Ollie’s and my plan was simple enough: we were going to drive our grandfathers’ ashes to Alaska. Theirs had been stationed there for Cold War reasons Ollie never fully understood, and mine had always wanted to go. I had a little red car that, while not new, was sound enough to make it from Boston to Alaska and back again. We made playlists and packed the back full of snacks, which we intended to save for the long stretches of the north where gas stations were scarce. We had been friends since first-year orientation at our college, plenty long enough to know that we wouldn’t get tired of each other in more than sixty hours of driving. It seemed straightforward, as plans go. Solid.

The first problem was that we both had to steal the ashes. For me this posed no great difficulty: I took my largest purse with me to the bathroom at my mother’s house in Somerville, I made a silent detour to the office closet where my mother had stashed the paper bag that contained the ashes until she was ready to deal with them—which would be never, at this rate; he’d been gone five years already—I stuck the bag in my purse, returned to family dinner, and escaped undetected.

Ollie had to break in for theirs.

A stop outside of Akron wasn’t that big a deal, once you were driving from Boston to Alaska anyway. The break-in itself gave me pause, but Ollie’s grandpa’s death was fresher, and I really didn’t want to argue with them about it if this was something they needed to do. I waited in the getaway car, not willing to listen to music or fidget with my phone in case I missed some kind of signal that Ollie was in trouble. The house stayed completely dark. From what Ollie had said about their parents, this seemed symbolic.

Then Ollie was pelting down the dark laneway, shouting, “Lucy! Now!” I popped the door open. They scrambled in, significantly burdened by their full backpack. “Go, go, go!” they shouted before they even had the door closed.

I hit the gas, and we peeled out of there like teenagers hitting mailboxes. My tires screeched on the turn onto the county highway. I saw nothing in the rearview.

“Did you get him?”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s right here.” Ollie was clutching the backpack like a life preserver, which their grandfather had been in life. Somehow we never had to discuss that each of our grandfathers’ ashes were “him,” not “it.”

“Did they catch you?”

“Mm?”

“Did they catch you, Ol. Did anybody see you?”

“Oh. Oh, no.”

I let the silence stretch. They reached to turn on the road trip playlist, and I interrupted to ask: “Then why did I have to drive that fast?”

I let my eyes drift from the road for a split second to assess what was going on with my friend. Their eyes were huge in the lights of a passing semi. Their face was set, stoic. “You know how my parents are.”

I didn’t, really. But I didn’t have to: I knew they scared the shit out of Ollie. I knew my friend never talked to or about them. So what if they were just freaked out by being in the same house as their sleeping parents. That wasn’t for me to judge. No one was following us.

I started to feel guilty about taking Grandpa’s ashes without telling my mom. Yeah, she was stuck in a loop, unable to make a decision about them. But still maybe I should only scatter a little and put the rest back. My parents were so much better than Ollie’s parents. Maybe Ollie would be interested in coming to my parents’ for Thanksgiving this year. I could ask.

I reached for the music myself, trying to keep an eye on the road while thumbing up the list on my phone and keeping it quiet. Ollie was asleep from the adrenaline crash before we hit Cleveland.

I woke them when I stopped for gas: better to pee and pick up gas station breakfast when they had the chance. They seemed unmoved by their earlier adventures, so I said they could drive and settled into the passenger’s seat to get some sleep myself, with a sleep mask against the early morning sunlight.

In the dream I had while Ollie was navigating Chicago traffic, a gigantic bear was looming over me and growling. I was terrified until I realized that the bear was facing away from me. It was protecting me from a round-faced grey-haired woman.

I had never seen a picture of Ollie’s mother, but I knew it was her in the way that you know things in dreams.

I jolted awake as the speed changed: Ollie was taking the off-ramp to the Wisconsin Dells Rest Stop. We silently admired its informational placard on our way to do our business. Land formations, very good. Ollie came with me into the ladies’ because there wasn’t a gender-neutral option in the not-very-Welcome Center, and I knew they were nervous about it, but neither of us said anything. I assumed that was why they were tense and quiet, but when we got out to the car, they said, “Lucy, did anything really super weird ever happen to you?”

I took the wheel. “Ollie. Come on. You know me. There was the time with the snowstorm and the chickens? And that woman on the plane to Memphis?”

“Haha, yeah, it could only happen to Lucy,” they said, but their heart was not in it. After another mile or two they said, “Those are more…million to one events. Or billion to one, even. I was thinking less that and more…impossible.”

“But if it happens, it can’t be impossible. It has to be something very unlikely you haven’t thought of yet. Maybe something you didn’t understand before.”

