The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni Page B

you’re looking for.”
    “An adventure,” Sheila repeated. She repeated it again biking down the Coralville
     strip to the gas station after school. As if all she had been looking for was a cheap
     and convenient thrill. As if she had memorized all that vocabulary and all those conjugations
     to move to a place where it snowed so much that underground tunnels had to be dug
     so the people could still get to work in the morning without using the actual streets.
     “Maybe give it some thought,” Ms. Lawrence had said. “Just as an alternative. We could
     research some options together.” Sheila swerved slightly across the white line of
     the road and was brought back to the task of pedaling by the sharp horn of a driver.
    “Get on the fucking sidewalk!” the man yelled out his window at her as he sped past.
    Yes, of course
, Sheila thought for the instant in which problems conflate in one’s brain and this
     seemed like the solution to everything that had steered off course in her life,
I should get on the sidewalk!
But if there had been a sidewalk, she would already be on it. SHARE THE ROAD a bright yellow sign sprouting from the concrete advised, as if it were that simple
     a thing to share something as open and straight and endless as a road. “There is no
     fucking sidewalk!” Sheila screamed back, near tears, pedaling fast, but minutes later,
     to no one, after the man had already driven off and was surely by now circling around
     the mall in pursuit of parking.
     
    Sheila sat in the gas station and waited for Peter. She didn’t know what she would
     say to him, but something was going to be said. She understood, irrationally, suddenly,
     that she needed him to walk into the station. It was toward the end of her shift,
     shortly after she’d decided that he would not come in at all, that she heard the sound
     of his engine cutting in the lot by the bathrooms, and she turned to see the headlights
     of his cab just as he switched them off. Sheila lifted the stack of flashcards from
     the counter and placed the top one—
la carotte, le céleri, la pomme de terre
—directly in front of her face.
    Peter walked into the gas station and stood at the counter.
    “What’s going on?” Sheila asked, looking up from her flashcard. This close to her
     face the words on her flashcard meant nothing at all. The letters blurred. The letters
     made her feel uneasy. “Slow night?”
    Peter reached into the pocket of his jacket and placed a shiny gun on the counter.
     He didn’t say anything. He just took it out the way someone might take out a set of
     car keys and placed it up there as if it had been uncomfortable in his pocket.
    “Uh, what’s with the gun?”
    “A proposition,” said Peter.
    “What is a gun doing on my counter?” Sheila clarified. Her heart beat faster, but
     it wasn’t fear exactly that directed her blood to move like this.
    “Have you ever been to Chicago?” asked Peter.
    “No.”
    “I’m going to Chicago,” said Peter. “I thought you might like to come with me.”
    Sheila knew she wasn’t putting in twenty-plus hours a week at the Sinclair station
     to go to a place like that.
    “I was going to leave the country soon,” she said.
    Peter shrugged. “So I’m heading east. It’s on your way.”
    “What’s in it for me?” asked Sheila.
    “If you don’t want to go,” he said, “I’ll go without you.”
    It occurred to her then that maybe this was one way to leave a place, with a boy and
     a gun. This was teamwork, having a plan.
    “What’s the plan?” she asked. “I’m assuming there is one.”
    Peter cleared his throat. “I will hold you at gunpoint. You will empty the cash register
     into my duffle bag. We will drive to Chicago. Fast,” he added.
    A city is a city
, she thought,
is a city is a city
. Is that what Ms. Lawrence had been trying to tell her? She thought of her father
     as he had looked standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She raised her chin and