Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [81]
Though his needs made it nearly impossible to travel anywhere without undue stress, Milo had hoped that this trip would be different. He was alone and therefore better prepared for travel than ever before. Though he might have difficulty finding a bowling alley if the need to bowl a strike arose, he knew that his GPS would eventually help him locate one. After all, bowling was hardly an activity relegated to New England (though he had checked the Internet prior to leaving, just to be sure).
It was the intense need for secrecy that had always prevented him from being as prepared as he was for this trip. Stocking the trunk of the car with jelly jars, ice cube trays, Weebles, and a karaoke version of “99 Luftballons” on CD (among other things) had not been possible when Christine was accompanying him, and explaining the sudden need to stop at a bowling alley or a karaoke bar would have proven equally difficult. This time, there was no one from whom he would need to keep his secrets, and Milo found this freedom remarkably liberating.
After stopping for a fast food dinner at the Molly Pitcher rest area along the Jersey Turnpike, Milo continued on through southern New Jersey, hoping to reach the Washington, D.C., suburbs before finding a place to rest for the night. He had identified College Park, a town just north of the city, as a possible stopping point. Since the University of Maryland was situated in the center of this suburb, Milo presumed that accommodations would be easy to find.
It was around the time that he crossed the New Jersey—Delaware border that the word placebo suddenly lit up in Milo’s head like a flashing detour sign on a rain-soaked highway.
One minute it wasn’t there. The next minute it was.
He had suspected that it might be coming, had felt the characteristic building of pressure between his temples, but he had hoped that the symptoms would not culminate in a word. The discharging of ice cubes from a plastic tray perhaps, or even the bowling of a strike, would have been be easier to accomplish than finding a stranger in a strange land to utter a word as infrequently used as placebo, but somehow he had known it would be a word. Though impossible to fully describe, it was the texture of the ever-building pressure, its inexplicable nuance and flavor, that often allowed Milo to predict the requirement before it arrived. He had guessed that a word might be coming ever since crossing over the George Washington Bridge, and had been dreading it, knowing how difficult it would be to fulfill.
But still, there it was, pulsating in his head, a quiet hum now that would only grow more forceful as the hours passed.
Loquacious had been the first word to lodge itself in Milo’s twelve-year-old mind, and when it did, he had assumed that his fixation had more to do with the desire for a definition rather than the need to hear another human being speak it aloud. Though he had experienced similar fixations in the past, he couldn’t begin to understand how this word had suddenly taken up residence in his mind. He had been sitting on the school bus, third seat from the front as always, staring out the window at nothing in particular, when the word began its monotonous, unrelenting incantation in his mind. Milo had no idea what the word meant at the time, or where he had first heard it. In truth, he doubted that such a word even existed, but as the morning bus ride turned into American history with Mrs. Allen, math with Mrs. Schultz, band rehearsal (Milo had been a flutist), and recess, it became clear that the word was going nowhere fast.
It was after lunch, in the midst of science class, that he had finally found the time to look up the word in a dictionary and discover that it actually existed. He and his science partner, Taylor Thumma (lamentably not the newly breasted Amy McDonald), had been rolling steel spheres down varying degrees of slope and recording their trajectories on carbon paper for reasons that Milo still did not understand