THE SUN HAD begun to set, turning the hills around us into a shade of light rose. Golden clouds that were reflected from the countryside illuminated the sky. Across the landscape, all was calm and quiet. The wind blew softly, causing the grass on the roadside to sway in perfect harmony. There were only a few cars on the highway. As each passed, I knew they too were taking in the magnificence all around us.

I had one foot on the gas, amping up the speed with every riff of the song, and the other resting near the open window. Sunglasses on my head kept my hair, whirling in every direction, out of my eyes for the most part. When the telltale redwood trees appeared in the distance, I pulled in a deep breath. Even after a day on the road, it felt so good to be driving. Soon, we’d bein our new hometown. We’d spent the night at a rest stop and I’d been driving since before daybreak, but nothing could slow us down. Shay, my co-pilot and best friend since I was twelve, was in the passenger seat, bending over pages of the atlas again, trying to figure out when we’d make it to our destination. The music fueled us forward as it had all day long.

We’d been to Eugene, Oregon, only once before, but once was all we needed. Downtown was the place to be, brimming with students and ideas and art, and one of those many rows of old craftsman-style houses would suit our plan to open a vintage store perfectly. The music—the records—would be the heart of it all. The other rooms would befilled with racks of clothes.

For months leading up to our high school graduation—and then all summer long—we’d been building out our big idea. We fashioned it around everything we loved, and we knew we could bring it to life. We were eighteen, done with school—for now at least—and free to carry out our wildest dreams and adventures.

Shay took a long swig of Mountain Dew and turned Nirvana up a few notches. We belted out every line of the “SmellsLike Teen Spirit” chorus and moaned along to every strung-out hello.

“I still can’t even believe you were in that video,” she said when the song wrapped up. “Like the biggest music video ever.”

“Seriously. I had no idea what I was walking into when we went to see them at the Roxy in Hollywood.” I couldn’t help but smile, thinking back to that concert. It was unbelievable. “Nobody had really heard much about Nirvana before. From the very first song, I knew they were gonna be huge. Then we were all doing stage dives andthey noticed us.”

“That’s when they asked you to come do their music video.” Shay let out a dramatic sigh. “Man, did I miss out.”

“Wish you’d been with us.”

“I know. I know. My host family in Germany thought I was nuts when I saw you on TV. Well, they thought I was nuts all the time, but you know what I mean. I couldn’t believe it. I was screaming, “There’s Denver!”

“Should have been ‘Denver and Shay,’ but that’s how it will be from now on. We’re gonna do it all. Way more ahead of us than behind us.” I gripped the wheel and gave her a glance.

“I don’t know whether I should be excited or scared,” she said, shouting over the next song. “We’ve done a lot of crazy stuff already.”

She was right. Catching a lift from strangers, riding our bikes to the ocean in the middle of the night, the clubs, and the parties. We always found a way in, and somehow, we always found our way out too. We were sheltered from harm in away neither of us could understand. In my heart, I’d always hoped it was my mom looking out for me.

As gorgeous as the sunset was, I couldn’t wait to see the enormous sky filled with stars, way out here away from the city lights.

Under the glow of starlight, I imagined, I’d have the chance to finally really think about all that had happened over the past four years. That big, wide-open starry sky was what I pictured when I prayed at my window every night, wishing everything would work out. That was when I could feel my mom’s presence most.

I glanced over at Shay. She’d traded the atlas for a floppy blue pillow in the backseat—we liked to call it her emotional support pillow—and turned the volume down. That pillow had been with her since she was a baby. She took it everywhere, including when she went away to Germany for her foreign exchange student year, and it had all the holes and stitches to prove its wear over the years. Like it had done off and on all day, a sunbeam struck an angle of the crystal necklace she wore, shooting out a rainbow prism on the dashboard.

“I think we can still make it all the way there tonight,” she said. “It’s a straight shot on I-5 into Eugene.”

“Perfect.” I pulled my leg back inside, rounded a curve that led to a long, descending stretch of road, and popped mysunglasses down over my eyes. “Riding right into the sunset, baby.”

We were cruising for a while longer, screaming to the music, before the sun began to descend into the horizon.Then the redwood trees rose higher before us like a greeting. I laid down hard on the horn as we passed the official sign: Oregon Welcomes You.

When we finally got to Eugene, though, the streets were mostly empty. The town wasn’t bustling with college kids like I had expected.

“Okay, it’s not exactly what I remember.” It was an admission to myself as much as it was to Shay.

“Well, first of all, it’s evening.” Shay reached both arms over-head to stretch and popped her chewing gum like she was unbothered by the ghost town vibes. She glanced at her watch. “It’s seven.” “Yeah, seven o’clock on a Friday night. I think that’s when everybody should be out.”

I peered down the street and spotted two other cars. There were only a few businesses along the main road that even had lights on.

“Let’s see what we can find. I need to move in the worst way,” Shay said, looping her arm into the crook of my elbow.“There has to be something open. Maybe we can ask around for a hotel, too. I’m dying for a shower. I think we can make that work in our budget.”

Between the two of us, we’d saved more money than we’d ever had at once in our entire lives. The plan was to find a storefront, and then we’d rent a truck and drive everything we had—all the cool clothes and old albums—to our new shop. We knew the money we’d saved wasn’t bottomless, but after spending the night in the Blazer, a shower sounded priceless.

The two of us went on a tour of darkened storefronts. Some were closed for the night. Some looked like they were closed for good. “Oh, check this out.” Shay dragged forward toward “Had Matter,” which—if the sign was any indication—appeared to be a trippy record shop. Half the window was covered with flyers for shows, which seemed promising, but then we noticed the dates had all passed months ago. Nobody had put anything up since May.

