The Starlite Drive-In

Lancaster County. Saturday.

By Saturday the rental no longer smelled surprising, and Jasper had a system: drive an hour, find a parking lot with a signal, call everyone in range, repeat.

The Starlite was a drive-in of the eat-in-your-car variety—a curl of neon, a kid on roller skates who clipped a tray to the window with the bored grace of someone doing it for the four-thousandth time. Jasper ordered a root beer and a burger he’d actually finish, because despair, it turned out, burned calories.

He’d sent Noah the whole tangled list the night before, and Noah—who did not do anything by halves once he’d decided to do it at all—had turned it into a spreadsheet by morning, cross-referencing nurseries against seed-catalog records, pruning the dead ends before Jasper could waste a call on them. Skip the first six, Noah had texted at 6 a.m. Ornamental only. Try the three I starred—they actually carry heirloom capsicum.

The first starred number was a seed supplier outside Lancaster. The woman who answered knew exactly what a Fish Pepper was. “Green and white stripes, goes red? Nearly-lost variety. We don’t carry it—hardly anybody grows it anymore.” A pause. “There’s a place that does. Some collective, out past the city. Share the land, grow the old seeds. I sent them a few packets a couple seasons back.”

Jasper sat up so fast he nearly upended the tray. The collective—the rumor he’d carried out of Brooklyn, suddenly real enough to have received a seed shipment. “Do you have a name? An address?”

“Somewhere. Meadow-something. Let me dig up the invoice.”

He texted Noah before he’d even hung up: THE COLLECTIVE. it’s real. grows fish peppers, “meadow-something.” running it down.

Noah, instantly: On it.

For the first time since Brooklyn, Jasper felt the thing he was actually best at—the scattered connections in his head lining up into a single thread—and it didn’t feel like trouble. It felt like use.