Page 10 of Road Trip

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 syruppretendingto 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.”

We 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 thebestidea!”

“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.

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