Page 5 of Road Trip

CHAPTER

FIVE

JACOB

2121 miles to go

Fall Creek Falls, TN

G etting the tent up was pretty easy even if we had to read the instructions to find out where to slot in the bendy poles. Dinner was less of a success. Back in Boone we’d hit up a grocery store and grabbed a lot of stuff in cans, none of which was very appetizing when we could smell people doing actual grilling at nearby campsites. But it was cheap, which was the point. And wasn’t that part of the fun of camping, pretending we were pioneers or some shit?

That was what I told myself as I ate my beans, anyway. And it was pretty chill, sitting round the campfire I’d made and watching Matt grin around his spoon and laugh at some dumb joke I’d made. He was the happiest I’d seen him in a while. I figured it was because he was excited to see his dad, but part of me liked to think that maybe I was the reason too.

We’d laid our wet shorts on the hood of the car to dry when we got back and Matt was wearing an oversized hoodie and old jeans that made him look almost fragile. He’d always been smaller than me, even though he was forever shoveling food in his mouth. Mom sometimes looked in the refrigerator after he’d gone and asked if his legs were hollow. I’d built some muscle in the last few years, but Matt was as skinny as ever. I sometimes thought that was part of why I felt so protective of him. Like my big brother instincts were activated or something, because they sure as hell never had been with Luke. Then again Luke was built like a linebacker. He could look after himself just fine, plus he had a bunch of friends. Matt only had me.

Like, his mom worked a lot of hours and even when she was home, it was like she wasn’t really there. Even before she’d been wrapped up in her new boyfriend, she’d been as antisocial as Matt in her own way. In all the years Matt and I had been friends, she’d probably only met my parents maybe three times. Matt always said his dad had been the fun one—right until he left.

Matt caught me watching him and his smile widened. “Wanna find some sticks?”

“What for?”

He reached into the grocery bag next to him and pulled out a bag of marshmallows and waved it at me. “Duh, we’re camping. We need to set these on fire.”

“Did we get graham crackers and chocolate?”

“Yeah, but you ate them on the way here, remember?”

“I didn’t know they were for s’mores.”

Matt gave me one of his narrow looks, the ones that looked more hostile than they really were. I mean, I hoped. “Bro, why would we buy graham crackers unless they were for s’mores? Who eats just graham crackers?”

“I like them.”

“Weirdo,” Matt said and tossed the bag of marshmallows at me. “Go find some sticks.”

I went and found some sticks. When I got back to the campsite, Matt was sitting cross-legged by our little fire with his sketchpad on his knee. He flipped it closed as I approached and tucked his pencil up his sleeve. He liked to sketch when he got the chance, even though he hardly ever let me see what he’d drawn .

I sat down beside him and showed him the sticks I’d found.

He grabbed one and waved it through the fire a few times.

“What are you doing that for?”

“I’m sterilizing it. What if a raccoon pissed on it or something?”

“If a raccoon pissed on it, I don’t think that would help. Also, it would probably smell like raccoon piss.”

“What does that even smell like?”

“Well, not good probably!” I snatched the stick back and sniffed it. “It’s fine. It smells like a stick.”

Matt rolled his eyes and grabbed it back, holding it over the flames again—for too long, it turned out, because it caught fire. He yelped and dropped it and then took my stick. I probably deserved it for laughing so hard.

“Maybe toasted marshmallows are overrated,” he said a while later when his third attempt at toasting a marshmallow ended with it bursting into flames and most of it dropping into the fire. Again.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Matt’s brow scrunched up the way it did when he knew I was right but he wasn’t going to admit it. “It’s holding a stick. How can I be doing it wrong?”

“You’re getting too close to the flames too fast. That’s why it’s melting.”

Matt’s expression did something complicated at that.

“You have to go slow and keep turning it,” I said, taking the stick off him and shoving two marshmallows on the end. I held them over the flames, far enough away that they didn’t catch fire, and slowly turned them. When the outside was a glossy golden brown and tiny bubbles appeared on the surface, I held the stick out to Matt. “Try these.”

