LITMIR.BIZ

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come to her defense, calling her a free thinker. But eventually, even he had given up on her.

      Both her parents, she knew, wanted her to “be somebody.” Her sisters had both followed their example, or at least their father’s example. David Lee was a well-respected neurosurgeon at the prestigious UCSF Medical Center and each of her sisters had their own surgical specialties and enjoyed surgery privileges at the same hospital, making her father exceedingly proud.

      Her mother was a law professor at the University of San Francisco. Her classes were always in demand. Which made her, with her BA in Liberal Arts—emphasis on English—the official black sheep of the family.

      “You’d think, with an Asian-American father and a mother whose grandparents hailed from Ireland and Scotland, and came here eager to make something of themselves in their adopted county, you’d have some real drive, some kind of ambition to become someone,” her mother had lamented when she had informed her parents that she was not applying to either medical school or law school.

      Well, she had drive. Only her drive just happened to be in another direction than her parents and sisters had taken.

      A drive that was stalling, Kim thought in disgust, with this detour to write a story about a town that was barely a visible dot on the map.

      She would have been tempted to say that Stan had made the whole thing up, playing some really bizarre belated April Fool’s prank on her two weeks before Christmas—except that she had actually managed to find the damn hole-in-the-wall on her GPS when she’d gotten into the car she’d rented at the airport.

      The airport at Laredo had been all right, she supposed. Nothing like what she was used to in San Francisco, but compared to what she was looking at now on her way to Forever, the airport seemed like an absolute Shangri-la.

      How did people survive in places like this? And why would they even want to if they had to live out their whole lives here? Kim couldn’t help wondering. There were miles and miles of miles and miles, nothing else in either direction.

      All she knew was that if she’d been born in a place like this, she would have saved every dime she could and the moment she graduated high school, she would have been gone—maybe even before then if the opportunity presented itself—but definitely the second she graduated.

      There was nothing out here except for desolation, with an occasional ranch thrown in between, but she hadn’t even seen one of those for an hour now.

      People who lived in this part of the country probably looked like dried-up, wrinkled prunes by the time they were thirty-five, she estimated, glancing up toward the sky through her windshield.

      Not wanting to usher in the dust, she had her windows rolled up and soon discovered that it was warm in her car. The weather down here was a lot warmer than she was accustomed to this time of year. She shouldn’t have wasted her time packing heavy sweaters and jackets, she thought.

      You shouldn’t have wasted your time coming here at all, a nagging voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like her sister, Monica, whispered to her. Mom and Dad would have been more than happy to lend you the money—or better yet, have you move back into the house. It’s way too big for just the two of them.

      Great, now she was hearing voices. More specifically, Monica’s voice.

      That was all she needed, to get heatstroke out here, Kim thought in exasperation. Next, she would start hallucinating.

      Damn it, she should have held out. There had to be some other story on Stan’s docket, something she could have worked on that was a lot closer to home than this. Union-Post Publishing owned a theater magazine, didn’t it? Stan could have easily sent her to do some puff piece on the new theater season that was coming next fall. Anything other than this Sagebrush Cowboys Save Troubled Teens thing he wanted her to write.

      With every passing minute, she grew more irritable.

      She should have stood her ground and dug in. Now it was too late and she was stuck out here. Stuck going to some stupid town called Farewell, or Forever, or Four Miles From Nowhere—

      Kim’s eyes widened as she stared at the small rectangular screen on the dashboard that had, until a moment ago, been her GPS monitoring unit.

      Except now it wasn’t.

      It wasn’t anything.

      The screen had gone blank. Desperate, Kim hit the blank screen with the heel of her hand, trying to make it come around. It remained blank.

      That was what she got for renting a compact car, she upbraided herself.

      Trying to figure out what to do, she pulled the car over to the side of the road—although if she just kept on going, what was the difference? she asked herself. It wasn’t as if she’d hit anything. There was nothing for her to hit in either direction, not even a rabbit, or snail, or whatever animals they had out here in the forgotten desert.

      With the car idling, Kim shifted in her seat and pulled her purse back onto the passenger seat. Her purse had lunged onto the floor when she’d pulled over a bit too suddenly, spilling, she now saw, its entire contents onto the floor of the car. Everything was in a jumbled heap.

      Swallowing a curse, she pulled it all together and deposited it back into her purse—all except for her cell phone. That she took and opened. She swiped past a couple of screens until she found the GPS app that had come preinstalled on her phone.

      Despite the fact that she’d lived her entire life in San Francisco, she still managed to get lost on a fairly regular basis and she had come to rely rather heavily on her phone’s GPS feature.

      A feature which wasn’t pulling up, Kim noticed angrily as she stabbed over and over again at the small square image on her phone. When the image finally did enlarge, the words below it irritatingly informed her that it couldn’t find a data connection and thus, the very sophisticated feature on her phone containing all the latest bells and whistles wasn’t about to ring any of its bells or blow any of its whistles, at least not now. Not until its lost signal was suddenly restored.

      “Damn it, I really am in hell,” Kim declared, looking around.

      There were absolutely no signs posted anywhere to tell her if she was going in the right direction or even if she was going around in circles. For all she knew, she wasn’t even in Texas anymore.

      The dirt road was too dry and hard to have registered her tire tracks, so she had no idea if she had traveled this way before.

      “I could be going around in circles until I die from dehydration out here, and nobody’d know the difference—not even me,” she lamented.

      Why had she ever said yes to this horrible assignment?

      For two cents, she’d turn around and go back—except that she had no idea if turning around actually meant that she was going back. Maybe if she turned around, she would eventually wind up driving into this town she didn’t want to go to?

      Damn it, she was confusing herself.

      Feeling panicky, Kim looked around the interior of the pristine vehicle to see if there was anything packed in one of the side pockets that could help her.

      After foraging around, she discovered an old folded map tucked into the side of the rear passenger door, but when she opened it, she found that the map did her no good. A product of the digital age, she had absolutely no idea how to actually read a map.

      She was going to die out here, Kim thought, tossing the map aside. She was going to die out here and most likely, no one would ever even find her body.

      She still stubbornly didn’t regret not going to her parents for money. If she had to die, she would die rebellious and proud.

      What did it feel like, she wondered, baking to death inside a low-end economy car? Maybe she should have rented something more high-end, like a Mercedes or a Jaguar. If it was going to wind up being her casket, then maybe—

      A

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