It was incredible, really, how much of nothing he'd seen in the past week. He'd been warned about it before he'd left, but he'd never really believed it. Each little diner he'd stopped in, he'd had the same conversations. The accent was always the first topic of discussion, quickly followed by the list of acquaintances and friends-of-friends who lived in England, did he know them? (Of course! was always the answer, Insert-name-here! What a joker! But then he'd feel bad when they got all excited and he had to fess up. Sam was quickly learning that different rules of humour applied out here). Then they'd get around to asking him what he was doing out here, and he'd always have to answer truthfully because he honestly couldn't think of any other way to explain it:
"Oh, I'm just getting away from it all for a bit. I needed a change. I thought I'd try driving around the midwest a bit."
Then there was always the silence, the grimaces, the attempts at clarification. "You mean, down through to Dallas or Phoenix?" "Or up to Chi-town?"
"Nope. Just... you know. See a bit of the countryside. The great frontier, you know?"
And they'd shake their heads, chuckle, and mutter something about crazy Brits. It seemed to endear him to them more, though, and once or twice he'd even gotten a free breakfast out of it. If you could call it a breakfast, at least... for the supposed leader of the free world, they seemed to have a distressing baked beans famine.
They'd told him, you're not going to see nothin'. You want the nature, you want the full amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, you wanna go out West into the Smokies, or East and down, get into Bayou country or the Appalachians. Hell, even Arizona's got something goin' for it. But the Midwest? Son, don't nobody hang around the middle of this country unless they ain't got a choice. He'd been told - and this was a fact, he'd looked it up - that more Apollo astronauts had come from Ohio than from any other state. By a big margin. And didn't that tell you somethin' about the place, that you don't just wanna leave the state, you wanna clear leave the Earth!
Sam hadn't really taken it to heart. It came from growing up in a village that was barely big enough to host a good game of tennis, and coming from a country where a 2-hour drive to Margate was considered Going On Holiday. He'd rented the cheapest car he could find from a crooked little dealership in Tulsa and had been driving around since, taking the back roads where he could (despite the alarming protests from the car's suspension, brakes, and Everything), and firmly expecting that he'd be in Minneapolis by teatime.
Five days later, and he was still driving.
Sure, he was taking the back roads, and his route probably looked like a snake with vertigo. But it was incredible! This place was huge, on a scale that he still found it impossible to wrap his head around. And for days now, it had been cornfields - corn and corn and corn and corn with the occasional tired-looking barn or windmill or rusting watertower. He'd come across a town once or twice, and that had felt like downtown London during the Six Nations. But for the most part, it was just mind-numbing. Sam would keep his eyes focused on the middle distance and his mind would just turn to cotton wool. He'd made a game of how many bugs he could squish on his windscreen, and was up to 439 so far. It was all running together because there was absolutely nothing going on. Sometimes it felt like it had been a day. Sometimes a week. God, oh god, it was boring.
Sam couldn't have been happier.
This, he told himself, was exactly what he needed. What he needed was nothing, and that's exactly what he was getting, and in great quantities. His cup overfloweth'd with nothing. He had nothing coming out of his ears. Just sweet sweet monotony and boredom. No idiot coworkers, no harebrained schemes, no old people, and - best of all - not a frozen chicken to be found for miles. Just him, the road, a rickety old car that smelled like Oxo gravy mix, and all the corn and lack of stimulation a young man could dream of.
So when he saw her on Corn Day Three, standing there by the side of the road with her thumb out and a dusty backpack slung over her shoulder, his first thought was, '...great. Just great.'
I'm ashamed that I'm barely human / I'm ashamed that I don't have a heart you can break
