Chapter 14: MIDDLE AMERICA
Oklahoma had exactly one thing going for it: the highway was straight enough that I could let my mind wander without risking a crash.
Day two of the drive. We'd left Albuquerque at sunrise, pushed through the Texas panhandle (flat, brown, seemingly infinite), and crossed into Oklahoma around noon. Max had taken over radio duties with minimal argument, cycling through stations until she found something we could both tolerate.
Right now: silence. She'd turned the radio off somewhere around Oklahoma City, and the only sound was the engine and the wind.
"Okay." Max shifted in her seat to face me. "I have a question."
"Just one?"
"One to start." Her jaw had that stubborn set I was learning to recognize. "What happened to you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Don't." She shook her head. "Don't do the thing where you pretend not to understand. You know exactly what I mean. One day you were—" She paused, searching for words. "—you were the worst person I knew. Meaner than Neil, almost. And then you woke up and you were completely different. Like someone replaced you overnight."
I kept my eyes on the road. Watched the miles unspool ahead of us, endless and indifferent.
"What if they did?"
Max stared at me. "What does that mean?"
Ten miles passed before I answered. The words had to be chosen carefully—enough truth to satisfy her, not so much that it raised more questions than it answered.
"One day I woke up and the person I was before was gone." I kept my voice level. Steady. "Different memories. Different feelings. Different... everything. Don't ask me how, because I don't know. Don't ask me why, because I don't know that either. I just know that I'm not who I was."
Silence. I could feel her processing, turning the words over, testing them against what she knew.
"So you're telling me," she said slowly, "that the asshole Billy is just... gone? And you're—what? A new person wearing his face?"
"Something like that."
"That's insane."
"Yeah."
"That's literally impossible."
"Also yeah."
More silence. A sign announced we were sixty miles from Tulsa. The landscape was green now, more trees than desert, the terrain of the heartland slowly revealing itself.
"I make fire with my hands," I pointed out. "You've seen it. Impossible stopped being a useful category about a month ago."
Max opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Okay," she said finally. "Fair point."
"I'm not saying I understand what happened. I'm not saying I have answers. I'm just saying—the person you hated, the one who made your life hell for two years—he's not here anymore. Whoever I am now, I'm trying to be better."
"Whoever you are?"
"I don't know what to call it. New me. Different me. It doesn't matter what the label is. What matters is that I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not going to let anyone hurt you. That's the deal."
She turned to look out the window. Oklahoma scrolled past, unremarkable and endless.
"So the old Billy is just... dead? Gone forever?"
I thought about that morning in California. The wrong ceiling. The panic. The realization that I'd been ripped out of one life and dropped into another with no explanation and no preparation.
"I don't know if he was ever really alive the way you mean," I said. "But whatever he was—whoever he was—yeah. Gone."
Max was quiet for a long time. I let the silence stretch, gave her room to process. This wasn't something you could rush.
"The thing is," she said eventually, "I should be freaked out about this. Like, completely freaked out. Body-snatching supernatural weirdness should probably bother me more than it does."
"But?"
"But you're better." She turned back to face me, and something in her expression had shifted. Decision made. "New Billy is better than old Billy. So if whatever happened made that possible—I can work with that."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that." A small smile. "Besides, you make fire with your hands. That's pretty cool."
I laughed. Couldn't help it. The sound felt foreign, still—genuine amusement, the kind I hadn't felt much in either of my lives.
"Glad you approve."
"Don't let it go to your head." She reached for the radio dial. "Now shut up and let me find a good station. This silence is creeping me out."
She found something playing Prince. Neither of us complained.
The afternoon wore on. We stopped for gas in Tulsa, pushed through to Joplin, finally crashed at a motel in Springfield, Missouri. Closer now. One more day and we'd be in Indiana.
That night, lying in my motel bed, I thought about what I'd told her. Partial truth. Enough honesty to satisfy her questions without opening doors I couldn't close.
She'd accepted it. Chosen to believe—or at least to act like she believed—that her stepbrother had been replaced by someone better. And maybe that was enough. Maybe the explanation mattered less than the outcome.
Hawkins was pulling at me. I could feel it now, something on the edge of perception. Not quite a sound, not quite a feeling. More like a pressure, building slowly as the distance closed.
Tomorrow we'd cross into Indiana.
Tomorrow the real work would begin.
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