Page 1 of Road Trip

CHAPTER

ONE

JACOB

Cape Charles, VA

K ennedy’s party was wild .

Savannah got wasted and flashed everyone. Gage set fire to a tree in the backyard—I thought it was on accident, but I wasn’t sure. My cousin Charlie, who was in town for the summer, kissed Tanner the baseball jock. Things were getting crazy fun and I would have liked to stay longer, but Matt, my best friend, got that pinched look around his mouth that told me he’d hit that point where he hated it, so I told Charlie we were leaving and we got out of there.

“Hey,” I said to Charlie as we drove back toward town from Kennedy’s folks’ place, “so just so you know, Tanner’s okay. For a jock. I guess.”

Matt was riding shotgun, so I had to check out Charlie’s expression in the rearview. He looked about one part thoughtful and three parts worried, which was very much his default, but at the mention of Tanner he glanced down at his phone, and the worry was replaced with a look of triumph that was reminiscent of my little brother that one time he’d caught a rare Pokemon in the middle of the camping section at Walmart—like he couldn’t quite believe his luck, but he was gonna take the win anyway .

I was taking at least some of the credit for putting that smile on Charlie’s face since I’d been the one to suggest that he give Tanner his number. Mind you, I'd also cockblocked him by dragging him out of there. “You think he’ll call tonight?”

Charlie’s face darkened in the rearview mirror and I knew he was blushing, but his mouth was curved up in a smile. “Maybe. And thanks. For prodding me to give him my number, I mean.”

“No problem,” I said. “I figured if I didn’t say something, you two would still be standing there making heart eyes at each other and saying um by the time college started.”

Charlie snorted out a laugh. “Maybe.”

“I didn’t even know Tanner was gay,” Matt said, digging around in the glove compartment for some of the gum I usually kept there. He probably wanted to fix his breath before we got to his place. If his mom was home, she wouldn’t like smelling alcohol on it.

“It’s no big deal,” I said, glancing at Charlie again.

“I never said it was a big deal.” Matt rolled his eyes. “I just said I didn’t know, was all. I was just surprised. You don’t need to get all on my ass about it.”

Matt was moody. That was how my mom had described him once, with a pause before she said it, like you knew she’d come up with something different first but then went for a more diplomatic option. And if moody was the diplomatic option, her first choice probably hadn’t been great. She liked Matt a lot, don’t get me wrong, but yeah, he wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine.

Matt was like a porcupine—prickly as hell on the surface, but if he let you get close, you could see his vulnerable underside. I was grateful to be one of the few people who got to see the softer parts of him. I’d never tell him that, though. He’d get all defensive and those spines would go right back up.

“I wasn’t getting on your ass about it,” I said, unbothered by the sideways looks he was throwing me. I was immune to Matt’s scowling. “Anyway, I say that if you like someone, you shouldn’t be afraid to shoot your shot because who knows? Maybe they feel the same.”

“In the movies maybe,” Matt muttered under his breath.

See? Moody.

I eased my foot off the gas as we entered the outskirts of town, such as it was. Cape Charles wasn’t exactly hopping, even on a Friday night.

“You wanna crash at my place?” I asked Matt, giving him an out in case he didn’t want to go home. “Luke said something about a horror movie marathon.”

My brother Luke was sixteen and had been steaming with jealousy that he hadn’t been invited to Kennedy’s party—as if she would have wanted sophomores there. Kennedy’s party had been our senior class’s last big blast before we all headed out in different directions into the world. This last summer in Cape Charles felt momentous, and even a little scary. Like, I didn’t give two fucks about a whole lot of kids I’d gone to high school with, but now that we were about to get scattered on the wind? Suddenly I was going to miss them, and the feeling was an uneasy weight in my gut that wouldn’t settle.

“Nah.” Matt chewed his bottom lip and shoved the pack of gum into the pocket of his light hoodie. “Let me out here. I’ll walk.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yeah. Gotta clear my head.”

I pulled over and Matt got out. Charlie did too and claimed the front seat.

Matt knocked on the top of the car with his knuckles, then gave us a grin and a half wave and strode off into the darkness.

“He seemed much more hyped at the party,” Charlie said as we kept driving.

“That’s Matt for you,” I said. “He’s got a social battery that takes all day to charge up, he burns through it in about an hour of being the life of the party, and then it’s dead again. He’s the human version of a shitty laptop. ”

“I thought he was just a dick,” Charlie said with a grin that told me he didn’t mean it. Mostly.

“Eh.” I shrugged. “That too.”

It was still pretty early when we got home. Mom and Dad looked surprised to see us so soon, but Luke was happy we were back.

“Hey, dickbags,” he said. “Let’s watch a movie.”

We liked each other really, I promise.

We headed down into the basement with chips and sodas, and Luke demanded to know all the details of the party.

