily, reaching for his CDs. "Which one you want?"

"Siamese Dream."

"I have that."

Lily flipped through her CD book, found a burned copy of Siamese Dream, pulled it out, and inserted it. The drumroll intro of "Cherub Rock" and the subsequent shiny-clean chord chops filled the car.

"This is a good album," said Lily. "This and Mellon Collie. I hate Billy Corgan but I love these albums."

"Yeah, I know," said Evan. "It sucks this kind of stuff isn't, like, mainstream popular anymore. It's all Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and the other whores of Babylon now."

"The other whores of Babylon?"

"Yeah, that's what I call all the female pop stars these days. Taylor Swift, Pink—all of them. They suck. They're ruining the world."

"Jeez," said Lily. "Lady Gaga's okay. You can't argue with Bad Romance."

"Yeah, Jason used to say that," Evan said, gauging her reaction at Jason's mention. He hadn't told her about Jason's suicide and she hadn't asked about his family. He wondered if she'd heard and that's why she hadn't said anything.

She didn't take the bait, only continued to text, her knees drawn up to her chest now.

"I don't know if you heard about Jason," he ventured. "You know, my older brother."

She glanced over at him, looking like she didn't want to get into this now.

"Yeah, I did. I didn't think I should bring it up."

"It's all right. How did you hear?"

"Matt, the other night, mentioned it."

"Ah. Yeah, the first week of June."

"How old was he?"

"23."

"God, that sucks."

"He had been having a lot of problems lately, he'd joined the military and went to Afghanistan and had just been just fucking around for the past couple years... He was probably clinically depressed but he wouldn't get any help for it, cause, you know, masculinity and all that."

"That sucks," Lily said again. "That really sucks. I didn't know he was in the military."

"Yeah, he served in Afghanistan for a tour and a half and then he got discharged."

"Why?"

"We never really found out, but it had to do with him having panic attacks or something of that nature. He got diagnosed with something but wouldn't get help for it once he was out. He was, like, in denial. And my parents don't believe in that shit anyway, they think it's all just Big Pharma making money."

"Yeah, I can understand that," said Lily. "Still sucks, though. Suicide is... I don't know."

She shook her head and put her phone down.

"How'd your sister take it?"

"She's in the hospital. Has been for a month. She was the one who found him."

"Oh, God. That's horrible. How old is she now?"

"Eleven."

"Eleven, GOD, I can't even picture what she looks like. She's still a baby to me. What hospital?"

"Alliance. In Jackson. She's getting better though. They said she might be out next week."

Lily nodded. She seemed loosened up now. She was curious. That was a good thing. Evan hadn't talked about this with anyone outside of his parents. His friends were all too chicken to broach the subject. They got all tongue-tied and began spouting platitudes, if they were willing to discuss it at all. It was like they were worried that the tragedy was somehow contagious.

"How did Jason kill himself?" Lily asked. She quickly added, "And if you don't want to talk about it I completely understand."

"No, it's fine. He shot himself in the head. With his Glock."

"Oh my God. And your sister found him like that?"

Evan told her everything, right down to the steak knife.

"Oh, my God. That's fucking awful," Lily said. "I can't even... like, that's just, like, the worst thing I've ever heard. Why would she cut her forehead?"

"It's kind of a long story, but basically she had been having a lot of trouble sleeping, and she thought that somehow by doing that she would be allowed to sleep."

"Jesus fuck. Is she, like, okay? Did she, you know, permanently..."

Lily made a line across her forehead with a finger.

"She'll probably have scars, but they're not that bad, considering what it could've been.

When I saw her that night I thought she'd like, peeled her scalp back, scalped herself. But it looked worse than it actually was cause head wounds bleed a lot. She only cut like three or four lines in. The kitchen looked like someone had been murdered."

"Goddamn."

"Yeah. But I heard the doctor talking to my parents last time I was there, just before we left, and they said she's a lot better. I got to see her. She still talks a little weird, she's got this weird idea about this place called gloryland where she says Jason went, but she's a lot better than she was when she went in. She's, like, aware that she just went through some sort of psychotic break. So she's still scared, still a little fuzzy, but she's back. The first time I visited her she didn't want to talk to me. They said she was afraid that I was going to kill myself, she was afraid my dad would kill himself, my mom..."

"Are you?"

"What?"

"Going to kill yourself?"

"No," Evan said, shaking his head firmly. "No, not planning on it..."

That was something he'd made his mind up on the moment he'd set foot in the house, piss drunk on the night he'd been called home from Matt's. The night he'd seen flashing blue and red lights on the tree tops before he'd even turned the corner on his street. He thought of Maddie, how she'd seemed hollow, hollowed out and silent, and his parents, lost and afraid. The look on his father's face had been the most frightening of all. And the thought that had crashed into his brain over and over: Jason is gone, Jason is gone, Jason is gone.