The silence was larger than the car. I’ve been silent with Ollie before. It’s fine, sometimes we both need it. Then they said, “Do you think there’s a lot of stuff you don’t understand, Lucy?”

“Shit, Ollie, you know there is.”

They chuckled a little in their sad dry way, heh-heh-heh. Like a little old man. “Anyway, I need a favor tonight.”

“Sure.”

“I need to camp by the side of the road.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Ol.”

“This is something I have to do, Luce.”

“We can’t just…drive through the night?”

“No.”

I sniffed theatrically. “Or use one of the motel nights we planned? We could both really use a shower at this point. It’s not just you, but…buddy, it’s also you.”

“Can you trust me on this, Lucy?” they asked softly.

The miles of central Wisconsin slipped by, green with just a hint of rock poking through. A little bit like Ollie, with that solid core underneath. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” they repeated, and turned up Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Oh boy.

Whatever was on their mind, we didn’t talk about it all the way across Minnesota. We talked about my teenage canoe trip to the Boundary Waters, how Ollie wouldn’t get in a canoe if you paid them, why someone might pay them to get in a canoe. We talked about what the superior flavor of milkshake was (strawberry malt, fight me—which Ollie felt ready to, over Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup) and whether we might ever agree to get married (not to each other, obviously, but both yes but not soon) and what makes for a good pair of socks.

We talked about the time junior year Ollie tried to climb the side of the dorm on a dare and got stuck on the fire escape of an epically stoned guy from third floor—”I can’t believe you remember that,” said Ollie, and I said, “I remember everything, I have an amazing memory,” and they shook their head.

“That was when your mom was trying to make you be a geology major. I never knew what was up with that.”

They shrugged. “She has very firm ideas about how my life should go. To her very limited credit, she never cared whether I was a boy or a girl, I’ll say that much for her—as long as I gave my complete undying obedience to her every plan for me.”

“That…does not seem better.”

The dry chuckle again. “No. Not better. Grandpa did his best to protect me, until he couldn’t.”

“So she thought you should be…like working for oil companies or what? Because that’s the only lucrative job I ever heard of a geo major getting. Jocelyn did that for a couple years but she couldn’t stand it, did you hear?”

“I haven’t talked to Jocelyn since graduation,” Ollie said, dodging the question about their mother and oil companies, but I didn’t mind. We were allowed to wander. It was prime road trip conversation, and half the time we just sang along with the music or stared out the window.

Things were going to get less interstate-y when we got to Jamestown, North Dakota, so that’s where we started looking for a place to pull off. It was flat as hell up there, fields and silos, silos and fields. All the stereotypes we had about the middle of the continent that had been mildly exploded by the jutting rocks of the middle of Wisconsin and the gentle curves of eastern Minnesota were completely confirmed by the cornfields and clapboard houses of central North Dakota—not that there were that many houses either. At least it meant nobody to notice when we pulled off to camp.

I had not planned on this, and neither had Ollie, so we didn’t have sleeping bags or any of that. Boston is far enough north that I always kept a blanket in the back of my car in case I went into the ditch in the snow, but there was just the one. Ollie waved it off. “Keep it, I’ll use my coat.”

“That’s a hoodie.”

“I’m fine.”

I rolled my eyes but didn’t push further. They were the one who wanted to do this. And when they said I should take the passenger’s seat and recline it as far as I liked, I didn’t argue with that either.

I was not surprised when I felt a surreptitious rustling from the driver’s seat into the back, heard the driver’s side door open and shut as quietly as humanly possible about twenty minutes after we had said good night to each other. We’ve been friends a minute. They’re not as sneaky as they hoped to be. But also I was a little conflicted about whether I should follow or just give them their privacy.

They made it easy on me by staying immediately next to the car. They were shuffling around out there, going in circles around the car humming to themself in the tuneless way that drove me nuts when we tried living together the year after graduation. It was kind of endearing now. Let me know my friend was still right there, whatever shit it was they were dealing with.

I snuck a peek, figuring their attention was elsewhere, not on making sure I was still asleep. They crouched there against the side of the car with their backpack open. They’d taken the canteen out, some torn up paper, and a book of matches, two of them burnt. And also there was a cardboard box that looked weirdly like the cardboard box I had in my bag. So whatever Ollie was doing—and this did not surprise me—it had to do with their grandpa. A special private goodbye, maybe. None of my business, I just hoped we didn’t have to stop many more times like this, because I was about ready to sleep in a bed.

