Page 14 of Road Trip

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 sogooood.”

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.”

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