Page 18 of Road Trip

“I slept like shit last night,” I said, my voice rough. I cleared my throat. “Someone was all up in my”—don’t say ass, don’t say ass—“space.”

Jacob looked sheepish. “Sorry.”

We drove for a while more before we spotted a sign for Walmart. Jacob took the exit ramp and we found it easily enough. Since we’d done such a shit job of planning so far and had paid with a sleepless night, we took the time to make a list before we grabbed a cart and got what we needed. More yoga mats. Bug spray. Extra deodorant because that tent wassmall.An extra towel each. Wet wipes. Coke and Mountain Dew. A pair of aviators that I bought for no other reason than they were two dollars on clearance—that, and they made Jacob laugh and call me Maverick. We also got fruit and protein bars and jerky and other things that didn’t need to be kept cool and that we could eat for breakfast. I added graham crackers, chocolate, and marshmallows. I threw an extra box of graham crackers in the cart and when Jacob shot me a sideways look, I shrugged. “Extra for you to snack on.”Weirdo,I didn’t add, but the grin he gave me told me he heard it anyway.

Once we’d loaded our stuff in the RAV4, Jacob held up the keys. “Wanna drive for a while?”

My heart rabbitted in my chest, a combination of nerves and excitement. I hadn’t had my license for long and part of me wasconvinced that I’d either run us off the road or fuck up in other as yet unspecified ways, but I told that part of me to shut the fuck up. I nodded and grabbed the keys, grinning in spite of my nervousness. It wasn’t like I could get lost driving in a straight line on the highway.

I jumped in the driver’s door and took a minute to adjust the seat and the mirrors, conscious of Jacob watching me. “Shut up,” I said. “I’m getting comfortable.”

“I didn’t say anything.” And the thing was, he wouldn’t. If I needed to sit here for half an hour fiddling with the seat settings, Jacob would let me and he wouldn’t make it a big deal. He knew I got nervous over shit, but he always pretended he hadn’t noticed.

I gave the seat one last tweak, checked my mirrors, slipped on my two-dollar shades, and eased out of the parking lot and onto the road that led back to the highway. Traffic was light and I made it onto I-40 without any problems, and it was pretty much smooth sailing after that. Okay, fine, there were a couple of lane changes where I cut it close and I heard Jacob’s sharp intake of breath, but he never said anything, so neither did I. Near misses were still misses, right?

By the time we were an hour into the drive, I’d gotten the hang of driving on the highway, and when Jacob pointed to a sign advertising Memphis barbecue that said Wanna Stop? I was almost sad that we were pulling over.

I did, though, because comeon.This was barbecue. I took the off-ramp and followed the signs to BBQ Shack. The restaurant itself was small and well-weathered and there was a line that reached out the door, but I didn’t care because it smelled amazing. Jacob grinned at me and I grinned back as it struck me that we were really doing this, traveling across the country and stopping at roadside diners like we were Guy Fieri, if Guy Fieri was two kids from Virginia in a trench coat.

The line moved pretty quickly, and when we got to the front, we ordered two pulled pork sandwiches with fries and drinks. Then we took our tray outside and claimed a spot at one of thewooden picnic tables that were set up under the shade of an oak tree. My stomach growled as I unwrapped my sandwich and I took a bite, groaning at the combination of tender pork, rich barbecue sauce, and tangy coleslaw. Sauce dripped down my chin and I flicked my tongue out to catch it.

“This is fucking amazing,” I said around another mouthful of sandwich.

“Mmmm.” Jacob took a bite and moaned, and when I glanced over he had his head tipped back and his eyes closed like he was having some sort of religious experience—or possibly a sexual one. I grabbed my soda and sucked on the straw, my throat suddenly dry.

The last thing I needed right now was to imagine what Jacob looked like having sex. It would be all too easy for that to turn into imagining him having sex withme. Which was never happening, because Jacob was straight. It didn’t stop me wanting it, though. Wantinghim.And like, it wasn’t just because of how he looked and sounded when he was eating a pulled pork sandwich. It was because Ilovedhim. I’d loved him from the moment we first became friends, and nothing had ever changed that. Nothingcould. But it would never be the right sort of love because he was straight and I wasn’t a girl. That was just the way it was. Wishing my sad gay little heart out wouldn’t change a thing. Jacob would still be straight and the sky would still be blue.

“You okay?” he asked me, wiping sauce off his chin with his hand. “You’re being extra weird today.”

“No, I’m not,” I said, which was probably a defensive enough response that he could just add it to the list of weirdness charges he was building against me. I set my sandwich aside, wiped my hands on a napkin, and grabbed the BBQ Shack menu and a sharpie from my pocket. I started sketching a cartoon of a squirrel that was hanging around the tables, just so I wouldn’t have to look Jacob in the eye.

“You are.” He pointed a barbecue-sauce-covered finger at thesquirrel and then at me. “You’re more squirrelly than Sandy Cheeks.”

“A SpongeBob reference, really? We’re not ten. This is juvenile.”

“No, this is Patrick.” And then he howled with laughter.

Like, fuck him. Not only was I in love with my straight best friend, but I couldn’t even be pissed at him for it because the asshole was hilarious. I flicked a piece of pulled pork at him. It landed on the table between us and he ate it anyway, because he was gross.

“Seriously, though,” he said as we finished our sandwiches. “Are you okay? You’re not having second thoughts about this trip, are you?”

“What? No! Jesus, we just graduated, man. It’s our last summer, and we already wasted most of it doing what we do every summer. We’re supposed to do something amazing to celebrate finishing high school, and staying in Cape Charles sure as hell wasn’t it.”

“Eh, bumming around and going swimming every day is fun,” he said. “It’s not epic, but it’s nice. Oh! And we could have laughed at Charlie’s lame dating moves. I wonder if Tanner’s called him yet.”

“He seemed pretty excited to get his number.”

“You think Charlie’s messed it up yet? He’s shy as hell and he has zero game. He has even less game than you.”

“I have game,” I said. I didn’t, but I must have had something because that guy at the gas station back in Goose Run had given me a postcard with his number on it and said to call him if I was ever back in town. “I have?—”

And then I snapped my mouth shut because that wasn’t something I wanted to share with Jacob.

“You have what?” Jacob asked, showing me his familiar teasing smile. He teased and he trash-talked and easily gave as good as he got, but he was never mean about it. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

And all of a sudden, I wondered what was stopping me from telling him. I’d figured out I was gay when I was twelve, but it hadn’t been the right time then. I hadn’t been ready. And the older I got, the bigger the secret got in my mind, you know? But this was our last summer, and he was my best friend. Didn’t he deserve to know this thing about me before the rest of the world found out first? And, more importantly, didn’t I deserve to be who I was when I was around him?

I opened my mouth to tell him the most terrifying secret I’d ever had, and his phone blasted out “At The Risk of Feeling Dumb.”

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