"But she doesn't think that anymore, right? That you're going to kill yourself."

"No, she's way better, now. But honestly, that hurt way more than anything else. I mean, honestly, like, even if I did really want to, you know, do that, just seeing what it did to her, what it did to my parents... "

Evan shook his head.

"No, I'm stuck here. I'm staying. If I go early it'll be because something took me. It's better to just stay. No matter how much it sucks, it's better to just stay."

"And how are you after all this?" Lily asked.

Evan was struck. It occurred to him that no one had really asked him this before.

"Uh, I mean, I guess I've been fine. I'm more affected by what happened to Maddie than what happened to Jason. You know, at least, like, as far as Jason, his problems are over, you know?"

"Yeah," said Lily, grim-faced. "Yeah, I guess so."

She looked out over the fields towards the patches of trees and the farmhouses gliding by in the hot, clear day.

"You said she was talking about a place called gloryland? That was her, delusion or whatever?"

"Yeah, from what she said, it's like this utopia or version of heaven where people can go if they've been mostly a good person for their lives but if they've done like one or two really bad things they can go there and learn how to be happy again so they can get into the actual heaven."

"So it's like purgatory."

"Yeah, kinda, from the way she describes it, yeah, but not really. It's a positive place, like a happy purgatory. It's a place you can forget about everything that's wrong and just learn how to be your best self again. I mean, she made it up in her head to make herself feel better about what she saw. That's what the doctor said. She needs to believe Jason didn't, you know, just end like that."

Lily didn't say anything.

"We were really religious growing up, so it's like, an off shoot of that," said Evan. "She got the term gloryland from this Johnny Cash hymn that they played at Jason's memorial service."

"So it's, like, an actual thing?"

"No, gloryland isn't, it's just a lyric in the Johnny Cash hymn. 'I've got a home

in gloryland that outshines the sun,' is how it goes. Jason loved Johnny Cash. So that's where it came from and she just made up this shit in her head to cope with the trauma of the memory and all that."

"That sucks," said Lily again. "Really don't know what else to say to that."

"What else can be said?"

"Good point... so she was obsessing over gloryland and she cut her forehead so they committed her."

"Yeah, it was that, and then she was also fucking obsessed with Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox. That was another coping mechanism. They said she probably zeroed in on them because that's what she was focused on the most right before everything happened. That was like, the last thing she associated with when she felt normal last."

"Who the hell are Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox?"

"The winner and the runner-up of the most recent season of Idol. She has their studio performances on her iPod, we got them off LimeWire, and she would listen to them all the time. It got to the point where couldn't fall asleep unless she was listening to them. That's all she would listen to, just that playlist or whatever, front to back. But yeah, that's how we started to know something was wrong. She was fine, like, I mean- like, not fine, but not acting crazy, for like a week after it happened, and then like a day after the memorial she couldn't sleep, she was sucking her thumb again which she hadn't done in like seven years, she would not take her earbuds out, she only listened to that one playlist, she started talking about gloryland and being kissed by a rose, which she got from one of the Lee DeWyze's songs—"

"Kissed by a rose?"

"Yeah, Lee sang it at one point this season. It's that old Seal song. Like, the--"

Evan mumble-sang a bit of the "ba-da-da-ba-da-bah-da-bah-daaah" intro.

Lily nodded.

"Yeah, from that old Val Kilmer Batman movie."

"Yeah, that's it. It was the Lee DeWyze version. And it got to the point where she could only sleep with her earbuds in, in my parent's room, and then when they tried to get her to sleep in her own room, they ended up finding her in the kitchen like half an hour later, and now she's in the hospital."

"Jesus fuck," said Lily. "I'm so fucking sorry you guys are going through this. You guys were always so nice to us. How are your parents?"

"Shitty. My dad just got a new job and he's getting health insurance again in August, which is good, but they're going to be in debt for Maddie's hospitalization and the memorial service and everything else for a long time. Dad was pretty much unemployed for like two years before he got this new job, since the Recession, so... yeah."

"Yeah, my step-dad was unemployed, too, before I moved out. My mom was supporting them both, working at the bank."

"We'll make it," said Evan. "I feel like the worst is over now. That's one of the reasons I'm trying out for Idol. For the money. And cause, fuck it, you know? Life is short."

Evan knew he was probably sounding stupid but he couldn't stop talking.

"Follow your dreams, even if you've never told anyone about them and you know everyone will think they're stupid. You know? Fuck it. It's like the lottery, you know? Who knows?"

"Mmm," said Lily.

She picked up her phone again, attending to another text.