Just Drive [old version]

[ chapter seventeen ]

did you guys hear? twinkies are making a comeback :D

unrelated to the story, i was in china, if i haven't emphasized it enough yet. sorry for the unexplained disappearance

Chapter Seventeen

            The rest of the day was relatively empty. At this point, four days in, the road trip has lost its glamorous sheen. There was nothing I wanted more than to turn around and drive back home. No, it was not homesickness; it was disillusion. Hope drove me to accept Austin’s proposition. Well, hope is, and has been, slowly dying.

            “Where are we going?”

            I shrugged. “I don’t know.” That was a lie. I knew where I wanted to go, for once, even if I didn’t know exactly how to get there. Before we left the university, Jason gave me a few suggestions as to where we should visit, if we had time. Of course, I didn’t tell Austin about the list; he would immediately object to any destination that wasn’t Kellie. Most of the locations on the list were too far out of the way to be inconspicuous, but there was one little, college campus city in Michigan that caught my interest. Ann Arbor. I almost felt bad about lying to Austin, especially after hearing his silent answer.

            I shouldn’t feel bad about anything though. Technically, I was doing him a favor by giving him a free ride across the country, even if that free ride was completely offbeat and misguided. Not on purpose, of course, but I certainly had my own differing goals.

            Part of me wanted to hold this trip against him. That part was still bitter about how he led me on for those three years, but ran when I tried to close the gap. I knew it wasn’t exactly the right thing to do. He didn’t mean to do it, I don’t think, but then again, I’ve always given him the benefit of the doubt, and where has that gotten me? Driving his gloomy ass across the country to see his bitch of a girlfriend. The whole thing sickens me.

              “Do you think we’ll ever get to California?”

            I took a deep breath. He was like Gatsby in the sense that his hope was completely undying, and at the moment, it was annoying the hell out of me. “Eventually, I guess.”

            “I miss Kellie,” Austin lamented.

            I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. I wanted to tell him the truth so badly: all the times she flirted with other guys to make him “jealous”; the Twitter confessions that complained about him; her blatant hot-and-cold reactions to him; everything. I didn’t have the heart to tell him, though. “You’ll see her again soon.”

            “I hope so.”

            Besides the occasional simultaneous reach for the radio dial when we drove out of range, we acted like the other one wasn’t there. We were used to it by now. It was like déjà vu of our senior year. It was a shaky kind of silence; it was the kind of silence that rattled you to the core, and it scared the fuck out of me.

            We reached Ann Arbor earlier than expected, and quite frankly, I didn’t feel like driving to another city. “We’re stopping here for the night,” I announced. I did my best not to let my emotions show.

            “It’s only five fifteen. We can still drive for at least another two hours,” Austin protested.

            “I’m tired,” I whined. “I want to stop here. I’ve heard Ann Arbor’s a pretty city.”