He pulled the first marshmallow off, tossing it from hand to hand for a second before shoving it into his mouth, and then his eyes slipped closed. “That’s so gooood .”

I hadn’t heard anyone make a sound like that outside of Pornhub, and no, I had no fucking idea why my brain had made that association while I was watching my best friend lick his sticky fingers, okay? It was super fucking uncomfortable.

I tried to laugh it off, but I made a creaking, wheezing sound instead.

Matt opened his eyes. “What?”

“What?”

He pulled the second marshmallow off and handed it to me, then stuck his hand in the bag of marshmallows and skewered another one with his stick. “Okay, I think I got it now.”

He held out the stick and turned it slowly, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth like it always did when he was concentrating. When nothing burst into flames, he shot me a triumphant grin.

I grabbed myself another stick and waved it through the flames. “Gotta sterilize it,” I said. He jabbed me in the ribs with his marshmallowy stick, so I guessed he didn’t care too much about germs after all.

“Why’d we wait so long to do something like this? Just the two of us?” I asked once we’d both stopped laughing, and Matt shot me a wry look. “What?”

“What?” He laughed. “Dude, you always had like homework, and your job, and your parents on your case, and girlfriends , and?—”

“I didn’t always have girlfriends.”

“You had Layla.”

I still felt a little bad about Layla. Like, it had always felt as though she was way more into being my girlfriend than I was into being her boyfriend. I liked her. I liked her a lot. I wouldn’t have gone out with her when she asked me otherwise. But she’d always complained that she wasn’t my top priority, which, to be fair to her, was true. I had been a pretty shit boyfriend probably. Even now we’d broken up, she was still checking in on me when I hadn’t even thought of her once until she’d texted .

And I still hadn’t texted back.

“Honestly?” I stared into the fire. “Layla deserved a better boyfriend than me. Anyone deserves a better boyfriend than me.”

“Oh, fuck off with your pity party,” Matt said. “Layla’s clingy and you’re chill, that’s all. At least you got laid, right?”

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

“Like what? She is clingy.”

“No, like she’s just a thing I used to get laid. That’s not fair. I like Layla. I just wasn’t as into her as she was into me.”

Matt’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t mean it like that. Like, you wouldn’t do that to someone. Use them.”

“I mean…” I chewed on my bottom lip. “It sort of sounds like I did, though, right? I just said I knew she was into me more than I was into her.”

Matt stabbed me with his stick again. “You’re overthinking it. You don’t need to feel bad just because you didn’t want to put a ring on it. Why would you feel bad about getting laid? That’s what you do when you’re dating someone. And she was into it, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, guilt squirming low in my gut. Layla had been into it. In fact she’d been the one to start things the few times we’d actually had sex. I’d never pressured her. I’d liked making out, but every time we’d gone further I’d been so stressed about getting busted that I’d mostly just wanted to get it done before anyone caught me with my pants around my ankles. My parents were cool, so it would have been embarrassing to get caught but not the end of the world. But Layla’s parents had the Ten Commandments in cross-stitch in the bathroom and The Last Supper in their kitchen, so that would have been a whole other thing. That was maybe why I hadn’t enjoyed it that much, if I was honest. Sex was probably a lot more fun when you weren’t listening out for footsteps on the stairs and clenching your sphincter so tight you could crap diamonds.

“Anyway, I’m glad we’re doing this now,” Matt said, giving me a lopsided smile and pushing his dark hair back out of his eyes.

The fire crackled in the darkness, and the sounds of the other campers settling in drifted over the night air. We spent the next little while roasting the rest of the marshmallows, with Matt wondering aloud if s’mores would have been better, which was his not-so-subtle way of hinting I’d better not eat the graham crackers and chocolate beforehand next time.

A light breeze teased the back of my neck, providing some relief from the humidity, and I tipped my head back and closed my eyes, soaking up the cool air against my skin. When I opened my eyes again, Matt was watching me and then his gaze flicked down to where his pencil was moving rapidly against the page of his sketchpad.

“What are you drawing? Our stunning view of the bathhouse?”

