"Where the hell are we?" Mom asked the blackness outside the front window.
The line in the road blinked like a cursor, as if the night needed time to think.
"Where the hell are we?" she asked the Witch impatiently.
"You are offline," the Witch said.
"We're in Utah, remember?" I helped.
"Arizona, actually. Remember, we crossed the border last night right before the turnoff for the campground?"
"Oh yeah," I said, not because I remembered, but because it's what Mom wanted me to say. I remembered the rushing as we raced the sun toward a place called Monument Valley. When Mom saw that we were going to lose, she stopped rushing and I stopped paying attention. The sun was long gone by the time we arrived at the campground, and now, even though it was supposed to be morning, the desert was even darker than the night before.
"There was only one turn. How did we even get lost?" Mom asked the Witch, as if it weren't the Witch's fault that we were in this fix to begin with. If she weren't giving Mom the silent treatment, Mom wouldn't have tried to navigate on her own. Mom hit the shut up button in disgust. "We're definitely going to miss sunrise now."
"Are you sure?" I asked. "It looks pretty dark to me..."
"Yes! Sunrise is at 6:07 and it's already..." she woke up the Witch, "almost 5:45."
"Oh, there you are," the Witch said brightly. "You're going the wrong way. You will arrive in 27 minutes... oop, no 28 minutes now." Mom made the sound someone makes on TV when they're being rurmered... durmered... medr... (Darn it, I can never remember how to pronounce that word on Facebook.) "You will arrive at 5:10 am," the Witch concluded.
Mom looked at the Witch suspiciously. "What time is it?"
"It's 5:48 am," the Witch said confidently. "And you will arrive at 5:10am."
Mom groaned. "I need more coffee."
Finally, a twinkle appeared in the front window and grew into the campground.