scenes from a cyberpunk road story, pt. i

In no order.

It's harder than I thought it would be, leaving New York behind again. It's so easy to feel like home is this awful place when you're not there, to say you hate who you were there, you hate all your friends there. But I miss it. I miss when El and I were an unstoppable team.

Which means she was right, of course. She's always fucking right. I miss that, too.

Nora's driving again, because she likes it and she's better at it, but she keeps glancing at me. There's a question there, an unspoken "Are you okay?"--unspoken because Nora never says anything when she doesn't have to, and she knows I know.

"Home is like a glimpse into another timeline. A life where I never . . ." Here I sort of gesture with my cybernetic hand, because in many ways when I lost that I lost everything. "I spend so much time convincing myself I'm happier where life ended up taking me, but that's a fucking lie. You know? I loved it. And not just because my sister's still there."

She nods. "Would you go back, if you could?"

I hesitate, partly because I'm not sure I know the answer, partly because of the other reason leaving is so hard: because that's not such a hypothetical now. "Only if you can come with me," I tell her, and I'm not sure if it's just idle flattery or if I really mean it.

She nods again. Maybe she's not sure, either. Or maybe she's just processing. Either way, we ride together in silence for a while before she says, "You hungry?"

***

The food at these roadside diners is starting to taste like home, and I'm starting to realize that home is complicated. Home is the shitty apartment in Boston we abandoned when we skipped town just after Christmas. Home is scheming with El at New York high society functions, rubbing elbows with some of the worst people imaginable. And now, maybe, it's the road, all the greasy food and the shitty small towns and all the small town people sneering at the two girls from out of town.

Maybe home is just what happens when you finally get used to not fitting in.

"It's funny," I say, while Nora picks away at what's left of her fries. "When we got to New York I was sick to death of diner food. We spend a few days eating, you know, real food, objectively good food, rich people food, and after that suddenly this is fucking amazing."

"It tastes like adventure," she says. She sounds thoughtful. "Back when--when I was young, and we'd go on these long trips to nowhere because the eastern CCZ is nothing but nowhere, miles and miles and miles of it. We'd stop in at the truck stop outside town or some other diner or burger place and drink too much coffee and eat too many fries and then just drive, and it was wonderful. It was the only good thing about that place, and I miss it so much." She offers me something of a sheepish smile, then falls back to her customary silence.

"You can never quite leave home behind," I say. "No matter where you go it will follow you there."

She nods again.

"So. Do we keep driving or try to find a place here?"