Work Text:
Sometimes Gem Taylor is struck with the urge to look up how much jail time she’d be given for killing a customer in the middle of the store.
Not that she’s planning on actually doing it, obviously. Prison still has labour and it pays worse too - as much as she hates the Walmart auto department, she has to admit it does at least let her go home at the end of the day with a marginally livable wage. She makes rent; she pays taxes. Upstanding Canadian immigrant that she is, she’s doing okay in the U-S-of-A. Hah. Funny. She should be writing kids’ books, not punching in tire orders.
This particular tire order seems to have utterly flummoxed the woman before her, who doesn’t seem to understand that yes, if you want three tires, you do actually have to pay for three tires. “But I have a quote,” she’s insisting, waving her phone.
“You have a quote for the price of one tire,” Gem explains again, “we’re charging you for three, ‘cause you’re asking for three.”
“But the man on the phone gave me a quote! Where is he? I’m sure the mechanic would understand.”
Gem is the mechanic in this equation. The man on the phone was probably Tango, and he doesn’t know shit about fuck in auto, he was just on standby at the phones while Gem took her lunch break yesterday. If she really felt like indulging this woman’s misogyny, she could call Skizz and make him explain it… but she doesn’t want to, though. And Skizz has got enough work to do right now, besides. Which just leaves Gem, taking a deep breath, forcing her smile to stay stable, and wondering if she could plead justified self-defense if she argued that this woman’s lack of mathematic competence or basic feminism were a credible threat to her safety. She’s been provoked. Whatever.
In the end, she manages to convince the woman to pay her stupid sixty-nine bucks plus tax, and watches her going until she’s sure she’s aaaaall the way out the door and not coming back for a second round of bullshit. With a moment to breathe, she pulls back from the counter, gets fingers around her phone in her back pocket, and god fucking damn it another one.
“Hi!” Gem smiles, plastic, “welcome to Walmart, how can I help you today?”
After the first few seconds of autopilot customer service sugar, her actual senses kick in and she gets a good look at the guy. He’s around her age, maybe a little older - green streak in his hair, that’s fun - but most importantly he’s bouncing on the balls of his feet like he’s hopped up on five hour energy with nowhere to put it, restive, unsettled. “Er - hi,” he says, seemingly jolted out of his thoughts. (Not American, she notices.) “Yeah, I’ve got a, er… I think something’s got stuck in my wheel? Car’s still goin’, it’s just a bit janky at the moment.”
“Alright, sounds like it should be no problem for me to take a look!” That’s not actually something they have a set fee for, but this guy seems distracted enough that she figures she can probably just name a price at the end and he’ll hand it to her. Walmart employees are not allowed to take tips, but that hasn’t stopped Gem before. Etho’s never watching her on the security cameras. “You parked outside?”
“Yeah, round by the side door, I think. Where the bins are.”
“That’s good! I’ll come outside and we can see if you need to bring your vehicle into the shop. Have you used our services before?”
“Er - no,” he shakes his head kind of intensely. “First time. Normally I’d, er - go local, but - well,” and that laugh is anything but natural, “you know how it is.”
Gem does not get paid enough to question these kinds of things. As long as he’s not actively making her uncomfortable, Green-Streak can be as weird as he wants. She’s seen plenty weirder.
She pokes her head in through the door to the bays and waves Skizz down, who gets the message straight away and trades off. Skizz is a multi-year reigning champ at stopping her to chat about something else sometimes, which means that in contrast today he’s probably taken his meds. Good for him. Out through the side door, branded STAFF ONLY in spray-black stencil print, Gem lets the autumn air hit her square in the face as her feet hit gravel from the concrete inside. She’s actually kinda fond of the parking lot, as much as she knows that’s a lame thing to find joy in; Walmart just does that to you, makes you the kind of person who’s forced to sift their nuggets of joy from the silt of monotonous drudgery. Plus this is where she comes to pretend to have her smoke breaks and steal company time, so, it’s sentimental. Sue her.
Green-Streak’s car awaits. It’s nice - black and old-fashioned, all square angles that modern cars have replaced with more road-safe ergonomics, with distinctive dark red racing stripes. Gem makes a point of not learning what logo belongs to what car, but it was probably expensive. He’s dithering next to the back-right wheel uncertainly.
“Alright,” she says, “let’s see.”
She’d brought a screwdriver from the garage, and was willing to go back inside and get a larger poking implement if it came down to it, but she can actually see the scrap that’s wedged in the wheel-well from outside and in the end it only takes a few sharp tugs with her bare hand to get it free. It’s a scrunched-up, creased and darkened tear-off from a red piece of fabric; probably clothes, although it could have been a bag or something as well. When she stretches it out, it makes the very edges of her fingers feel sticky, so she pinches it between two fingers and looks back at her customer.
“You think this was all you had in there, or could there be anything else?”
He’s pale, running a cold sweat, but he nods. “Yeah. Er - yes. Think that’s probably all of it.”
“Do you, uh… want it?”
“No,” he answers too quickly. “You can bin it.”
“Cool.”
