Page 3 of Road Trip

CHAPTER

THREE

JACOB

2703 miles to go

Norfolk, VA, to Boone, NC

F uck Norfolk traffic.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad, but I was used to driving around Cape Charles, and there wasn’t a lot going on back on the pointy end of the peninsula, traffic-wise or otherwise. Take the tunnel to Norfolk, though, and it was a different story. I was suddenly a hell of a lot more nervous at the prospect of driving across the entire country. Hell, even some of the interchanges in Norfolk looked like complicated Celtic knots on the map, and I was having flashbacks to every dashcam compilation I’d ever watched on YouTube and wondering if me and Matt were about to become unwilling collateral damage in one. Like, you indicate before you change lanes, you know? And you fucking look .

I either had to get real chill about driving real soon, or I’d leave indentations in the steering wheel from gripping it so hard. And have a meltdown before we even got out of the state.

“You’re driving like someone’s grandma,” Matt said, flipping the visor on the passenger side up and down. “On her way to church, with a three-tier cake on the back seat. ”

“Fuck off,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road.

“Bro,” he said, his voice tempered with rare amusement. “Did your dad’s talk really wig you out that much? You can, like, unclench a little , you know?”

“I’ll unclench when we get through this next goddamn interchange,” I bit out.

I thought Matt would laugh at me for finding the traffic pants-shittingly scary, and I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t up for the trip or anything. I totally was. The traffic was just a lot .

“You got this,” he said, and there was no sharp edge to his tone. No sarcasm. “The map says just stay in this lane and follow it around.”

I felt warm and stupid all at the same time. Warm because Matt had my back and stupid because it was dumb to be so nervous in the first place. It wasn’t as though this was my first time behind the wheel. Just, like everything else in my life right now, it felt like I was about to be on a really steep learning curve and I wasn’t sure I was ready. What if I couldn’t handle the pressure? And no, I didn’t mean the trip because at least for that I still had Matt right beside me. But when summer was over, what then? Like, what then for the rest of my life?

“Nice one, bro,” Matt told me as we made it through the interchange.

I let out a breath and tried not to hold the next one for quite as long.

“Hey,” he said. “I want your phone.”

“What? Why?”

“Because my Spotify has ads,” he said. He plucked my phone out of the center console. “I know you’ve got premium.”

I snorted and kept my eyes on the road, waiting for him to start playing something. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“How long does it take to pick a song?”

“I’m making a playlist.”

“You can put something on while you make a playlist. ”

“It’s got to be perfect. What sort of vibe are we going for?” he asked. “Kind of retro lo-fi beatnik Kerouac road trip—that one’s pretty hard to pull off in a RAV4, honestly—or more of an unhinged, psychedelic Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing kind of road trip? Also hard to pull off in a RAV4.”

“Just put on a daily mix.”

“But which one? Daily Mix 1 is more indie rock, but Daily Mix 2 is leaning hard into hip-hop. And Daily Mix 3 is like that K-pop stuff you like.”

“Dude, Hyukoh is not K-pop. I’ve told you this like a hundred times—” I was cut off by his laughter and glanced over at him. “What?”

He pointed to my grip on the steering wheel, where my knuckles were no longer bright white. “I got you to unclench.” His laughter faded into a smug grin. “Daily Mix 3 it is.”

Asshole.

The chill indie sounds of Hyukoh and Sunset Rollercoaster carried us the rest of the way out of Norfolk.

A few hours out of Norfolk, somewhere on US 58 on the west side of Emporia, we pulled into a gas station to grab coffee and more snacks and take a leak. The gas station looked the same as every single other one we’d passed: oil-stained ground, sun-bleached signs, and not much else going on at all. There was a flaking decal on the front doors to the store that told us we were at Goose Run Gas, but if there was a town nearby, we either hadn’t quite reached it yet or it was hidden by the curtain of trees that flanked the highway.

“Goose Run Gas,” Matt said, walking backward through the rattling automatic doors like he was checking I was coming with him. “Makes it sound like the manager is a goose. ”

“Place’d maybe be better if he was,” said a guy shoving bags of chips in the rack by the door, and Matt yelped and jumped about three feet in the air.

