“You’ve never actually been to one?” I asked. We’d already finished packing up all the music crates into my parents’ green Ford pick-up truck, then we’d pressed pedal to the metal as we drove down the highway back to the clean and squeaky suburbs of Milton again.

  Winona didn’t answer at first. Instead, she twiddled with the radio dial, hoping to find a song she liked playing on one of the many perennial radio stations that Boston had in spades.

  Finally, there was one on air that prided itself on playing nothing but dad rock. At least that was an improvement from the ones who played nothing but butt rock. Fittingly, the song was “Drive” by Incubus, another band we both liked and had planned to go and see together, but, again, it hadn’t come to fruition like many of our plans.

  Once Brandon Boyd started hollering about WHATEVER TOMORROW BRINGS, I’LL BE THERE, I felt Winona settle down a bit, letting her shoulders relax.

  She shook her head. “No, never.”

  “You make it sound like some terrible, dark secret I’ve unearthed about you,” I said.

  Winona looked out of the passenger window. It was a good thing we didn’t leave until everyone else in O’Brien’s had cleared out before us. The highway was quiet, save for the occasional speeding ambulance or police car rushing to the scene of a crime. I liked it that way.

  Benjamin had asked her before he’d left if she wanted to go with him, but she said no. She wanted to stay with her best friend for a while. That was also Benjamin’s cue that she wouldn’t be staying with him for the night, but with me.

  I didn’t mind. I would get to spend more time with Winona, something my heart so desperately craved after spending so many days away from her. Even spending time with Felicity hadn’t filled the Winona-shaped hole in my heart. Nothing could.

  Maybe I’d had a crush on her all this time. Maybe I was just good at lying to myself. Maybe this sudden fog that was beginning to clear in my mind was a sign I’d been in a waking dream all this time whenever I was around Winona.

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  “It makes me feel like a fraud,” Winona murmured.

  “What? Because you didn’t live on a reservation?”

  “Not just that, but because…”

  An absolute headbanger of a siren came up behind us, and I had to swerve to the other end of the lane to let the cop car overtake. It looked like it was going to fall apart at any moment. So I slowed down the green Ford and kept a big distance between the two of us, lest Irish Navajo meet its end on a quiet highway like this.

  “Because?” I pressed.

  “I don’t feel Native for not having lived on a reservation,” she answered.

  “I don’t think anyone will care if you feel Native or not, Winona,” I replied, “especially if we keep performing like we did tonight.”

  “Drive” finished, then “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers came up next. God, I’d been such an RHCP fanatic as a kid, but then I was lulled away by rap music in my teens. Once my attempts at being a mumble rap sensation on SoundCloud had fizzled out, I got back into rock, but RHCP had always eluded me since. I hadn’t even listened to any of their new albums after The Getaway came out, but here I was listening to my second-favourite song of theirs with a girl I was crushing hard on (Strip My Mind is still number one to me).

  “I write all these songs about Native women, and yet I haven’t lived as one.”

  “What does living as a Native woman entail, exactly?”

  “Being among Natives,” she said, “living the way of the land. Taking part in traditions.”

  “You did take part in traditions though,” I countered, “with your parents. In your car-slash-RV thing.”

  I knew that because I’d been there with Winona when it happened. It really was quite cramped with three people, let alone adding my bespectacled ten-year-old self into the mix. Winona’s mother took time out to braid her hair, then eventually she braided my hair into a ponytail.

  My hair back then was an absolute fluff ball, so it was a steady improvement. In thanks, I taught Winona and her family how to make a St Brigid’s cross with the junk they had on hand.

  “It’s not the same,” Winona said. “I write all these activist songs. Speak about Native politics. Carry AIM stickers. Yet…”

  I swerved the Ford again. This time, it wasn’t a worn-out cop car, but a well-polished Bentley that I knew belonged to Dr Raj and Myra. They wanted to race us after closing up their shop. Winona and I had agreed, but all this talking meant we were left in the dust this time.

  “Yet?”

  “I feel like I’ve spent my whole life wrapped in the white man’s world,” she mumbled cautiously. “That’s why I feel like a fraud.”