Night Trips 1989 -

For the next three hours, they drove. The Buick ate up the miles. Sam told him about the ocean—how she’d seen it once, in Virginia Beach, and how the water was the color of a black eye at night. Leo told her about his father’s temper, the way it filled the house like gas. They passed a sign that said “Welcome to North Carolina” and neither of them slowed down.

Leo watched her walk across the parking lot until the gray light swallowed her. Then he got back in the Buick. He rewound the Smiths tape to the beginning. He didn’t go home. Not yet.

“Don’t lose it,” she said.

At dawn, Leo pulled into a truck stop outside Fayetteville. Sam said she had a cousin there. She’d be fine. She wrote a number on a napkin— “If you ever get to Chicago” —and pressed it into his palm.

“As far as the gas lasts,” Leo said. night trips 1989

“Then let’s fix that,” she said, and she ejected Disintegration from the tape deck. She dug into her duffel bag and pulled out a bootleg cassette with a handwritten label: “The Smiths – Louder Than Bombs (Side A only).”

The night trips were his secret. Every Friday that summer, he’d drive without a map, chasing the red glow of radio towers or the promise of a 24-hour diner. He never told his friends. They were busy with fireworks and keg stands. Leo was busy memorizing the way streetlights painted the dashboard gold. For the next three hours, they drove

Leo had been driving since dusk. His car was a dented Buick Skylark the color of a dirty cloud, and the tape deck only played one cassette without crackling: The Cure’s Disintegration . He’d listened to “Plainsong” so many times that the opening chime had become the sound of loneliness.