This time Leo laughed aloud. The sound startled him. It was thin and uncertain, but it was his.
Sully pulled on his helmet, then paused to study the ruined garage. His gaze rested on the patched bicycle and Leo's canteen. Without comment, he placed the unopened bottle of water beside the phone number. 'You need it more than I do.'
A mile or so away, a pair of headlights swept across a low rise. Sully noticed them immediately. He started the Harley, waited for the motor to settle, and rolled toward the station entrance.
'One more thing,' he called over the engine.
Leo looked up.
'You don't have to stay invisible forever.'
Before Leo could answer, the Road King moved out into the dark. Its rumble faded along Route 66 until only the wind remained. Leo stood in the garage with the lighter in one hand and the water bottle in the other, feeling as though a door had opened somewhere beyond the horizon and closed before he could see what lay on the other side.
He placed the lighter beside his father's photograph that night. For the first time since leaving Flagstaff, he slept without keeping his shoes on.
By morning, the garage looked exactly as it had before. The same cracked floor, the same old sign, the same bicycle with its front wheel removed. But Leo woke with an unfamiliar sense that something had happened to him that could not be undone. An adult had needed his help, had listened when Leo explained what was wrong, and had thanked him without taking the credit back a moment later.
He sat on the edge of his blanket and opened the lighter. The tiny wheel turned beneath his thumb, and a flame rose, steady and pale, in the dimness. He closed it before wasting fuel. The engraving was worn, but careful work remained visible in the details of the skull. Whoever had carved it had taken time over a thing small enough to fit inside a palm.
At breakfast, which consisted of water and half a dry cracker, he found himself speaking to the bicycle as though it were an impatient customer. 'You're going to get there,' he told its bent wheel. 'Not today, maybe. But you're going to.'
Then he remembered the phone number on Sully's cardboard. It was only seven digits and an area code, a collection of marks that might connect him to a person who had treated him with something like respect. Yet the thought of calling made him nervous. What if he reached Sully and discovered the offer had been no more than something the man said at the end of a difficult night? What if the biker regretted handing a valuable lighter to a runaway boy with no safe place to keep it?
Leo decided to wait until he had a better reason to call. The decision sounded sensible, but underneath it was an old fear: if he did not ask for help, no one could refuse him.