She tucks it into her back jeans pocket just to get it out of the way so she can focus on using her hand sanitizer, but by the time she looks back up from that, he’s holding a crumpled 20 out towards her.
“... Tha-”
“Dunno if you’re meant to… put me in the system, or whatever, but, er, don’t think it’s that important, so… Tip.”
That’s called a bribe, Gem thinks, and takes it. “Less paperwork for me, I guess. Thanks.”
He nods tersely. “Yeah, no problem.”
With nothing else she can do for this guy, Gem ducks back inside and trades off with Skizz again.
“What was the situation?” Skizz asks, fresh off of ushering someone through to get new brake pads fitted.
“Uh, just some junk in some guy’s wheel. Got it with my hand, I didn’t charge, it’s whatever.”
“You’re nice like that! Keep doin’ what you’re doin’, Gemstone. Except maybe don’t keep helpin’ people free of charge too often. We’re running a business here. Etho’s got his eye on you.”
Gem laughs. Even if the security cameras in the parking lot were more than 25% functional and not just there to serve as deterrents, Etho almost certainly has his eye on absolutely nothing. Maybe he’s people-watching the people in the tech department; more likely he’s playing that fishing game and only sparing a glance to his job every fifteen minutes. “Sorry, sorry!”
It all goes back to normal after that. Customers - normal customers who want normal things like check engine light assessments and battery replacements - cycle through and replace her train of thought, and before too long Gem’s not thinking about the weird thing that happened this morning even a little. In fact, it’s not until she takes her final break of the day that the transaction even comes back into mind for her.
When it does, though, it’s… almost funny.
Set the scene: exterior; staff-only door at the side of the Walmart. Gem Taylor, front and centre, picking up the plastic carcass of some teenager’s discarded vape from the gutter, rolling it between her fingers in case her supervisor comes out to call her bluff about needing a smoke break. Cut to a wide-pan shot as she scans across the parking lot, looking for anything interesting, maybe a skateboarding kid or a funny bird.
And there, Green-Streak, kneeling at the front of his car, focusing on something. Frame comes into focus. He’s holding the screwdriver she’d left on the ground when she pulled the fabric from his wheel-well. Yellow handle; it’s distinctive, like everything else the guy’s got going on.
He’s unscrewing his license plate.
Gem takes two steps forward in shock before she can catch herself. She nearly stumbles over the curb, foot catching on the grate - doubles back and leans casual up against the wall instead, popcorn-wall paint pressing into her back where she’s standing.
Green-Streak takes all four of the screws out, fast and intense, flinching when his grip slips and the screwdriver juts away from its destination. When he’s done, he moves round to the back of the car and repeats his previous actions.
And then he crosses the parking lot, picks what can only be a random car, and starts taking off their plates as well.
Gem dips into the security office before she can think about it. “Hey, Etho!”
Sure enough, he’s playing his dumb fishing game. Green-Streak’s unfathomably stupid actions aren’t being caught on any of the monitors, thank goodness. “What’s up?”
“Oh, just on my fifteen. Hope you’re not dying of boredom out here like I am.”
“No, we’re good,” says Etho, and he gestures to the screen brazenly, “business as usual.”
“That’s good,” says Gem, trying and failing to suppress a little smile.
“You need something?”
“Nope. Don’t even worry about it. Kay, seeya!”
“Uh, bye,” Etho says. Sometimes she thinks she makes him nervous, which is kinda funny, ‘cause she hasn’t really done anything to warrant that. Maybe Etho’s just a nervous kind of person. Apparently he’s been working at this same location, like, since it was built, so maybe he doesn’t know how to deal with new recruits. Although that’d be kinda stupid because surely Walmart has as high of a turnover rate as anywhere else round here. Maybe he’d prefer she regard him as part of the furniture. Whatever. More interesting things are going on right now.
Having ascertained that Green-Streak’s absolutely illegal activities aren’t being caught on any of the working cameras, Gem returns to the scene of the crime. He’s just about done fastening the last of his screws on his new license plates. Congratulations to the stranger with the car from Illinois who just got a hell of a headache to explain to the DMV heaped onto their plate.
“Hey,” she calls, before she’s quite finished jogging over, “what are you doing?”
He flinches violently. “Nothing,” and then, voice dropped back down the octave from where it had soared seconds prior, “what’s it look like?”
She reaches reasonable-speaking-volume distance. "This is the Walmart parking lot, sir. There are security cameras everywhere." (Ignoring the part where she saw him doing this and the cameraman didn’t.)
He turns to look at her. Still knelt on the ground, still holding the bright yellow screwdriver. Guilty as sin. “Didn’t - didn’t think of that.”
“Yeah,” she snorts, “I can tell.”
Another beat. He puts the screwdriver into his pocket.
“Look - whatever you’re doing. You do realise that when they find out about whatever you did, they’re gonna track you here, right? And then you’re screwed.”
“That was the point,” he says, gesturing at his handiwork.
“Plates or no plates, that car’s pretty distinctive. It is yours, right?” Whatever you did, whatever put that scrap in your wheel, that’s what you’re running away from?
(... What the fuck did this guy do?)
He nods. Gem sighs. “Okay, so - so why didn’t you just take somebody else’s car?” In for a penny, right?
