Traffic Jam

the eleventh

It's early when I wake up. I can tell because the sky through the windshield is pink and orange. I didn't mean to fall asleep, but I remember it happening. Slowly and then fast, and I remember Kane was still vaguely singing when I finally drifted off.

I assume he was singing because it was keeping him awake, but there's a small part of me that wants to believe he was singing because he likes it.

When I stretch my fingers in the air, my ribcage screams with pain and I can practically feel all my nerves cussing me out. Kane glances over at me as I yawn and his eyes are rimmed with red. My eyes flicker down to the car clock that reads six a.m. I fell asleep somewhere around one, which means I only got five hours of sleep, but it was still five more hours that Kane got.

"I think," he says after a minute, "that we'll be at the hospital in thirty minutes or so."

I raise my eyebrows, as the information slowly seeps into my sleepy brain. "That soon?"

He nods and switches lanes smoothly, "Yeah. There's no traffic at all, obviously, so I'm going pretty fast right now. From the roadmarks I'd say we're pretty close."

I lean back against my seat a bit, glad that we're that close. I sigh out my nose and he looks sideways at me again before speeding up a bit more.

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"You're going to have to do it out the window," Kane states amid Lizzie yelling at me from the backseat. She woke up about ten minutes ago, and we're still fifteen minutes from the hospital.

"I can't do it out the window!" I scream back at Lizzie and then I watch as Kane attempts to stifle a laugh.

"Do you remember what happened last time we stopped?" He asks, having managed to not bust out laughing.

I huff and roll my eyes, "Well, yeah but that doesn't mean I have to do it out the car! I can't, it'll never work!"

Kane just stays silent, but the next thing I know he's rolling down my window with his set of driver controls.

"Nuh-uh. No way," I retort and cross my arms over my chest.

Three seconds later, I can't handle it anymore. 

I unbuckle my seatbelt and lean out the window of the car and get sick all over the road and all over the bottom of the door to the car.

We didn't have the foresight to realize that this sickness would carry over into the car, and no one thought to bring a puke bucket or anything. Kane told me I was going to have to just roll down the window and throw up, but that's so nasty and gross that I didn't want to.

But in the end, I don't really have a choice. 

When I finish I pull myself back into the car and roll the window up. I grab a wet wipe and wipe my mouth before chucking it out of the car. When I turn back to Kane, he looks green.

"Oh, geez," I mutter as he begins rolling his window down. He unbuckles his seatbelt and manages to murmur a faint, "Take the steering wheel," as he leans out of the car.

Behind me, I can hear Lizzie gagging into her pillow.

I lean over and grip the steering wheel, managing to keep us on the road. Kane still has his foot on the gas, so all I have to do is keep the car straight as Kane vomits into the asphalt.

After a few seconds he comes back in the car, and I throw him the bag of wet wipes. When he's pulled himself together he takes the steering wheel back and I lean back into my seat.