Stealing The Show (Such Sweet Sorrow Trilogy, Book One)

12

RIDING IN A car with two drama kids is already stupid insane. But riding in Eeyore with two drama kids who just got done with a performance--a damn good one--is probably one of the things that would make people seek therapy or turn back for home. 

They are skipping the cast party to be here with me, which means they don't have that party to get it all out of their system, so I'm the audience and I'm the sponge and I'm the one who has to hear everything that happened in rehearsals and the backstage almost-tragedies and the little moments when they sort of forgot their lines. 

But that's okay with me. It gives us all something to talk about, so that the weird slimy worry about whether Jubilee heard me confess my feelings for her doesn't come up. Every mile that goes by, I worry about it a little less, until somewhere around the Iowa border, I start to actually breathe. 

Maybe she didn't hear, maybe we're pretending it never happened. I don't know. But we've got a long way to go, so, whatever works. 

While they talk about the play, I keep feeling like I missed out on something. I should have tried harder at the auditions. I wasn't doing well back then. Wasn't actually living. 

But then, if I had done that, would the three of us be in Eeyore right now, on the interstate heading to the West Coast? Would I have taken life by the balls and actually done this? Maybe we have to choose what we do, because we can't do everything. It's our choice how we live and what we make up our life to be, I'm realizing. But that's where it gets fucked. Choices suck because they can be wrong so many times. 

Anyway, right here in this moment, even though I feel left out of what they went through with Our Town, I know it's right. I know that it's pitch black and we're driving south through Iowa, and it's flat as far as you can see, just a black plain of cornfields and a dark blue sky up above us. Sometime in the early hours before the sun comes up, when we're the only people in the entire world who are awake, we're suddenly near Nebraska and there are signs for Omaha.  

The drama kids have quieted down for the last few hours. I think Jubilee fell asleep in the backseat for a while.  

"Omaha is supposed to be cool, very indie rock." Shoe says. "I think Conor Oberst lives there." 

"Who?" I ask. 

"He's this musician guy Lacey turned me on to." 

"Who?" 

"Who who?" 

"Lacey who!" 

"Oh. Dramatical." 

From the backseat comes this roar of a laugh from Jubilee. "I wish I had that on tape. We are so stupid tired right now." 

We stop at 4 a.m. for breakfast at The Flying J, one of those 24-hour truck stops. We all get the buffet and it is pure greasy goodness. Eggs, sausage, biscuits, hashbrowns. There is nothing on the buffet that could be healthy, even if you left to run a marathon right after. You'd never burn it all off and you'd puke after about one mile. 

But right then, with the three of us and one other trucker as the only people in The Flying J, it tastes perfect. 

We get back in Eeyore and Shoe drives for a while. It's still dark, and Omaha comes up on us slow at first. The city's lights look like the reflection of a Christmas tree in a puddle. We drive through it while the sun starts to light up the edge of Iowa behind us, and still hardly anybody else is on the road since it is the ass-crack of Saturday morning. 

"Anybody see Conor Oberst?" I ask.  

"I wish," Jubilee says.  

"It's a miracle. I feel sleepy finally," Shoe says. When we get through Omaha, we stop at a Starbucks and I buy us all gigantic lattes. We sit in the parking lot and drink them, and this is the real miracle: after we drink the coffee, we all fall asleep. Hard. In Eeyore. In the Starbucks parking lot.