But - “No,” he insists, air forced out of him sharply. “No, I’m not leaving this.”
“Your funeral,” Gem mutters. “Most of these cameras are broken, anyway. You got lucky, ‘cause that was a stupid decision.”
“Oh.” He stands abruptly. “Right, well - well then I’ll just… go, then.”
“Definitely do that.”
“Right.” He clears his throat. “Bye. Thanks.”
Gem bites the inside of her lip. For whatever reason, stood here in the parking lot, the last minutes of her fifteen draining away like so much sand in an hourglass - the urge is striking her to just take off the vest and get in the passenger seat with this guy. If only to save him from whatever completely unfollowable thought process is making him do stupid shit like drive straight to the nearest Walmart after doing something unspeakable, bribe the workers not to say they’ve helped him, and steal the plates right off somebody else’s car for his racing-striped vintage car that anyone in the world could pick out of a lineup.
It’s a crazy concept. But Gem’s no stranger to strapping herself into the seat next to crazy and letting it take the wheel. And she’s been meaning to quit since she got here, really.
“Wait,” she tells him, “don’t - okay, listen. You’re gonna get yourself killed at your next traffic stop if you keep acting this suspicious on your own. Just - don’t -” there’s gotta be a better way to play this “- why don’t you go park up at the feed store down the street? I can be there in twenty, we’ll go from there.”
He stares at her.
“What? I wanna see where this is going.”
It’s intriguing, the way his general air of twitchiness and nervousness seems to fluctuate. Right now, he’s looking every which way across the parking lot, presumably trying to suss out what her deal is. But, really, Gem does just want to watch this trainwreck. Someone’s gotta.
“Go on,” she prompts him.
“Alright,” he says detachedly. (What did he do?) “See you.”
And he gets in the car, and turns the ignition, and starts reversing out of his parking space. Gem does a little reversing of her own, backing up towards the staff-only door until she sees him head off in the direction she’d prompted. This is a lot of power she’s come into very suddenly. It’s kind of awesome.
She comes back to the desk, drops a headache lie on Skizz, and takes exactly one more phone call before clocking herself out early. The write-up feels distant and inconsequential.
Gem has launched herself adrift with absolutely no idea what direction she’s gonna be sailing in for the foreseeable future. This was a terrible idea. She doesn’t regret it for a second.
He is there, which is even now a little unexpected, once she’s marched herself all the way down the side of the road to Coulson’s on foot. There are no external security cameras here, which is why it came to mind. Past the front awning, you’re golden.
When he sees her he starts the engine, eyes trained on her from across the lot. She slides into the passenger seat next to him. The car smells like it gets cleaned often.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hello.”
A beat. “I’m Joel.”
“... Is that your real name?”
“Yes?”
“Well, uh, stop telling people your real name if you’re running from the cops, is your first clue.”
“Oh. Right. Good - yeah, good point, that, yeah."
“Have you been doing that this whole time?”
“No, you were, er, the only person I’ve gone up to.”
“Okay.”
The car backs out of the parking spot again. It beeps quietly until he’s out of the space, warning them of obstacles on either side. Gem talks over this - “I gotta ask. You did… whatever you did… and the first thing you did after that was go to Walmart? Like, the major chain with a lot of connections?”
“Couldn’t go to the normal garage, could I,” says Joel, “they’d know me.”
“And your next best choice was Walmart.”
“Look, I wasn’t thinking straight,” he says, and then pulls his foot off the gas.
As they travel at a crawl towards the exit, where the lot meets the highway, she appraises him. He’s staring shellshocked out the windshield, suddenly much less fidgety, suddenly wide-eyed and cold.
Okay. Okay, cool. He hasn’t been thinking straight about anything this entire time. Gem had figured as much, but it looks like this is just now occurring to Joel.
“Brake,” she murmurs gently.
Joel brakes.
They sit at the intersection. Traffic passes.
“I’m fucked,” he says, voice cracking.
“No, you’re not,” she declares. “You’re gonna be fine, okay? You’re gonna get out of here, and we’re gonna figure it out when we get there. ‘Cause I’m coming with you.” For some reason.
… No, she knows the reason. God help her, Gem gets pulled into the orbit of crazy like an electromagnetic asteroid, every time. She sees somebody with skeletons in their closet and she just can’t help herself. She’s gotta see the whole bloody mess go down.
This guy seems like he’s gonna be fun, at least. It could end better than the last time. Or she could end up going to jail. Depends what happened this morning.
He flicks his turn signal and starts out onto the road. “Yeah. Alright, then.”
“Step one, we go get gas,” she says, eyeing his dashboard. “And food. I’m guessing you haven’t eaten.”
“Yeah,” he frowns.
They sit in unsteady silence for another minute or so before his hand comes out to turn on the radio. Espresso cuts in mid-chorus, song of the summer, soundtrack of their getaway mission.
“What’s yours?”
She raises an eyebrow. “What’s my what?”
“What’s your name. Sorry.”
“Oh. I’m not gonna tell you that. I just said it’s a bad idea.”
“Right.” Beat. “Well, I’ve gotta call you something.”