“Holy shit ,” he said, clutching his heart.

The guy was about our age, maybe a couple years older. He had a friendly, crooked grin and was wearing a flannel overshirt and a trucker cap. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to take you by surprise.”

Matt laughed and ducked his head. “Nah, it’s cool.”

“I’m getting drinks,” I said and headed for the wall of refrigerator doors at the back of the place. We might have only been driving for three hours, but I’d been tense for way too much of it, so it felt good to get out of the car and stretch my muscles a little. I detoured to the bathroom first and then took my time choosing sodas, even though I knew exactly what to get—a Coke for me and a Mountain Dew for Matt. When you’d been best friends forever, you didn’t have to ask.

There was a counter at the back too, with a display case of sad-looking cookies underneath it and a big coffee machine on top of it. Behind the counter there was a guy sitting on a stool. He glanced up from his phone as I got near him and then glanced down again.

“The machine’s broken,” he said.

“I was looking at the cookies.”

“You can get them cheaper at Food Lion.” He cracked his gum. “They’re the same ones.”

I guessed I wasn’t getting the cookies then.

I grabbed a water each along with our sodas, then worked my way back through the aisles of junk food to the front counter.

“California,” Matt was saying to the first guy, the friendly one. “We’re in our road trip era.”

They weren’t standing by the chips anymore. They were in the candy aisle and Matt was picking out a few things. He wasn’t really looking at the guy, but the guy was looking at him. Then the guy’s gaze cut to me, and I looked away and pretended I was checking out the gross gas station hot dogs. I didn’t know why I’d looked away. I wanted the guy to notice me; I had shit to pay for.

I stared at those hot dogs like they held all the secrets to the universe, and Matt laughed at something the guy said. It didn’t sound like his usual laugh. It was lighter somehow. This wasn’t the sharp-edged laughter of my sarcastic asshole best friend. This was a friendly laugh. Something about it landed wrong, but the gas station guy didn’t seem to notice because he said something else to Matt in a voice too low for me to hear. I looked over at them again, suddenly paranoid they were talking about me or something, and this time Matt was looking at the guy and smiling and the guy was handing him a pack of Twizzlers and smiling back.

“Hey,” I called, and the word came out louder than I thought it would. “Can I pay for these drinks here?”

The guy exchanged a look with Matt and then shrugged as he wandered over to the counter. “No problem.”

Except there was a fucking problem; I just couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, apart from Matt acting weird with this guy.

I paid for the drinks and went back outside, leaning on the car and waiting for Matt to join me.

“Dude,” he said, a Twizzler hanging out of his mouth when he finally came back outside, “why are you being so weird?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re the one being weird.”

“Whatever.” He opened his door and grabbed his sketchbook off the seat. Peeling the thick rubber band off, he opened it. Then he took something out of his back pocket and slid it between the pages.

“What’s that?”

“A postcard,” he said, closing the book and snapping the rubber band back on.

“What the hell did you get a postcard of this dump for?”

“Uh…I’m chronicling our road trip, obviously,” he said and tu cked the book into the compartment on the inside of the door. “Want a Twizzler?”

I shook my head and went around to my side of the car. By the time I got there, Matt was in his seat, pulling his belt across and clipping it closed. I held out his Mountain Dew. “I don’t know how you can drink this crap.”

He leaned over and snagged the bottle. “You just have no taste.”

“That must be why I’m hanging out with you.”

Matt flipped me the bird, and the familiar gesture settled my jangling nerves.

As I put the keys in the ignition, Matt suddenly said, “Hey, did you get coffee?”

“The machine was broken.”

“Aw, man. I like coffee.”

He didn’t. He liked whipped cream and sugar and caramel syrup pretending to be coffee.

“We’ll stop somewhere else,” I said. “We can stop whenever we want.”