He flipped the page shut. “Something like that.” He folded the book over, then wrapped the ever-present elastic band around it and shoved it into the pocket of his hoodie. “We should probably go shower.”

I raised an arm, sniffed my pit, and grimaced. He wasn’t wrong. We’d worked up a sweat getting the tent up, and I smelled of woodsmoke as well. The smoke I could live with. My own body odor, not so much. Plus our sleeping bags would be pretty gross in no time at all if we got in them dirty.

I kind of wished we could stay by the fire all night, eating marshmallows and basking in the glow of the flames, but if we were going to make it across the country and back before college started, we needed to sleep.

Besides, I was kind of looking forward to spending the night in the tent. It’d be fun.

T he tent was not fun.

I’d be the first to admit that forward planning wasn’t exactly our strong point and when we’d bought our camping supplies we’d been more concerned with the price tag than anything else. The tent was barely big enough for both of us to lie down in, and the yoga mats we’d bought for mattresses were basically useless, with every stone and branch and tree root poking into my back. I might as well have been lying directly in the dirt.

I rolled over for the fifth time trying to get comfortable, and my head brushed the wall of the tent, making that creepy, whispery noise that nylon does. Matt let out a frustrated huff and propped himself up on his elbows. “This yoga mat fucking sucks.”

I sat up next to him, my sleeping bag pooling around my waist. “So does this tent.”

“And it’s hot .” I heard his sleeping bag rustling, then the rasp of a zipper as he opened the tent.

“What are you doing? A bear could come in!”

He flapped the door of the tent, and the breeze was so good. “We’re surrounded by other campsites. Some of them have toddlers. Why would a bear eat us and not a tiny defenseless toddler?”

“Maybe they want more than a snack.”

“Yeah, but eating the toddler will slow them down and we’ll have time to run away.”

There were so many holes in that logic I didn't know where to start, but the breeze really was nice, so I let it go and lay back down, leaving my sleeping bag unzipped. A twig poked at my hip and in desperation I climbed out of the bag and lay on top of it. The extra half inch of padding made a real difference. “Hey,” I said, “if you lie on top of the sleeping bag, it sucks less.”

I heard Matt shuffle out of his bag. “Huh. It does.”

We lay there for a while, listening to the quiet thwap of the tent door flapping in the wind. Someone must have had a Bluetooth speaker, and the sound of Elvis crooning about wise men and falling in love floated across the campground.

“Hey,” I said. “You know what we should do?”

“What?”

“We should go to Graceland.”

“Dude, did Kerouac go to Graceland?”

“I don’t know. Did he?”

“Well, it probably wasn’t around then. But the point is he wouldn’t have gone to it even if it was.”

“Did Kerouac actually have fun on his road trip, or was he too busy being too cool for school?”

“Have you even read On The Road ?” Matt asked me.

“No. Have you?”

He didn’t answer, which was a dead giveaway, so I laughed. He punched me in the arm.

I rolled over and something sharp poked at my kidney. I wished I’d thought to buy two yoga mats. Next time we passed a Walmart I’d stop and grab another one, but that wouldn’t help me tonight. I was just going to have to put up with a shitty night’s sleep, between the lack of padding and Matt being jammed up right next to me. We might as well have been sharing a bed.

It was as I closed my eyes that I had a flash of genius. I sat up and grabbed our flashlight, turning it on and pointing it at Matt. “Hey.”

The beam of light hit him full in the face. “What the fuck?” Matt squawked as he scrambled to sit up, somehow managing to glare while still squinting from the brightness. I quickly lowered the flashlight.

“Sorry.” I tugged at the edge of his yoga mat. “I have an idea. What if we stack the mats and put both sleeping bags on top? We might actually get some sleep.”

Matt stared at me silently for a second and then gestured the length of my body. “There won’t be room for both of us.”

“Yes, there will. You’re skinny as fuck and we’ll lie on our sides. Can we at least try?” I put on my best public service announcement voice and intoned, “Driver fatigue is no joke,” but I was only half kidding.

Matt rolled his eyes and huffed out a sigh. “I mean, I guess. But if it sucks I want my own mat back.”

“Deal.”