Gem casts her mind about for options. The music provides an easy answer. “I’ll be Sabrina.”
“Okay.”
She lets herself start bopping along, a little. Maybe it’ll ease the vibe a little. “Are you gonna pick an alias?”
“Should do, yeah. Haven’t thought of one.”
“Well, you better do it fast.”
“Fast and the Furious,” he chimes against her, seemingly more out of just wanting something to say than anything meaningful. Then clears his throat. “Could be Dom, then. Like the guy. From Fast and the Furious.”
“Sounds good.”
“Good.”
On either side of them, lines of trees roll by, inoffensive. The road’s pretty quiet right now. They’re dodging rush hour.
Gem thinks about it for a second, then turns off her phone.
“Are you really?” she asks. “Running from the cops?”
“Yeah,” says Joel, hands rigid at ten and two.
“Why?”
“I -” his expression stormclouds “- well, I was just driving, me, I was just trying to leave. It’s not my fault if anyone else got in the way.”
“... You ran someone over?”
“I’ve just said, I -” he exhales. “Well. When you put it like that.”
“You did. You ran someone over.” Gem can’t help but smile, just a little. “Was it a hit-and-run? Was it a stranger?”
“Oh, much worse,” says Joel, so that’s just perfect.
They merge onto the highway. Sabrina Carpenter makes way for Beyonce's Texas Hold 'Em.
"It was my mate, if you want to know. And I hope he's dead. Saves me the trouble of punching him when I get back home."
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“What, you just told me you might have killed someone! Can I not think that’s a little stupid?”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Well,” says Gem.
Joel’s knuckles flex against the steering wheel.
Right. She’s locked herself in a car with a stranger, a possible murderer. She did do that to herself. That is a thing that she did.
“After petrol,” he says. “What happens after that.”
“After the gas station,” she follows, trying to be gentle, “we’re… we go north. We could be in Canada pretty fast if we don’t make too many stops.”
“Flee the country,” Joel echoes.
“Yeah. Unless you wanna hand yourself into the cops before that turns into a problem.”
“Obviously not,” he grits, “or I wouldn’t be here, would I.”
“Okay, so we go to Canada.”
“Okay.”
Beyonce to Noah Kahan, to Morgan Wallen, all spilling from the radio one by one. If Gem didn’t tune out the radio that plays at all hours during work, she’d lose her shit as bad as Joel has, so she doesn’t know the lyrics to any of these songs, but the rhythms of them are still bone-deep familiar by now. Radio hosts announce a million-dollar giveaway that can be entered by texting as soon as you hear the music of Queen. Joel drives.
By the time they hit a gas station, Gem has settled into the passenger seat pretty comfortably. Joel’s car has clearly had a lot of work done to it over the years, has been kept incredibly well maintained for something that looks like it’s gotta be pretty vintage; the seats are good leather and the air doesn’t smell like New Car but rather something more subtle and… okay, Gem doesn’t work in the perfume department, she doesn’t know what smells are. It’s nice. He pays a lot of attention to the experience, is what she’s reaching for.
Bet he never thought he’d be letting a stranger into this thing, Gem thinks, must be like his baby.
Joel parks up by a pump, bumps the door open with some force, putting his elbow into it. Gem unbuckles and lets herself out too. “We better be quick about this,” she says, keeping her tone as nonchalant as she can manage, because there are a couple strangers in the vicinity as well. “You need anything from inside?”
“Erm,” says Joel, eyes focused on the pump, picking out a nozzle almost absently, “well, I’ve not eaten.”
“Since when?”
“Last night.”
Oh. Okay. Fuck, then. “Okay, well, gas-station snacks aren’t gonna cut it, or at least they won’t with how much money I’ve got in my wallet.”
“Could just nick something,” he says.
“What? No, we’re -” she comes round the hood of the car to hiss at him, eyes still directed firmly into the process of filling up the tank “- c’mon. You can’t say that.”
“They’re not gonna -”
“Dude,” she smacks his shoulder with the back of her fingers, “it doesn’t matter if it’s something small. If you get caught doing anything, they are gonna recognise your goddamn car and they’re gonna find out what happened and then we’re both fucked. Can we lay low? Please? Can we do that?”
“Lay low,” he repeats, nose scrunching as he does it. He dismounts the nozzle from the tank and taps it against the edge to get the last couple drops. “Right.”
Gem snaps. She grabs the gas pipe right above his fist, other hand wrapping around the join between his neck and shoulder, and turns him to face her. “Look at me.”
Joel looks, startled.
“Lay. Low.”
He nods rapidly.
“Can we do that, Joel?”
“Dom,” trips over his tongue. “Fast and the Furious.”
“Sure. Whatever. Tell me we can do that.”
“We can lay low,” he says.
“Good. Okay, now I’m gonna go into the store and get us some dinner, and you’re gonna give me your wallet ‘cause it’s not my car and I don’t budget for gas money, and I’m gonna be quick and we’re gonna lay low and then we’re gonna keep driving. Sound good?”
“Sounds great,” says Joel, and Gem lets go of the pump.