I watched them trace things in the dirt. Not letters, not numbers. A couple of triangles, a circle, lines joining them. Huh.

Then the wind came up.

I’m not from the prairie. I’m not used to wind that whistles through grain like that. I don’t like it. I don’t trust it. I’ve seen videos of tornados, and I don’t know when they’re going to have one again. And this wind, it sounded like nothing I’d ever seen before. Which made it seem to me like Ollie should get back in the damn car, or maybe under it…but the windows weren’t rattling, nothing was shaking.

When I heard Ollie’s voice, they didn’t sound shaken either.

“All right, Mother, you can fuck off,” they said, and mostly they just sounded tired.

Another voice, a hoarse deep voice, said, “Froggy, you know I don’t like that kind of language.”

I had been trying to keep still so Ollie wouldn’t know I was awake, but it’s a good thing they were not paying attention to me, because I jumped and smacked into the parking brake when I heard that. Because—of course—Froggy was what Ollie’s grandpa called them. They knew they wouldn’t ever have to explain the name change, because he never called them by their dead name more than maybe twice in their entire life. He just looked down at them in his arms the second day they were born and said, “Well, hello there, little frog.” And that was that.

(I could relate. My grandpa called me Goosey.)

I craned my head trying to see, and the conversation about stuff I didn’t understand became very, very real, because there was a shadowy shape crouched down next to them there, like a lanky old man. Ollie sort of shuffled over a little, like they were going to lean on—let’s call it what it is—their grandpa’s ghost. “I know, Grandpa, but you know how she gets.”

“Nobody knows it better than me, Frogs, but let’s keep it PG-13, okay?”

“Little busy here, Grandpa.” Ollie drew one last sign in the dust, and there was this low intense singing, like someone ringing a glass, except it was the whole prairie. “Grandpa, you have to protect me, Lucy, and the car from Mother. Okay?”

The pause was longer than I expected. The glass-ringing singing sound got louder.

“Froggy,” he said hoarsely. “What if I can’t?”

There was a hail of gravel, but it didn’t hit the car. I was sitting all the way up now, because Ollie wasn’t paying any attention to me, and I didn’t blame them one little bit. It hit—kind of a shell around the car.

“What if I’m not strong enough?”

“You’re strong, Grandpa, you’re strong.” Ollie was crying.

“You know what she’s like. Nobody knows better than you. I’m so sorry, Frogs, what if I can’t do all of it?”

“Then—” Ollie straightened up. “Protect Lucy. If you can’t do all of it, you have to keep Lucy safe. She’s never had to deal with any of this. She had a nice family. Not like ours.”

“Okay, Frogs,” he said, real low.

Well, fuck that.

I scrabbled over my shoulder to get the duffel bag into which I’d transferred what I needed. Ollie was already yelling, “Oh shit, Lucy, Lucy no,” by the time I slammed the car door. I ignored them.

Three circles around the car. The canteen from the ground, burnt paper, two pieces, hoping desperately there wasn’t supposed to be anything written on it that I hadn’t seen. Ollie was staring at me open-mouthed. The weird humming noise was harmonizing with itself. Ollie’s grandpa slashed his arms out, but not at me, and the humming noise backed off a notch or two like the volume knob on my little red car.

And then I dumped my grandpa’s ashes in the North Dakota dust—I don’t know when I started crying, but it was definitely before the ashes—and I did the circles and the triangle and the lines, almost like I was doing the circle-circle-dot-dot of a cootie shot when I was a little kid.

“Lucy,” Ollie whispered.

“Protect Ollie,” I grated.

And there he was.

He was right there. He was right there. I knew without asking that I couldn’t touch him, but he was close enough that I felt like I could. My grandpa was much smaller than Ollie’s, compact and bald and tidy and did you know that ghosts can still have pens in their shirt pocket? He stared at me like he did that time I got into the bottle of Wite-Out and spilled it all over his office carpeting trying to figure out what the strange ancient substance was.

“What the sam hell, Goosey?” he said.

“Grandpa, this is Ollie, and this is Ollie’s grandpa,” I said. “Their mom is…a problem. And they—and they—” I choked and sputtered, but I made myself go on. “They were going to make their grandpa protect me, when he could only take care of one of us. But then they wouldn’t have protection. So you have to protect Ollie. And then we’ll both have somebody. Okay?”

Ollie’s grandpa let out the same dry little chuckle Ollie had, and if I hadn’t already been crying, that would have done it right there. “I think she’s got us there. Wait. She?”

“She,” I confirmed.

“What?” said my grandpa.

