By her twentieth birthday, there are a few things Valarie Ricci knows for certain.
She knows that her waitressing job barely covers the costs of living out of a beat up old van. She knows she's stuck in the dead end hometown her high school friends...
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Being confined in a small space with the person who had once meant everything to her was, in fact, not ideal. The silence that filled the van was so heavy, Valarie had to roll down her window just to breathe. The roar of the highway and cut of cold wind that sliced through the opening was welcome. She started picking at the wheel as she drove, tapping her hands and feet, always aware of an itch or discomfort; a need to move.
She wasn't sure how Alice expected her of all people to drive for extended amounts of time–for roughly two thousand kilometres according to the route they'd mapped out on Alice's phone. It was giving her horrible flashbacks to being forced to sit behind a desk at school. Every time she felt her focus wandering away from the road, Valarie would get angry at herself and her failure of a brain. She was increasingly convinced that someone had secretly shoved ten little cat brains into a human skull and that skull had accidentally ended up attached to her neck.
Valarie would frequently snap back into reality with the realisation that she was driving a piece of metal at high speeds on a busy highway and was responsible for not killing Alice or Ithaca or herself so she should probably bePAYING ATTENTION.
Her eyes grabbed onto the green-grey blur of the passing scenery. She felt mild panic at the thought that this was the furthest from she'd ever really been and searched for any signs of change in the world around her. It turned out, however, that the trees four hours outside of Valentine looked the exact same as trees in Valentine. A half-formed laugh bubbled to her lips when she remembered that in order to leave home, you need to have one in the first place.
Alice fixed her with a strange, mildly-concerned look. "You good?"
"Fine." She tried to wipe the smile off her face. "I'm just going a little crazy."
Alice's gaze lingered on her face. "How about some music?" She reached out to press the knob for the radio, only to immediately click it back off when ear-grating static poured from the speakers.
"Been meaning to fix that."
"Okay... Is there anything in here?" When Alice pulled the latch for the glove compartment, the door fell open like it was barely still attached to the hinge and expelled everything inside onto the ground–a cascade of old cassette tapes, CDs, and dishevelled papers.
"Been meaning to clean that."
Alice made quick work of sorting through the mess, her fingers deftly stacking the music into a neater stack on her lap. "Dean Martin, Vera Lynn, Italian music, Patsy Cline, and... more Italian music." She looked up. "Nonno's?"
Valarie nodded, swallowing around the lump growing in her throat.
"Do you wanna listen to it?"
"Uh..." It was the same music she had played for him in hospice, unsure if he was even able to hear or think anymore as he struggled to breathe, painfully thin and shrivelled; unsure if he even knew that Valarie was there as she held his hand. Her nose violently flooded with the chemical stench of antiseptic and death. She cracked the window open slightly more. "I mean... if–if you want to, sure."