Inside the gas station, she’s one of three, including one bored cashier and a middle-aged woman who is clearly having an extremely difficult time choosing between the available flavours of Gatorade. Gem picks up a pair of pre-packaged sandwiches, some water, some Monsters, and a bag of cheese popcorn, aware that it’s gonna be a bitch to eat without dropping any of it in Joel’s obviously-beloved car and getting an earful. Worth it. She also picks up a scratch card at the counter, after some deliberation, and puts it on Joel’s tab. He’s carrying enough cash to cover the full tank; he’s not gonna miss a little more. Besides, he owes her for having her head on straight about the whole thing.
Watching the money disappear into the register is a little sobering, though. They don’t have a plan beyond get to Canada. Gem’s not sure how long that’s actually gonna take. If the fuel runs out before then…
She carries her armful of bullshit back to the car and stares at Joel expectantly until he leans over and opens the door for her. Then she dumps it all over her seat.
“You can pick a sandwich.”
“What’s - why’ve you got four drinks?”
“Water’s for now so you stop freaking the fuck out. Monster’s for tomorrow so you don’t crash.”
He frowns at her and takes his share. Gem tucks her popcorn and her can between her ankles, slots the water into the cupholder, and cracks the seal on the sandwich. It’s not good, but it’s dinner.
(Scratch card comes up empty. Go figure.)
They keep driving north-west; sunset creeps up on them a lot sooner than Gem would have liked. She pops the visor on the roof of the car when the sun starts getting in her eyes and is met with a pair of polaroids that have been actually sewn with needle and thread into the fabric of it.
She studies them, as her eyes adjust to the respite. One blurry, where Joel is surrounded on either side by a pair of dudes, the taller one (blond with a blue shirt) holding the camera out at arm’s length. The other is the same taller guy posing with a golden retriever in front of a hedge while the other guy (red sweater, glasses) gestures between them like he’s saying, can you see the resemblance?
“These your friends?” she asks idly.
Joel reaches over and flips the visor back up.
“Ow, okay.” Blinded by the sunset it is.
Neither of them really knows where they’re going other than vaguely north, but it definitely feels like progress, if a blurry and blended kind of progress that sends them flying past exit after exit on an unfamiliar highway. The repetitiveness seems to bring Joel some comfort, or at least distraction, because his shoulders stop sitting quite so tense after a little while. Gem starts and then finishes her bag of popcorn. Sun in her eyes turns to dying-ember orange, to darkening indigo-blue. The headlights come on. The voices on the radio switch out from the afternoon show hosts to the evening ones.
She watches him, between bouts of dozing, in the absence of allowance to do much else. Wonders where he’s coming from, what he’s running from. Who the friends in the picture could be to him. Maybe, she muses to herself, hiding a smile, that’s his polycule; maybe those are his brothers, or something. Not that there’s much of a resemblance, but family doesn’t really have to resemble each other, does it?
Notices that his gaze is drifting slightly when it starts to unfocus. “Need to stop,” says Joel, firm and sudden.
“You gettin’ sleepy?”
He shoots a disbelieving, judging glance at her before his eyes turn back to the road. At least there’s not that many cars around them. “Tired.”
“That’s what I said.”
Joel doesn’t seem amused enough to keep fighting this particular fight. “We should find a motel or sommat.”
“You wanna stop and leave your incredibly easy to identify car outside for the night?” Honestly, he’s not really even wrong; they do have to stop to sleep eventually. Gem could just be being paranoid here.
He grimaces, though. “Right. Well. I’m stopping for a bit, at least.”
Maybe Gem shouldn’t have presented herself as such an authority about the car and the cops. Sure, she’s the one who works in the auto department, Joel’s just the guy who loves his vehicle, but it’s not like she’s ever done this before, either.
(Worked in the auto department, a stressed little part of her mind that needs to stay buried points out. She’s fucked if she chickens out and goes home. Walmart can always find another warm body to replace her.)
“Alright. We can figure it out in a second.”
So they peel off the highway, and then off another exit, and another, and finally find somewhere to park up on a side street, over the drive of some random suburban house. (Not like they’re gonna be using it at this hour, right?) Joel lets his forehead drop down to bump against the top of the steering wheel as soon as he’s parked. “Ow.”
“Okay, don’t hurt yourself,” she mutters.
“‘M fine.” He pops back up, rubbing at the point of impact. The headlights having turned off with the engine, they’re sitting in sodium-orange streetlamp light now. It’s darker than Gem had realised. “So what, then?”
Gem thinks. She doesn’t know where they are, she doesn’t know where they’re headed, she doesn’t know what Joel did and if they’re far enough away from the scene of the crime for that to matter. “I don’t know. How scared are you?”
The look he gives her when she says that tells her that it’s not the answer he’d have expected from her in a hundred thousand years. “Erm. Haven’t… got an answer for that, really. Hadn’t thought about it. Can’t put a number on it.”
That much was obvious from the way he’d freaked out earlier. Gem’s kind of waiting on the moment this time bomb explodes, admittedly. “I guess a better question is how much distance you wanna put between us and that crime scene, then.”
“A lot.”
“More than this?”
He hesitates. “Yeah.”
