❝she was the girl, who bit the horizon, who peeled the stars from the sky and put them on her tongue, the girl who was hungry for the universe, who craved magic and saw the broken boy for who he truly was- a broken boy.❞
Beca...
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Chapter 34
A Rift In The Rocks
Jem
The car spat back out onto the interstate lanes ten minutes after everybody had piled in with the smell of July humid sweat and preservatives-ridden chips permeating through the limited air. Ellis set a ridiculously orange Cheetos into her mouth and tilted the bag over to my side, licking the orange dust gathering at her fingertips, and shaking the bag to indicate she was offering.
"Want one?"
"Nah," I shook my head, refusing the chips as my eyes didn't stray from the road.
"Is this one of your 'I-don't-like-conforming-to-globalized-money-making-typhoons thing you're always on about?"
A smirk quirked upwards and I shrugged. "What can I do? Consumerism never sleeps and neither will I."
Ellis blew out an exasperated sigh, "Whatever makes you happy," before she turned back to the packet of chips and passed it behind where Calista snatched it to share it with Astrid and Heath.
There was a buzzing warmth thrumming under my skin in the shape of Ellis's handprint on my shoulder but I tried not to let it bother me too much as we sped off into the distance.
-
"Five of you together?" The hostel clerk eyed our disheveled state after a five hours drive from Philly to Pittsburg. I rubbed my eyes, tired and overheated from opening them against the slanting flared sunlight, and stretched my strained fingers that were tired from being curled up on the steering wheel against the wooden counter.
"Yup," I yawned. "Two rooms would be great. One for them-" I gestured to Astrid, Calista and Ellis, "and one for us," I indicated at Heath and me.
The clerk tapped on the keyboard as Calista checked her phone, Astrid paced the small dusty lobby in a mad frenzy to shake off the sleepiness in her legs. Heath was on the couch, sprawled out in the dim lighting of the hostel. At the corner, there was a clock ticking midnight. Ellis was beside me, trying to keep her whole body alert with her head holding itself high on her chin while nodding off every time there's a slight pause of long silence between finger taps of the clerk's slow-working fingers. Her gaze sought to meet mine and they were saying I'm so fucking tired I can sleep here.
"I'm sorry but we only have about one room left with three beds."
"Fuck," I swore, letting it ring out in the echoey hall, "You know what? We're all tired so we'll take it."
"What?" out cried Calista, "How are all five of us fitting in three beds?"
"Heath and I can take the floor," I said impatiently, rubbing my eyes to keep the salty crust of drowsiness from forming. "We'll just take whatever you have."
I slapped eighty bucks on the counter and she handed us the key card. We collected all our bags and shuffled into the hallway where the rooms were. The room was alright, with three beds evenly spread out across the space. We all dumped our bags by the closet, not bothered to stack them properly- not even Ellis's OCD-ness was on the fence of unleashing her claws about the unorderly manner we were treating our items- and all subsiding into sacks of a heaping mess.