“I hadn’t thought about what it’s like when students aren’t here,” I said, pressing my forehead against the cool glass to get a better look. There wasn’t much to see. A few worn leather chairs were clustered around a patterned rug that lookedlike it had seen some things.

“Feels a little like a downer,” Shay offered, “but the kids should be back soon for fall semester, right? I’m sure we can figure out a way to make it work. Our way.”

“Yeah, maybe. Maybe not.”

“Hey.” Shay pulled me by my shoulders to face her. “We’ve been driving for two days. We’ve been planning for,like, a year. Did we come all this way to let the first problem trip us up?”

“No.” My response came off a little limp.

Shay shot me a head tilt that said you can do better than that. I couldn’t help but smile back.

“Just seems like maybe our timing is off,” I answered her. I pointed at the shuttered record shop. “This doesn’t look like a good sign.”

“We’ve been down one street,” Shay said. “Let’s at least see what else we can find. Where was that park we liked? By the river? Remember?”

Five sleepy blocks later, past rows of houses with Greek symbols nailed out front but no lights on, we found the park. What we didn’t find was people, other than a couple shady looking characters huddled together in an exchange near a trash can.

We’d passed two dive bars that looked like they might be open, but that was the only sign of life. I couldn’t even hear anything but insects. This place was literally crickets. It was far more lush than it had been when we visited before, in January, but somehow it felt less alive.

“We could try to sneak into that one bar,” Shay offered. “I brought my fake ID.”

We followed a walkway to the water, and I slumped down onto a park bench bolted to a wooden pier. Maybe the weight of the day or the fatigue from the long drive were catching up to me. I tried to focus on the serenity of the river. It was postcard-perfect in the glow of moonlight. It felt like a dream. What it didn’t feel like was real life, or at least not my life.

“What’s actually bugging you?” Shay asked. “I know it’s not quite what we were thinking, but things will look up. We’ll figure out a plan.”

“I think maybe this is the right plan, but the wrong time,” I answered. “Something feels wrong.”

“Girl, I know you. I know what’s wrong too.”

I felt the pinprick of tears and willed them to stay back. None of this was going the way I’d hoped.

“You can talk to me about it. I hope you know you can talk to me about anything.”

I let the moment sink in. For the first time in weeks, or maybe the first time in months, I let myself think about what was behind me instead of what was ahead of me. I’d been okay packing up for our new life. I’d even been okay saying goodbye, once and for all, to my boyfriend. Now that we’d made it, though, I knew I wasn’t okay without knowing whether my dad was okay.

“When he didn’t show up at graduation, I figured I wasn’t going to let him mess with our plans. He didn’t show upfor me, so why should I show up for him?”

Shay didn’t answer. She waited for me to talk it out.

“But maybe the reason he didn’t show up is because something happened to him.”

That was the only real answer I could form in my mind about why my own father would have missed my high school graduation. He had been gone for more than a year by that point, but I’d still held out hope that I’d look out into the bleachers and see him looking back at me, arms crossed, with that mischievous twinkle in his eyes. I’d give anything to feel him hug me. I’d made it all the way through senior year without him, pretty much all on my own. Why couldn’t he show up to acknowledge how much I’d been able to pull off or tell me how proud he was of me?

I knew he loved me, but what dad would miss a moment like that? Or all the other moments over the last year when I needed my only living parent to be by my side…

He had to be hurt, lost, or in trouble. He’d been a police officer; he could take care of himself. But he’d also been fighting a battle that was too difficult for anyone to face alone. My dad needed help. He needed me.

I hadn’t said anything to her about my dad on graduation day, but Shay knew.

She reached an arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “The thrift store can wait a few more weeks,” she said. “Or maybe we’ll come across a better place. We’ve got a whole country of cool towns and places to explore and all the time in the world.” I leaned back and peered up through a canopy of sky-high trees. How’d I land such an amazing friend? This girl had been a game-changer for me since Day One. Running late on my first day of seventh grade, I’d walked into awall of silence and weird looks for my first-period science class. I opened the door, expecting to slip in among the chatter, but it was one of those moments where it felt like a sea of people turned around and zeroed in on only me—awkward, alone, and one step behind.

That was my shaky start to junior high, or it could have been if Shay hadn’t stood up in a crowd and invited me, by name, to sit with her. I’d recognized her from a class in sixth grade, but we’d never talked before. She came to my rescue in an awkward moment, and since then, we’d been like sisters.

She still had the same sweetheart looks, a blonde bob haircut that emphasized the roundness of her face and brought the intensity of her wide eyes front and center. When she added an edgy pop of red lipstick, she was a totalbadass babe, always by my side and up for whatever wild idea I had next. And I’d had some wild ones.

We’d sneaked from our home in Huntington Beach, California, down to Tijuana, Mexico, by ourselves a few timeswithout a care or a worry in the world. We’d finagled our way into more clubs than I could count and hitchhiked our way up and down Beach Boulevard. More than once, we’d shaken loose a perv or two, just by thinking fast on our feet.

And now Shay was offering to ditch everything we’d planned and ride with me across the country to find my out-of-the-picture dad. On paper, it was probably a dead end. My instinct told me otherwise. I’d been trying to ignore it. Shay got me like nobody else could, but how could I ask her to go along with this, after all we’d worked for?

My boyfriend—well, ex-boyfriend—and I had driven all the way from Huntington Beach, California, toWashington D.C. to find my dad a few weeks after he left last year. We’d showed up at the building where Dad was supposed to meet us and never found him, not a single trace of him. He hadn’t left messages on the machine back home nor left us a single clue. I couldn’t make Shay do the same thing.

“I can’t ask you to do that. Besides, I don’t have an address or even a phone number for Dad.”

I don’t even know if he’s alive.

That’s the part I couldn’t bring myself to say.

The journey continues…