“Alright, scootch over, I’ll drive for a couple hours.”
His eyebrows drop. “You what?”
“I can take us -”
“No, I heard you, just - I barely know you. You’re not driving my car, any length of time.”
Gem keeps looking at him. Tries to beam the facts of we don’t know how long this trip is gonna take and we’re running from the cops and you just nearly fell asleep behind the wheel to him all at once.
Unfortunately, she still hasn’t quite figured out psychic communication just yet, because he still doesn’t fold. “Look, I can do it, it’s - I’m alright.” He gestures to his can of Monster in the cupholder. “That’s what these are for, en’t they.”
“Those are for the morning. Joel - Dom - whatever - if you seriously chug that now you’re gonna start seeing the hat man and we’re gonna crash the car and die either way.”
“As if I can’t manage alright without one night’s sleep,” he keeps arguing, thumb rubbing at the steering wheel restlessly like he’s gonna erode a hole in it. “Few minutes, I’ll be fine.”
“You will not,” Gem snaps, and even as his eyes flare with anger at being talked to like that, she realises somewhat awkwardly that within the last few hours of non-conversation and tension and radio millions giveaways, she’s started to develop the first dregs of a foundation of actually caring about Joel’s wellbeing more than she would any other stranger.
Because, yes, she’d try to convince any given customer that approached her at the auto department desk not to drive exhausted, that’s basic road safety and she doesn’t want random people to die on her watch - but if they kept insisting like this, she’s not sure she wouldn’t usually give up and declare, it’s your funeral. Yet here she is, trying her best to wear Joel down.
Because she wants him (and herself) to live, because she wants to see this through, yeah… more, though, because she’s declared him her responsibility now, and - and he seems like a cool guy if you look past the crimes of ambiguous nature, and it’d be great if once they get to Canada and he’s got time to figure out what the fuck he’s gonna do about all this, if they… don’t never see one another again, she supposes. If they keep in touch. If she gets to know what he’s like when he’s not knee-deep in mania, on the run from maybe-murder.
“Right, that’s it,” says Joel, “get out of my car. I’m not doing this.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You can fuck off if you’re gonna try tell me what to do like that. It’s - I’m not havin’ it.”
With the engine shut off, it feels ten times quieter, submersed in Gem’s stunned silence. “You’re gonna kick me out on the street? I don’t even know where we are.”
“You’ve got a phone. Use it.”
“We were driving for hours! You think I’m just gonna, what, Uber home? You think I know somebody who’s gonna just come pick me up? Look at how late it is! Look at - look at me, Joel, I’m a woman and I’m not that big and I’m not even wearing a coat, you think I’m safe even waiting for a cab alone?”
“It’s not -”
“Look, I know you think you know what you’re doing but you really fucking don’t and I’m not gonna let you abandon me like that - which, unbelievably cruel and stupid thing to try, by the way - can you just take a breath and think for ten seconds before you start burning your goddamn bridges even more than you clearly already have?”
Thank god, that seems to cut his tongue out. He blinks, and blinks again, visibly seething, then gets out the car himself and Gem watches him go kick the streetlight. Two, three times. Then fall against it, both arms up to form a barrier between cold metal and his face, and he breathes, and he breathes, and he breathes.
Wait. Gem can’t hear it from this side, even though Joel left the door wide open, but that’s - he might be crying.
From inside the glove compartment, some guitar-heavy soundbyte starts playing.
Gem lets Joel’s phone ring out. Doesn’t dare touch it, or anything, really. If he freaked out that much over the idea of her taking the wheel, she doesn’t wanna risk him finding her looking at her phone to see whose call he missed. (Although, honestly, it might not even be as severe of a crashout as this one was.) She just kind of sits, stuck in an iron maiden of anticipation, hardly twitching lest she get skewered on the sides.
(... There is a number she could call, if she wanted someone to drive out and get her in the middle of the night right now, no questions asked. There is.
She’s got it blocked for damn good reason.)
Joel comes over. Opens the passenger side door. His eyes are definitely red.
She gets out, awkwardly, unties her flannel from round her waist and puts it on for real, because it is colder than she’d realised in the open air. Looks at him, waiting for the last word.
Instead of attacking her, he goes to sit on the short brick wall that outlines the edge of the house’s property, the house they’re parked up on the drive of. Gem joins him, a foot or two away. Hedge leaves tickle the back of her neck.
“You got a phone call,” she offers, when she’s really sure that he’s not going to be the one to start things.
He’s deflated, almost, unusually shrunken into himself, even though he was already pretty short. “I did?”
“I didn’t check who it was.”
“Jim,” he asserts, with such confidence that Gem almost believes for a second that she’s supposed to know who Jim is. “God.”
Gem lets that sit for a few moments. He didn’t say it like a prayer necessarily, but it had all the fervent, hopeless desperation of one.
Joel shivers. “Can’t - don’t know how to feel about that, really.”
“Do we… like Jim?”
“Ye-” a laugh forces its way out of his throat, just one, almost uncomfortable “- yeah. We like Jim.”
Another long pause.
“Dunno if Jim still likes me.”
Gem hedges her bets. “Is he the guy you…?”