His jaw dropped. “You saw Savannah’s boobs? Holy shit . Tell me everything .”

“You little perv.” I snorted, and he looked to Charlie beseechingly.

“I’m gay,” Charlie said and shrugged. “They were nice, I guess. Symmetrical.”

“Jacob,” Luke whined.

“Dude, if you’ve seen one pair, you’ve seen them all,” I said. Boobs were overrated, honestly.

“I haven’t seen any ,” he muttered and threw me a death glare. “I don’t have a girlfriend like you do!”

I gave a guilty jolt.

Shit .

Layla.

“Hey!” she’d exclaimed when she saw me at the party and pushed herself up onto her toes to kiss me. “I’m gonna go say hi to Kennedy. Meet me back here?”

“Sure,” I’d said and then, like an asshole, I’d forgotten about her and left .

I winced as I pulled my phone out of my pocket.

Five messages and two missed calls.

“Shit,” I said. “Start the movie without me. I have to make a call.”

And I headed upstairs and all the way out into the backyard, where, if Layla actually picked up, I could apologize and grovel without having my brother and my cousin laugh at me.

A shower of pebbles on my window woke me when it was still dark, because apparently Matt had never heard of texting. Like, I didn’t even need to look out the window to know it was him. Who the hell else would throw pebbles at my window instead of picking up his fucking phone? He’d been doing this since we were kids.

I climbed out of bed, careful not to step on Charlie, who was sleeping on a mattress on my floor for the summer. I crept around him and opened my window.

“Matt?”

“Yeah.”

I caught a glimpse of his pale face in the gloom before he melted back into the darkness under the dogwood tree.

I closed the window and tiptoed toward my door. Luckily, I knew my way through the house in the dark and which creaking steps to avoid as I went downstairs. I let myself out onto the back porch where Matt was waiting.

“You been home yet?” I asked.

“Yeah. Zeke’s there, though.” Matt wasn’t the biggest fan of his mom’s boyfriend, although that was more on account of how thin the walls in their trailer were than anything the guy had done. He showed me a crooked smile. “Wanna go to the beach?”

At three in the morning?

“Sure,” I said, feeling a strange lightness catch me. Since graduation, I’d felt up and down and all over the place, but sneaking out with Matt in the middle of the night was familiar. Just stupid and fun and something we’d done a hundred times before because it was Cape Charles and there was nothing to do except go to the beach, especially at three in the morning .

It wasn’t like we were delinquents or anything. Okay, that was probably what the old folks who drove golf buggies through town thought if they ever saw us out after dark, but they thought that about anyone who was under twenty-five. Or older than twenty-five but with tattoos. Point was, we weren’t up to any trouble when we snuck out. We just liked to sit on the beach. If either of us had one, we might have smoked a blunt, but mostly we just sat and talked shit, and sometimes we sat and didn’t say anything at all, just breathed in the salt and listened to the waves washing back and forth for hours on end.

We walked the couple of blocks to the beach. The wind was coming in off Chesapeake Bay, ruffling the tussocky grasses on the fenced-off dunes and keeping the worst of the sand flies away. It also made Matt’s dark hair dance wildly. He pulled his shoes off and we took the nearest access path through the dunes to the beachfront.

We sat and watched the ocean for a while, and then Matt said, “It was my birthday on Wednesday.”

I punched him on the shoulder. “I know that. I was there.”

He punched me back. “And after the summer you’re off to Old Dominion while I’m going to community college in fucking Melfa .”

“Old Dominion isn’t that far away,” I said. “We’ll still see each other all the time.”

“Sure, man. Sure.” Matt laughed, and the twist in my gut that had been bothering me since graduation was back, and it was stronger than hell this time. But before I had time to protest, he turned his head to look at me, the bright moonlight catching on his suddenly wide grin. “We should go on a road trip.”

“What?”

“A road trip!” He knocked his shoulder against mine.

“A road trip to where?”

Matt’s grin grew. “To California , bro! Sun, sand, and surf, right?”

Like we didn’t have that here .

I dragged my heels through the sand. “Doesn’t your dad live in California?”

“Yup.” Matt looked away, fixing his gaze on the dark ocean. “And my mom won’t be able to do shit about me going to see him now I’m eighteen.”

Matt’s dad had left when he was like seven or eight or whatever, and ever since then Matt had been butting heads with his mom about never seeing him. I’d felt guilty whenever he bitched that she wouldn’t let him go live with his dad, hot disloyalty squirming in my gut even while I’d nodded along with him, because I hadn’t wanted him to leave. What about me? I’d wanted to yell at him, but I never did. I never had to because Matt’s mom was like that guy in a war movie who threw himself on the grenade so the other guy hunkering down in the foxhole didn’t get blown up.

Matt was very much the grenade in this scenario.

