You Are Here by Jennifer E. Smith Page B

too.

chapter twelve
     
    When he pulled into the parking lot of the diner, Peter turned off the engine and reached for the door handle without looking at Emma, since he already felt certain he could guess the look on her face. There was a blinking neon sign that read sid’s diner in orange letters and below that declared that what appeared to be the hollowed-out shell of an old barn was the scrumptious civil war sensation.
    It didn’t look like much of a sensation from the outside, where only one other car was parked in the gravel lot, a faded blue pickup truck with a rusted shovel in the back. But Peter could see inside the windows to where the walls were plastered with old wartime flags and posters and a few old muskets hung above the counter. It was like the worst of all theme restaurants. Like Medieval Times, he thought, only without the jousting. And probably not quite as cool, if such things could ever really be considered cool in the first place.
    But Emma—who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the walk back from the cemetery—didn’t seem to mind. They left the dog to poke at the garbage bins outside and then walked in to find themselves set adrift somewhere between 1860 and 1960, the room alternating between actual antiques from the Civil War and outdated furniture from when the diner must have first opened. There were only two other customers, a pair of men hunched low over their steaming mugs of coffee as they scraped the crusted dirt from their boots onto the metal legs of the stools.
    Peter and Emma slid into an orange vinyl booth and sat examining the menu and the ketchup bottle and the dirty silverware, making fans and tubes and tiny squares out of their napkins rather than speaking to each other. Peter’s eyes roamed the walls, the framed declarations and tattered flags, the Union caps and Confederate slogans, and he thought of explaining their significance to Emma, but he wasn’t sure this was the best way to break the silence.
    Once they’d ordered from a bored-looking waitress—Custer’s Custard Pie for Peter and Abolitionist Apple Strudel for Emma—they resumed their own separate investigations of the cutlery, playing with forks and spoons, inspecting the edges of the table and the tears in the seat where the yellow stuffing bloomed. Peter could very nearly feel it, the way the space had suddenly expanded between them. He didn’t have much practice with this kind of thing, but the trip ahead—four more states and five hundred more miles—was beginning to seem far longer than it had at first.
    “So,” Emma said finally, more like a sigh than a word. It was the first time either of them had spoken since they’d ordered, and they both seemed slightly unhinged by the sound of it.
    “So,” Peter said back. He was aware this was perhaps not the world’s most brilliant response, but he wasn’t sure exactly what the moment called for; it wasn’t like Emma to look this way, weary and overwhelmed and just a little bit sad, sitting in the orange light of the diner in front of her half-eaten plate of dessert.
    She looked up at him, her eyes wide and serious. “Do you think this was a mistake?”
    “The apple strudel?”
    “No,” she said, but he was pleased to see a hint of a smile. “The trip.”
    He shook his head.
    “You’re not ready to turn back then?”
    “Not unless you are.”
    “Okay, then,” she said with a nod, though she still looked a bit uncertain, and Peter could understand why: After all, they had nowhere to sleep tonight and were no doubt in a world of trouble with their parents. They were somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, and in many ways it had all stopped seeming like a game.
    It had all started in the cemetery, of course, when she’d turned to him as if expecting someone else, her eyes widening just slightly, her face going abruptly pale. Gettysburg was supposedly one of the most haunted places in the world, with frequent sightings of ghosts in the