“Not Jim, no. He’s -” he gestures to the car, broadly “- you saw him.”
In the photographs, then. “Blue shirt or glasses?”
“Blue one, yeah.”
“... So was it Glasses?”
Joel hits a long, slow breath, eyes screwing shut, his entire face pulling in and then pushing out again with the opening of his eyes as he exhales. “Yeah. His name’s Grian.”
“And these are… your friends?”
“They were, yeah.”
“Right.” A little hard to stay chummy with someone after you’ve maybe run them over.
She doesn’t think she’s ever seen someone more in need of a cigarette. A real one, not her stupid little faux-vape breaks she takes to get an extra couple minutes outside the building when she’s at her limit with her job. Then again, if Joel had a lighter right now, she wonders if he might not use it on something far more destructive. “Erm.”
Gem waits.
Joel cracks, eventually. “Last night. This morning. Yesterday morning. Whatever.”
“Uh-huh?”
“We were - I mean, we’re always in a bit of a spat, it’s not - but we’d been on at each other a bit more, lately, it was just - I don’t know. Tensions. Grian’s got his new job, it’s been -” he cuts himself off, thinking. “‘S been weird.”
“And?”
“And last night we got into it, that wasn’t new - most nights we just shove each other round a bit then forget about it in the morning, but - I dunno, he just - pissed me off, right. So I told him I’d go, said I’d be off on a drive, said don’t wait for me. And Grian said.” He swallows. “Said no, you can’t just leave, we’re not done, we’re in the middle of something, Joel, you can’t just drive off like that. And I said if he didn’t get out the way, I wasn’t stopping. And.”
“He didn’t get out the way,” Gem finishes, quietly.
Joel hums. “So I went. And I was driving for a while, but I could tell there was something sticking in the wheel. ‘Cos he can’t just get out of my way, can he, not even for a second. So I was gonna try and grab it myself, but - but I don’t know, I didn’t wanna touch it.”
Blood on his hands, quite literally, if he had. Gem can get the picture.
“But I can’t see the normal shop, either, they’ll know something’s off, so.” Joel makes eye contact. “Came to you.”
“And I had you covered.”
“Yeah.” He snickers, mirthless. “You’re mad for that. What’re you doing here?”
“I dunno,” she echoes him, “I’ve been having fun.”
He laughs again, like he can’t understand her, ‘cause he can’t. She’s not sure she understands herself.
What she does know is that they’re at a crossroads, now. “So are you gonna call Jim back?”
Joel sobers. “Erm. I should. If only to find out if Grian’s actually dead now.”
“Do you wanna know?”
“Well - no. Yes. Not really.”
“But you should.”
“I should, yeah.”
She turns this over. She knows what she wants to do, has wanted all night, and she knows what Joel doesn’t want to do. The only question is how to thread one into the other.
At least he seems to be crashing again. He’s draped himself over the steering wheel, forearms forming a pillow between his forehead and the fancy varnished wooden grip. (Because he spared no expense for any part of this thing, evidently.)
“And you don’t wanna go home yet,” she presses.
“Er. Not if I can help it.”
“Okay,” Gem says slowly, “so we leave it ‘till morning. Make ‘em sweat. If you wait long enough, he’s just gonna be glad you didn’t both die, right?”
Joel scoffs, still into his arms. “Yeah. Grian’ll just call me a twat, if he’s alright. And Jim’s a big softy anyway, when he’s not being stupid.”
“Yeah, so this sounds like a plan to me. And if we do need to keep moving, we’ll have the extra hours of progress, and if we don’t, we can always turn around. They’ll be fine.”
He doesn’t reply, like he’s trying to run the calculations on what she’s pitching.
Okay, better make it easy on him. He’s had a long day. “If you’re gonna let me drive now.”
Big sigh, harsh and mouthy, all the way out of his lungs and into the wheel. “Alright,” says Joel, “only ‘cos I’m genuinely dead on my feet at this point.”
“Cool,” says Gem, nonchalant, like she doesn’t get a little sick thrill from winning the fight after all that trouble.
He doesn’t just switch seats with her but instead goes to the effort of bedding down flat across the back seat, both seatbelts strapped across him in a way that makes Gem giggle as she gets a feel for the driver’s seat. “What?”
“Nothin’. Glad you’re practising road safety.”
He doesn’t dignify that with a response, but when she looks back a few seconds later to see if that’s because he’s fallen asleep already, he’s just kind of idly scowling. Gem twists the ignition.
(The radio starts up again with the engine. The late-night program seems to be on a greatest-hits train, from how it’s fading out of a Beatles song into something she doesn’t know the artist of but does recognise from a half-dozen commercials over the years. She sets the volume low.)
It’s lucky she was half-asleep for so long earlier, because now she actually feels kind of refreshed, as she relocates the highway and keeps moving. Joel’s car does honestly drive better than the car she used to have. Money can buy quality; who knew? Still, it’s not like it’s different from what she’s used to, so it’s no trouble to make more progress north.
The phone in the glove compartment doesn’t ring again. Gem’s not sure if that’s a good thing.
