At the GPS’s demand, the green hatchback turned onto the highway. The early Saturday morning was quiet; not a single car occupied the road, and the previous night’s rain had left the air shrouded in a pale, drowsy fog. That morning, the young couple in the car was traveling to their favorite New Hampshire camping grounds for the weekend. It was supposed to clear up and be nice and sunny, but even if it didn’t, the cooler of liquor in the trunk would make the heavy mist feel just fine.
Jana had refused to drive so early in the morning—“I can’t read GPS directions when I’m not fully awake!”—so her boyfriend, Alex, took the wheel first. There were bags under his eyes too, but even tired, he was better at matching the GPS map to the real road than she was. However, they had only been in the car for five minutes, and Jana was already struggling to find a comfortable position on the old leather passenger seat. She hated being stuck in the car.
It was 5:03 A.M. by the time they hit the highway, and their projected arrival time was 8:07 A.M. For the first part of their trip, the GPS told them they’d be on this highway for seventy miles. That was about an hour right there—an hour of foggy, abandoned concrete. They passed the first of a thousand exit signs, Exit 8 going to Route 2, and Jana’s fingers, wrapped around her phone, began pressing buttons and clicking around for an application she’d been obsessively checking since the beginning of her final spring semester.
Alex glanced over and saw her tap the LinkedIn icon, and he sighed. “Jana,” he said, “come on. Just relax with that.”
Jana sighed and laid her head against the seat. “I can’t just ‘relax with that.’ I need to get more applications out.”
“We just graduated, babe.” He glanced at her and flashed a small smile then tossed his disheveled hair out of his eyes. “There’s no rush. Besides, there’s not going to be much signal up in the mountains anyway. We’re on a trip to celebrate, remember? Not to worry about the future.”
The app never opened, her data non-existent already in this little dead spot on the highway. With a huff, she closed the app and put her phone in her hoodie pocket.
“Yeah, but I have a reason to worry. You’re so lucky your dad put in a good word for you at his company.”
Alex shrugged. “I guess. It’s not my end-goal, though; it’s more like a pit-stop job. I’ve still got some looking to do if I want to really get into computer tech.”
“But it’s better than nothing.” Jana slumped in her seat.
“True. But really, there’s nothing you can do about it this weekend, so just try and relax. Take a nap; I know you’re tired.”
As the car rumbled through the fog, a yawn escaped her. There was no use fighting the heaviness of her eyelids or the sleepy haze in her head. Jana shifted and curled up into as comfortable a position as she could manage, then tugged her hoodie tighter around her and closed her eyes.
Despite her twitching fingers itching to keep hunting through job applications, she slept for what felt like a full night, with long and twisting dreams about nothing in particular. Normally, she would have been woken up every minute or so by the movements of the car, but this was one of the best snoozes she’d had on a road trip.
When she finally awoke, she rubbed her eyes and peered out at the road. The fog seemed like it had gotten a little heavier, and the road was still free of any other drivers. Maybe everyone decided to stay home in all this gray, cloudy nothingness.
Jana checked her phone. It said 5:03 A.M. The GPS still projected seventy miles to go. Disoriented, Jana blinked at her phone and rubbed her eyes again, harder this time.
“That was a quick nap,” Alex said with a smile.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
But already, her lower body was feeling the discomfort of sitting for a long time. She twisted in her seat with her legs rammed up against the door; she could barely see out of the passenger window. Staring out into the endless, sleepy fog, she wanted to feel giddy as the car rumbled along—she’d graduated!––she was going on her first vacation as a free lady!—she couldn’t. She caught her reflection in the glass, her big eyes with bruise-purple circles underneath.
It had taken her six years to get her Bachelor’s in English, which had been her favorite subject in high school. In college, she had eaten up class after class on different types of literature, participated every chance she got in her seminar on women, crime, and representation, dove wholeheartedly into the theories of Derrida, Butler, and Gubar. But around her third year, the sudden death of her sister in a car accident had made it all but impossible to focus on more than one class at a time. Her transcript was smirched with withdrawals.
If she could’ve just kept it together—
Another flash of green passed by, another exit sign. Jana craned her neck to read it so that she might distract herself from those ugly memories, hoping to squash them back out of sight. The sign was for Exit 8, going on Route 2.
“Didn’t we already?” Jana sat up again, quickly checking to see if she could recognize any of the empty surroundings in all that fog, “Didn’t we already pass exit 8?”
“No, we just got on the highway.” Alex chuckled and shook his head. “Go back to sleep.”
She stared at him, and he glanced back, still smiling. Jana blinked, and her eye drifted to the fuel gauge. It wasn’t full, but that morning, it had said it was full. Though, maybe she had really been half asleep when she got in the car and misread the gauge. With a huff, she settled into her seat again and tried to sleep, but she wasn’t tired anymore. No matter how long she sat there with her eyes closed, she couldn’t drift off again.
Instead, the cool surface of the phone screen crept its way under her fingertips once more, and Jana found herself opening LinkedIn again and checking to see if it would load. For a brief moment, it did, and a list of job titles came up on the screen, the 4G icon a welcome sight at the top of her phone.
She was desperate to get into the workforce and do something with her passion for reading and writing. All over Google, people crowed about the infinite possibilities for English majors, how their skills in writing made them an invaluable asset to the workplace, but any industry she perused—publishing, advertising, public relations, social media marketing—wanted years of experience, even at entry-level. And since she didn’t live in some fancy state like New York, she was limited in the types of places she could apply for now.
