“I’m never right,” I tell him. “It’s one of the perks of being me. I’m forever wrong.”
“I’m boring.”
“So what? The world needs boring people to balance out interesting people.” Lightning tries to strike me dead in that exact moment.
No, seriously.
It hits somewhere close enough to the car that we shake and rattle while the thunder booms simultaneously around us.
My heart is permanently residing in my throat while I squeeze the ever-loving hell out of the stuffed hermit crab, waiting for the thunder-induced earthquake in the car to pass.
“You’re not boring,” I gasp. “Okay?Okay, Mother Nature? He’s not boring!”
Oliver snorts.
And it’s not a derisive snort, or a mocking snort, or astop lyingsnort.
I swear on my stuffed lobster back home, it’s a completely amused snort.
The kind of snort that leads to rolling laughter.
Not necessarily funny laughter.
Possibly hyperventilating,everything’s wronglaughter, but one minute, I’m begging the universe to forgive me for being an asshole, and the next, Oliver’s laughing so hard the car’s shaking again, but this time fromhim.
I finally get up the guts to look at him, and find him hunched over the steering wheel, absolutely losing what might very well be the last of his sanity.
Lightning flashes and thunder cracks on top of us once again.
I squeeze the stuffed crab harder, watching while he laughs himself out, because I need to hold on to something so that I don’t reach over and touch him.
His smile.
The crinkles in his cheeks from the smile.
The lines in his forehead that are probably stress, likely from me.
Rain pelts the windows in a downfall so thick that I can’t identify individual drops of rain.
It’s a sheet of water accompanying nature’s temper tantrum.
I stare down at my lap so I stop looking at him, wincing at one more boom of blinding-white thunder.
We are in the absolute center of this storm, and there’s no separating the lightning and the thunder here. It’s all smushed together.
My Landslide has melted. It’s flavored water now.
I don’t want chips. I don’t want music. I don’t want to be in this Camry, and I don’t want to be out of it either.
I want the rain and the thunder and the lightning to stop and for Oliver to quit laughing like a madman.
In fact, I want him to be boring again.
Could use a little bit of predictability here.
Wind buffets the vehicle.
I squeeze the crab impossibly harder and bury my face in it.