This road trip wouldn’t be much of an adventure if all we did was drive across the country at record speed. And okay, maybe I didn’t want it to be over too soon. Who knew when I’d get to spend time with Matt like this, just the two of us, again? I’d likely get another girlfriend once I started college, and Matt’s odds of finding some girl who liked prickly assholes would increase once he was in a bigger setting. Hell, one of them would probably find his perpetual scowl charming and think he was their very own bad boy Heath Ledger lookalike from that movie we’d both watched with my mom about a hundred times.

Joke was on them, I thought wryly. Matt was never going to dance along the bleachers, and he couldn’t sing for shit.

He proved that now by putting on Spotify and singing along—badly—to “Pink Pony Club.”

W e stopped in Boone, North Carolina, not because there was anything to see in Boone but because I was tired of driving. My shoulders were tense, my neck ached, and even my ass was sore from sitting so long. We booked a room at a Quality Inn and both winced a little at the cost.

“See, there’s no way to be footloose and fancy-free nowadays,” Matt bitched as we dug into a plate of nachos at some Mexican place near the university. “Like, if we wanted to go cheaper, we could book rooms in vacation rentals or whatever, but then you’re on a schedule and who knows? Maybe there’s a whole amazing list of shit to do in Boone and we want to spend a few days here!”

“Yeah, there’s not,” I said, scrolling through my phone. “Oh, they have awesome ski slopes in the winter, though. I mean, I guess we could go hiking?”

Matt gave me a narrow-eyed look that needed no translation.

“Or not.” I put my phone face down on the table and dug into the nachos before Matt could shove them all in his face.

“Bro, I just had the best idea!”

“What?”

Matt leaned across the table, his ass making a high-pitched squeaking sound on the vinyl seat of the booth. “We could—shut up!”

I kept laughing into my soda.

“It was the seat!” He wiggled but couldn’t make the sound again, and I laughed harder. He gave me that narrow-eyed look again, which just made it funnier. “You’re such a dick. You know it was the seat.”

“Yeah, but it was still funny.”

“If you’re a little kid, maybe.”

“Fart noises are always funny,” I said. “Age has nothing to do with it. Tell me your great idea.”

“Okay, so instead of paying for a motel every night, we could go to Walmart and get a couple sleeping bags and a tent and stay at campsites instead. That would be so much cheaper, right?”

The way he said it, with an almost pleading tone, told me he knew I’d need convincing. And of course I would. I mean, I liked camping well enough, but usually it was something that was planned and usually by my dad, and there were a whole lot of people involved who knew exactly what to pack, where to go, and what food to bring.

“Stop channeling your mom,” Matt said, rolling his eyes.

“What? I’m not!”

Except suddenly I was. My dad too. There was no way they would approve of this half-baked idea. They didn’t approve of most of Matt’s and my half-baked ideas on principle alone. They were probably smart not to at least half the time, but the problem was that when it came to Matt’s camping idea, I had no idea if they’d be right to disapprove or not. I mean, camping was safe enough, right?

That seemed like the sort of thing someone would think right before they went camping and were murdered by hill folk.

“Okay, but it would save so much money,” Matt said. “And your parents are always on your ass about not wasting your money.”

That was true. I’d worked the last two summers at a boat rental place in Cape Charles, explaining to tourists how I couldn’t rent them a pontoon boat before they’d completed the Boater Safety Course, however much they assured me they knew boats. I’d saved some of that money, but Matt was right that my parents were always on my case to save more.

So, after we finished our nachos, we went to Walmart and got a cheap tent and some sleeping bags and other stuff. We got some more snacks for tomorrow’s drive too, and by the time we got back to the motel, I was ready to crash. I grabbed a shower first, and afterward I stared at the crack of light coming in through the curtains that didn’t quite close and listened to Matt humming in the bathroom. My eyes kept closing, and every time they did, I could still see the road stretching out in front of me and feel the thrum of the car’s engine in my bones as I drifted closer and closer to sleep. I’d probably dream about driving tonight.

And then, right on the edge of sleep, I heard Matt climbing under the covers of his bed and letting out a long, slow sigh.

“I’m really glad you’re here with me, Jacob,” he whispered, and I didn’t know if I’d dreamed it or not.