Her finger nearly burned from how fast she was scrolling through names, positions, places. The words whirred across the phone screen, almost too fast to process. But maybe, if she looked a little harder, she’d find something—
“Jana,” Alex said with a sigh, “come on. Just relax with that.”
The app froze, and the 4G dropped to a G, then an E. The pink-cased phone became a pale brick in her hands as LinkedIn went dead. Her teeth ground together as she stared at him.
Whatever dead zone they were still in, though, refused to let LinkedIn load on her phone no matter how many times she reopened it. She closed it and stared out of the window, already fidgety, wishing they could simply teleport to the campground rather than have to drive all this way. And if there hadn’t been any fog, she could at least watch the trees whir past.
But outside, it was all the same gray canvas. A blur of wispy, soft coils rushed over the car’s mirrors and cushioned its metal frame. Jana rolled the window down and stuck her hand outside, watching her arm disappear as the soft fog took hold of her. The smell of fresh, dewy air, the cool kiss of mist, it made her eyelids feel heavy, and made her slump a little in her seat. Jana pulled her arm back in, closed the window, and stared out into the blank haze until she was dozing again. She slept, haunted by swirls of images both foreign and familiar, and by one repeating line:
“Thank you for your application, but we’ve chosen another candidate at this time. We’ll keep your application on file in case new opportunities arise.”
Jana woke with a gasp, as though she’d been held underwater for a minute. She dragged air into her lungs and heaved it back out, her heart knocking wildly in her chest as she clutched the armrest.
“Whoa, Jana, you okay?” Alex glanced over, his brows furrowed in his concern.
“Oh my God, I had an awful dream,” she croaked.
“Must’ve been one of those falling dreams, huh?” His lips pulled back in a small smile. “I hate those. You just start falling asleep, then bam! You wake up in a panic.”
Jana shook her head. “No, no, this was a regular dream, but it was awful, it just—”
“Really? A full dream? You only just closed your eyes.”
Whatever Jana was going to say about her dream died in her throat. Her whole body ached from sleeping in such a tightly curled position, and she cracked her back. With how loud her spine popped, she figured they must have been traveling nearly an hour. She pawed the seat for her phone. When she checked it, the numbers practically laughed at her.
5:03 A.M. Seventy miles to go.
“I think the GPS is frozen,” she muttered. “It says we still have seventy miles to go.”
“What? Jana, we just got on the highway.”
Jana whipped around to look at him. “Are you kidding me? We’ve been driving for over half an hour, at least!”
“You’re so dramatic,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Just be patient; we’ll get there before you even know it.”
Her eyes drifted again to the gas gauge. It was half empty. She pointed to it and barked, “Look!”
“What?”
“Your gas! Look at it!”
“What about it?”
“It was full when we got into the car this morning, and now it’s half empty!”
“What? No way.” He chuckled and shook his head. “It must have just been less than we thought; we couldn’t have burned through a half a tank of gas this quickly.”
“Well, clearly we did!”
“Jana, come on. You’re being silly.”
She scowled at him and stared back out of the window, trying to see anything in that awful fog. A flash of green came from the gray fog, and Jana squinted, eager to read it. When she did, her spine went alight with prickles, and her fingernails dug into her palms.
“Pull over,” she whispered as bile rose in her throat. “Alex, pull over. I’m gonna be sick.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes! Pull over!”
Even though there were no cars on the road, Alex turned on his blinker and looked over his shoulder. The car scraped over the rumble strips and sat in the breakdown lane, and Jana burst out of the car. Her tight and aching legs cracked at the knees, and she wrapped her arms around herself as she hunched over, waiting for the fluids to exit. They never did. She merely dry-heaved.
Alex’s broad palm ran up and down her back, and he asked, “You okay?”
“No.” Her voice barely left her tight throat, and she dragged herself up to look at him, her eyes wild. “Why aren’t we moving?”
He blinked at her, and she shook the phone that was still tightly clutched in one hand.
“It says we’re not moving!” Her finger smashed against the screen. “We’re still at the same time, same mileage! Why aren’t we moving? Why?”
Tears stung her eyes, and she took quick, shallow breaths. Her constant tapping had exited the GPS, opening her e-mail instead. But the app didn’t open, thanks to the dead zone; it simply loaded the messages she’d already seen a billion times before.
Most of them were rejection messages for the applications she’d sent over the week.
“Hey,” Alex whispered. He took hold of her shoulders. “You’re okay. We’re definitely moving, all right? Maybe your GPS just isn’t updating. Do you have any 4G right now?”
“No.”
“Okay, see? We’ll use my phone; it gets better internet.”
The fog brushed by them, leaving the air almost too thick with moisture to breathe. No matter which direction Jana looked, she couldn’t see farther than a few feet down the road.
“Jana,” Alex whispered, “do you wanna get back in the car?”
His hand gently touched her shoulder, and she sucked in a breath of mist that felt like lead in her lungs. From some long way off, they heard a crow caw—a raspy, grating sound. Jana didn’t want to get back on the road, but what other option did she have? It wasn’t like she could turn around and walk home on the highway. There was nothing she could do but keep going, even though a sinking feeling in her stomach told her it was pointless.
“Yeah, let’s just go,” she said, her voice brittle, her shoulders slumping.
They both got back into the car. Alex punched in the address on his phone’s GPS, then handed it to Jana. She didn’t look at it; she simply stared ahead into the blanketing void.
“See?” Alex craned over her. “It’s working now. We got a connection.”
She still didn’t look at the phone. She didn’t have to. Every now and then, she’d get a flash of green out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t need to look at that, either. She stared straight ahead, looking endlessly onward at the never-changing gray. But the more she looked, the more she knew.
There was nothing in the fog.