But he was right. When summer was over, I’d be going off to Old Dominion and he’d be staying home. A road trip might be our last chance to really hang out together, properly, before college pulled us apart. He was right to laugh when I’d said we’d still see each other all the time too. We wouldn’t. I knew we wouldn’t. Was I really gonna drive home every weekend? Maybe at first, but I was gonna try to get a job, so I’d probably be working weekends. And there would be studying, and writing papers, and—that squirming sense of disloyalty was back—new friends to party with.

“Okay,” I said too quickly, just to push the word out before Matt could sense my guilt.

He turned his head to look at me. “Seriously?”

“Fuck, yeah,” I said, holding my hand out for a fist bump. “Of course, bro.”

Sand scraped my knuckles when he knocked his fist against mine, and I guessed that, shit, we were actually doing this.

“ I t’s not that I think it’s a bad idea,” Mom said later that day, unloading groceries onto the kitchen counter. “But, honey, Charlie came to spend the summer with you and Luke, and now you want to take off to—” She frowned at a can of tomatoes. “Where are you even going to?”

“To California,” I said. “That’s where Matt’s dad lives now.”

Mom pursed her lips together and let out a breath through her nose. “Jacob.”

The way she said my name was like she was laying the groundwork for a whole lot of gentle reproach.

“Charlie won’t mind hanging with Luke,” I said. “Maybe it’ll even civilize him a little. Luke, I mean, not Charlie.”

Mom snorted. “I knew who you meant.”

“It’s our last summer,” I said. “Me and Matt. And we…”

“You what?” she asked, gaze sharpening.

I shrugged. “I just wanna spend some time with him, you know, before it’s all different.”

She sighed, but there wasn’t as much disapproval in it as I’d been expecting, and she looked almost sympathetic. “You’re going to Norfolk, Jacob, not Mars.”

“Yeah, but Matt’s not,” I said. “C’mon, Mom, please.”

I was eighteen already, but if I was going to do this, I actually wanted my parents’ permission. It was another new and awkward thing, asking permission for stuff even though I was technically an adult now, when both me and my parents knew they couldn’t really say no. Like, they didn’t have the leverage anymore or something. Not that my parents had ever been hard-asses or anything. Just, it was weird, was all. Just another thing that was changing and I hadn’t figured out how to feel about it yet.

Mom tossed a bag of dry pasta at me, and I caught it against my chest and then put it in the pantry .

“Talk to your father when he gets home,” she said, and she shook her head before smiling. “Because there is no way in hell your shitty car will make it all the way to California and back.”

“Seriously? Thanks, Mom! You’re the best!”

“I know,” she said. “I know. Now unpack the rest of these groceries before I change my mind.”

I t took the weekend to negotiate with my parents, but on Sunday night I called Matt.

“Okay, the road trip is on,” I said, “and we can take my dad’s RAV4, but there are rules.”

“Rules?” he asked, his voice wary with suspicion.

“Yeah,” I said. “I have to keep my location tracking on.” I waited for him to snort at that, but he didn’t. “And I have to check the tire pressure before we leave here and before we head back.”

“How do you check the tire pressure?” His voice was suddenly echoey, as though he’d put me on speaker.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll fucking look it up on YouTube or something.” I stepped outside onto the back porch, pulling the door shut behind me and dimming the sound of Luke and Charlie talking shit as they loaded the dishwasher. “I have to be back a full week before I’m due at college.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m not allowed to spend any of the money I saved for when I’m at college unless it’s an emergency,” I said.

“Okay.”

“And I have to check in at least once every twenty-four hours,” I said, saying the last of it in a rush because I figured Matt would make a big deal out of it. When he didn’t say anything, I said, “What?”

“What?” he asked right back.

“You’re just holding back some smart-ass comment, I can tell. ”

“I am not!” he protested.

“Then why didn’t you say anything?”

“Fuck off. I was writing it all down!”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. On the lame birthday card you got me.”

I would have protested, but yeah, it was pretty lame. I’d just gotten it at the grocery store. In my defense, his actual present—some Japanese pencils he wanted—more than made up for the shitty card.

“Well, okay then,” I said, finding myself off-balance because Matt wasn’t being a dick about my parents’ rules. He was probably just as happy as I was that we’d be taking the RAV4 and not my piece-of-crap car.

“This is gonna be so great,” he said. “When are we leaving? Are you picking me up, or will I meet you at your place? Are you packed yet? What are you taking?”

“Dude, I haven’t even started to think about packing.”

“We definitely need snacks,” he said, and I grinned to hear the excitement in his voice. “And drinks. And a good fucking playlist. It’s gonna be awesome!”

“Yeah,” I said, because he was right. “It’s gonna be a blast!”

“Was Layla cool when you told her?” he asked me, and oh…

You ever been on a roller coaster? You know that feeling, on that first drop, when you’re hurtling downward at a million miles an hour, but somehow you left your stomach behind you?

Yeah.

I was feeling that right now.

Oh shit.