Empty road. Black night; dark skyline, stars obscured by thin and patchy cloud layer. It’s nice to be far from anywhere.
By the time she feels herself faltering, losing stretches of time to highway hypnosis, the night shows no signs of ceding, so she cracks her Monster and drinks it early. The clock on the dashboard blinks 02:46. Every name on every exit sign is unfamiliar. They must have crossed state lines at least once by now, right?
Which means you’re home free, a stupid part of her brain announces, we can stop worrying about it now. Drop him off on the side of the road like he was gonna do to you. Keep the car, you’ve got the keys. New starts are fun!
Okay. She remembers why she gets so drawn in by crazy people now. It’s because she’s just as bad.
Gem does not drop Joel off on the side of the road, and she does not steal the car, and she does not stop worrying about it, at least not entirely. She makes steady pace at the speed limit until sunrise, at which point she starts looking out for a gas station, while Joel stirs heavy and ungainly behind her.
“Y’ve not crashed?” he asks.
“No, I didn’t crash your car,” says Gem. “You want breakfast?”
“Not yet.” Joel’s still indistinct, slow-waking.
“Well, good, ‘cause I haven’t found any yet.”
When he next speaks, it’s much more clearly. “I’ve got to call Jim.”
“Mhm.”
“... Should I do that now?”
“Wait till we stop.” She kinda doesn’t wanna be there when they have the conversation. Doesn’t want to intercede on Joel’s personal life, when right now she’s just the chauffeur to his getaway mission. “Give yourself time to think about what you’re gonna tell ‘em.”
“Yeah,” says Joel, with all the certainty of someone who has never thought about what he was going to say before he said it in the past and who has no plans of starting the trend today.
It’s lucky Joel has pulled himself upright by the time Gem finds and exit and pulls off the road to settle by a pump, because there are a couple of cops hanging around the door to the convenience store, and it would look even worse if they’d spotted her with what appeared to be a body in the back. As it stands, she just flicks her head back to silently confer wide eyes with him, disguised as backing herself up slightly to align herself with gas she isn’t going to purchase.
Joel seems spooked as well, but doesn’t show any particular signs of feeling the need to bolt. Sleep has done him good.
“Okay,” says Gem, “you stay in the back and make your call, I go in the store again?”
“Alright.”
“Whatcha want to eat?”
“Er. God, I don’t know. They’ll have some kind of protein bar nonsense, won’t they?”
“Probably.” She underhand-bowls him the keys to the car, leans over to pop the glove compartment, and pulls the phone out. It’s a beat-up android with no case. Very Joel. “Here ya go,” she finishes.
Joel catches the keys smoothly and receives the phone like it might burn him. “Yeah, it was Jim who called,” he mutters. “Fuck.”
“Go get ‘em, tiger,” Gem shrugs, and excuses herself with his wallet. (He never asked for it back the first time, alright?)
The cops don’t seem to recognise his extremely distinctive striped car, which either means that his friend lived or they’re just far away enough now for it not to matter. Gem pulls two chocolate chip peanut butter protein things out of a display and feels her fingers trembling slightly against the wrappers. The Monster is monstering, it seems. It’s very early morning still - if they keep going after this, she’s gonna crash at maybe ten o’clock, knowing her body. Maybe she’ll try that thing Joel did with strapping himself in at the back to sleep sideways. She’s never seen anyone do that before, but if it works, it works.
Protein things, and some prepackaged protein shakes too, because they say fortified on the side and the two of them must need fortification right now. She peeps out the door; Joel’s still talking. And some chips.
And a scratch card, again, she decides at the counter. Joel’s not broke yet. This cashier eyes her like he can’t quite believe she’d ask for one, but that doesn’t bother Gem. Walmart inoculates you to a lot worse bullshit than that.
This time all her shit goes in a plastic bag, because she wasn’t quite paying attention when the attendant asked, but at least it gives her a better excuse to dangle it between her fingers while she stands outside waiting for Joel to finish. It’s no broken vape, but it’s something.
Well, there’s that and the scratch card. Which she is really, truly, honestly expecting to be a bust again - it’s just a pointless exercise in spending money, she’s always known this, she doesn’t think it’s ever gonna work.
But her thumb nail clears up square, square, square, square, square, and wait, holy shit? Holy shit??
Gem’s head darts up to Joel again. Back to the card. Back to Joel. She catches his eye and he nods. That doesn’t give anything away. His friend’s alive and dead at the same time, Schrödinger-esque.
The cops are still here, lingering.
Adrift. No idea what direction she’ll be sailing in for the foreseeable future. Paths in every single goddamn direction. All of her ideas terrible and genius.
Gem feels a little like she ran somebody over herself right now, and she doesn’t regret any of it for a second.
Joel hangs up. The waveform is going to collapse the instant she gets back in the car. Which is why, right now, Gem just allows herself to stand in the intoxicating overflow of possibilities, here at this no-name gas station hours and hours from anywhere she’s ever called home, uncertain.
Then, floating two inches off the ground, Gem starts walking over to her green-streak maybe-murderer new-best-friend’s expensive car, and settles herself in to keep a solid two-hand grip on the wheel of whatever comes next.
Someone’s gotta.