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Two 16-year-old loners plus a dog take a road trip that brings them together; it’s a familiar plot, but Smith invests her somewhat odd and isolated characters with some distinctions that help to make this feel more fresh than that description might lead readers to believe. Emma is a much-younger child in a family of academically gifted children and parents, while Peter’s father is the town sheriff in the upstate New York college town where they live and occasionally share space at the same time. As acquaintances recognizing a bond of sorts, they gradually begin to open up to each other. Peter’s mother died at his birth, and Emma has just discovered a birth and death certificate minutes apart for a twin brother never before known. An alternating focus on each establishes the differences that have nonetheless managed to lead them to share a similar journey. Still, it’s a half-relayed journey at best, one that fails to deal realistically with money, potty breaks or other mundane details of life on the road—a lapse that might well prove fatal with readers. (Fiction. 12 & up)