Approaching the wrong person with open hands can be fatal. Seeking escape from their small-town existence, two teenagers impulsively drive north, with no particular place to go and no particular sense of who is at the wheel. Adam and Teddy hope to leave boyhood behind, but as the journey progresses their friendship becomes a struggle to prove themselves. When Adam harasses a young couple they meet on the highway it lands them in trouble they cannot run from. In taut and stylish prose, The Passenger Seat examines how men learn and perform masculinity. Rejecting easy answers, it keeps our eyes trained on the vanishing point where vulnerability edges into violence, alienation into aggression.