“I’ll explain later,” I said, wincing a little: Grandpa had died before I’d had a chance to explain very much about pronouns or gender. I’d just saddled my best friend with a protector who’d never used “they” to refer to one specific person before. He’d figure it out, though. I trusted his heart.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” said Ollie.

“Oh excuse me? You can’t believe I just did that?”

“Kids, we have a bigger problem,” said Ollie’s grandpa. He jerked the shadow of his head out at the field. “My daughter can be a real handful, and half our group is inexperienced.”

“And nobody thought to protect the—” Ollie shut their mouth with a snap in case their mother hadn’t thought of it, but I followed their train of thought: nobody thought to protect the car. Could their mother ruin our only transportation? So far I’d just heard the wind and the creepy wailing.

“What can she do, exactly?” I asked.

“Elemental shit,” said Ollie succinctly. “She caught me when I was taking Grandpa’s ashes—”

“Ollie! If you’d told me the truth I wouldn’t have been going into this without—”

“Sorry! Sorry! So she can…uh…she can track me. At this point she can probably track us. But she doesn’t have infinite patience, or energy.”

“Having spirit protectors should help,” said Ollie’s grandpa. “Here’s what I think: it’s a little car. I think each of you should spread out, one on the hood and one on that little hatchback there, and we’ll stand over you. And then you, Ol—you didn’t tell your friend about any of this? Not even basic protection spells?” They shook their head. “Well, can’t undo it now. All right, you spread out on the car, we’ll stand over you, and Ollie, you do a big repulsion spell, and—what’s your name, friend?”

“Walt,” said my grandpa.

“Please to meet you, Walt, I’m Milt. Walt and I will sort of arch over the car and see if we can shove her off for good.”

I sprawled the hood and Ollie perched on the back bumper, and wow, was that uncomfortable. I reached for their hands over the top of the car, but while it isn’t a very big car, they needed their hands for their spell. So I just—sprawled out there and looked up at the stars. And waited for the rain of gravel to fall on my head.

Because Ollie’s mom did not go down easy. There was dust, gravel, little sharp bits of grass or dead leaf or twig. The wind made it hard to even breathe. Milt whispered in my ear, “Hang in there, kid, almost done now,” and I didn’t know whether to believe him.

I wished I had my own grandpa for a protector. But I really didn’t regret protecting Ollie.

Ollie’s mother had the face I had seen in my dream. The little round harmless-looking face: that was her. She did not have fangs or claws or anything like that. Except that people’s faces are not supposed to coalesce the size of a tanker truck out of dust and debris and attempt to swallow your car. I closed my eyes, but I had already seen Ollie’s mother’s face, it was already too late. And there was nothing I could do but hang on and be the human the protective ghost was anchored to.

And provide another protective ghost for the other human who knew how to do stuff. I didn’t see what magic Ollie was doing. I probably wouldn’t have understood it if I had. But I did hear them from time to time, over the noise, and their chant wasn’t abracadabra or anything like that. It was, “I am not yours. I am not yours.”

It felt like it should be almost dawn when the wind swooped down to nothing. When I looked at my phone, it was only 1:35. I climbed down off the car. Ollie stretched. The grandpas floated around next to us.

“Now can we find a hotel?” I said.

Ollie was looking in the dust next to the car. Their voice was worn down to a rasp. “Shit, Lucy, you used up all your grandpa’s ashes! What are you going to do now?”

“I had to for the spell! Like you did!”

“I didn’t use up all his ashes, you goober! The spell didn’t take them all!”

“Well, I didn’t know! Nobody taught me theory beforehand! And honestly, it wasn’t my highest dexterity moment. We can still take him to Alaska, right? Right, Grandpa? Right, Milt? Just not…like that.”

Ollie stopped. “You still want to go with me?”

“Of course I still want to go with you!”

“After I didn’t tell you about…about my mom? And all this?”

I screwed up my mouth. “I mean, that sucked, you know that sucked. We’ve been friends too long for you to pull shit like that. But…what were you going to say to explain? ‘My mom does evil magic, just trust me here’?” Their shoulders dropped a little in relief. “You can spend the trip explaining to make it up to me. And being very, very nice to me.”

“You really are a horrible goose. No wonder Walt calls you that.”

“I am the original.”

We limped into Minot, where we got a motel room, cheap and clean. Two of the four of us needed to sleep in real beds and have hot showers. And then, even without all the ashes, it was back on the road to Alaska. The four of us, together, even if not quite the way we planned.

(Editors’ Note: Marissa Lingen is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2023 Marissa Lingen