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bored.
    He pushed away from the bench and picked up the West Virginia/Ohio map. “You’re better at all that, dude. Figure out how to load it best, and I’ll learn to repack,” he said, unfolding the map and looking at the line I’d highlighted across Highway 60. “Don’t your grandparents live in Ohio?”
    “Yeah. Free food and a place to crash.”
    “Works for me,” he said, wadding the map back into something like its original shape. I resisted the urge to snatch it from his hands and fold it properly. Years of Win’s secondhand therapy had taught me a thing or two about enabling. I’d just fix it after he’d gone.
    “Get your money yet?” I asked.
    “Tomorrow,” he said. “I swear.”
    I rolled my eyes. Win’s dad was worth roughly the gross domestic product of a small island nation, and his mom routinely chucked handfuls of guilt money at my friend. Still, he had a nasty habit of not paying his way. “I’m not letting you bum off me for the next sixty days, Win.”
    He shook his head sadly. “This from the man who steals Jif from his own, sweet mother.”
    “Screw you,” I said, smiling, as Win tossed a peanut into his mouth, only to have it ricochet off his front tooth.
    “Blah, blah, blah, best days of our lives, oh the places we’ll go, don’t ever change,” mumbled Tracy Finn in a parody of the valedictory address that she would deliver tomorrow night. We sat under a giant plastic tent on the football field at the school, grateful for a chance to sit after an hour of marching practice in which even the school band seemed to grow bored.
    “Why are we practicing graduation?” Win asked.
    “Because apparently marching is
really
hard. And they don’t want anybody looking stupid,” I said.
    “A little redundant, don’t you think? Most of us are pretty practiced up on the not falling down and making asses of ourselves. You don’t survive this place otherwise,” he said.
    Win sat beside me. For the last nine years he’d been sitting beside me. In third grade, when his family moved to West Virginia from New York, the teacher labeled our desks in alphabetical order, placing Coggans next to Collins. And things sort of took, because we’d been inseparable right up through senior year. Best friends by default. Tomorrow night I’d follow him as we marched in, follow him as we walked up to get our diplomas. I just hoped I could lead once in a while out on the road.
    “Did you get the water filter?” he asked me.
    I nodded. “And the iodine tablets.”
    “Good Eagle,” Win said soothingly. Three months ago I’d earned my Eagle Scout rank. Win quit Scouts in eighth grade, but since then he had been mildly harassing me about the fact that Ihad stayed in. It was one of the items on a long list of things that had started to get old in our friendship.
    Down front the guidance counselor took control of the microphone. “Now, don’t forget to forget the following items for tomorrow’s evening of pomp and circumstance: beach balls, Silly String, air horns, fireworks …”
    “Well, we don’t know how far we’ll go between water sources. Some days it might be sixty or seventy miles,” I said.
    “Stop trying to scare me, Eagle,” Win began before Alicia Bivins, who was seated in front of us, text-messaging someone on her cell phone, whirled around to face us.
    “You guys are really going to do that bike-ride thingie?” she asked.
    I wasn’t sure what to say. In fact, I was shocked she’d noticed at all. Alicia—whose looks virtually guaranteed her a spot as the token hot girl on some future reality show—ran in circles decidedly above Chrisandwin.
    Win sat up a little straighter. “Hell, yeah.”
    “No way! So, like, where are you gonna live?”
    It was weird that Alicia, who had once publicly humiliated Win in seventh grade when he asked her to the May Day Dance, had deigned us worthy of her attentions.
    “Camping in a tent, under the stars, wherever,” Win said, sounding