"Ya just don't get wildlife like this up in Manhattan," says Jessie from the driver's seat, pointing at a pile of road kill on the highway that resembles a squashed possum.  His girlfriend giggles in the front seat next to him.  Seems like that girl giggles at everything even when there's nothing funny about it.  Jessie's sister, Sarah, rolls her eyes at them and smiles at me. Midway through Tennessee, Sarah's head slumps down, cause we've been driving for ten hours, right?  But you see, what's kind of weird is that even though the back of the Jeep has about fifty square feet of cargo space, somehow her head falls right on my shoulder.  I look around, but Jessie is too busy watching the road to notice and his girlfriend is too busy watching Jessie and giggling at nothing.  Ok, I’m thinking, this must be normal, then.  She's not doing anything out of the ordinary, just getting her sleep.  So I go on thinking, though it's kind of hard to be reflective when some chick is leaning on you and sort of gently rubbing the top of her head with its soft silky black hair into your neck.  So I give up thinking pretty fast.  After we pass out of Tennessee and into Arkansas, I feel myself getting carsick.  I try looking out the window at the countryside rushing past, but it doesn't work.  So I shut my eyes tightly and hyperventilate a little, like the Buddhists do, and I emit a barely perceptible "Ooooohhhh," like the monks, you know. The top of Sarah's head suddenly begins to apply more pressure into my neck and shift up and down with greater rapidity.  I contemplate her scalp, playing with her hair a little, and distinguish little white flakes of dandruff precipitating onto my shoulder like snow on Christmas.  I shift around in my seat a bit and moan quietly.  I'm sitting on the left side of the car, so after Sarah has been sleeping on me for about three hours, my right arm falls asleep.  I slowly withdraw it, careful not to wake Sarah, and hold it up in the air.  Shoot, I mutter.  What do I do with it now? I try crossing it over my body, but that’s just as uncomfortable. I grab the seat in front of me, but Jessie tells me to stop fooling around.  Finally, I realize that there’s only one logical place for my arm to go; unfortunately, that’s around Sarah.  This is still normal, I decide hesitantly.   I ignore the fact that Sarah has been fake sleeping on me for three hours, or that at a glacial speed her head has migrated from my shoulder down onto my stomach and then into my lap.  Finally, as we're just a few miles from the Texan border, Sarah's eyes flutter open. Thank God! Now she can get off my lap before I develop blood clots. But Sarah has a different plan.  She just whispers to me, “What are you thinking about?”  I reply, "I have to pee really bad."  She giggles. What the h*** is funny about that?  I really shouldn’t have had that Big Gulp, because now my bladder feels like porcupines mating in my stomach, and Sarah leaning up on it doesn’t help.  "What are you thinking about?"  I mumble grumpily.  Sarah is silent for ten minutes or so, and just as I’m thinking that she has returned to fake sleeping and bobbing her head around on my lap, she reaches her arm up over me, pulls my face down, and whispers, "I was thinking about you."  I sit stunned for several seconds.  My mind whirrs as it tries to process this new development.  Finally, the neurons come back with a report: this is not normal.  I yell up to Jessie.  “Jess, I gotta pee like crazy, pull over.”  We’re in a desert by this point.  “But there’s no cover, man,” he replies.  “It doesn’t matter, no one knows me here, I’ll just go behind a cactus or something.”  Anything to get out of that oppressive car seat.  Jessie pulls over, and I walk about a-hundred-and-fifty feet away from the vehicle, to where a large green cactus flecked with brown stands in the slanted light from the setting sun.  Jessie and the girls get out of the car and sit on the hood, watching the desert sunset.  A giant glowing red dome descends inches from the earth in the far distance with brilliant streaks of orange and purple accompanying it like a celestial entourage.  Suddenly, I see an armored gray lump lumbering away.  I squint at it for a second.  “Guys, it’s an armadillo!”  I yell.  They wriggle off the hood of the Jeep and run towards me as fast as they can.  “No, no, wait! I’m not finished.”  I panic.  Jessie ignores me and runs even faster.  The armadillo is moving towards a little hole near the base of another cactus some distance away.  I finish as quickly as I can and run after it, with Jessie and the girls hot on my heels.  Then I lose the armadillo, and so does everyone else.  They stop short behind me, and Sarah trips on the armadillo’s hole, miraculously falling into my arms.  I fall, too, grazing my back on the cactus and crashing into the sand with my face sinking into Sarah’s chest.  Most guys would probably envy me, but I’m just the most uncomfortable that I have ever been.  Sarah closes her eyes and puckers her lips.  They draw close, and make contact.  But she does not kiss me.  While I was falling, the armadillo had crawled out from the around the cactus and was strutting away behind me as fast as its stubby legs would carry it.  Sarah had not kissed me.  She had smooched an armadillo.  Her eyelids flutter open.  “You b******,” she screams, smacking me with her purse.  What did I do? I didn’t make her kiss an Armadillo.  We spend four days in Texas but decide to depart early, as Sarah has some unusual rashes forming around her mouth that should probably be treated.  The ride home is spent in blissful silence.