“You can Google me,” she says. “You’ll find my work easier that way. Speaking of which, I have to go. I have a gig.”
“Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night,” I say.
“I’m not free tomorrow night,” she replies.
“What about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday? The only day I’m not free is on Wednesdays.” I’m sounding desperate, but it’s okay. It’ll make it easier for her to bite the bait.
“Crap. You know what? This sucks, but I’m actually only available on Wednesdays.”
“I meant Thursdays,” I say.
“Right, yeah, or Thursdays … same here.”
I inhale sharply and purse my lips together, coming up with my next line, but I’m fresh out of ideas. “Fine, forget it. I’ll leave you alone, Journey Milan-formerly known-as-Journey-Quinn; girl-with-a story-who-doesn’t-want-to-share-y-but-wants-to-kiss-an-old-fling-in-an-elementary-school-parking-lot.”
“Brody, you don’t know a thing about me. The girl you last saw fifteen years ago is long gone. We’re strangers. That’s all. It was just a kiss, so don’t make more out of it than it was.”
“Hey look, I was just hoping to catch up and see who Journey Quinn became over the last fifteen years. No biggy.”
Journey chuckles through a sinister sound deep in her throat. “I’m someone no one wants to know. I became an asshole, so don’t waste your time, okay?”
Damn. She’s either going through some serious shit or I’m missing an enormous piece of whatever the hell happened to her. She was never full of rainbows and cupcakes, but she was funny and snarky in a cute manner. “Okay, sure,” I say.
“That’s it, you cannot keep calling to persuade me to play twenty questions?”
“I won’t,” I say.
“Thank God.”
“I will not be talking to you later, so have a wonderful life.”
“Yup, you have a good life too,” she says with the most subtle smirk that makes me think this isn’t the end. I swear, I see something in her expression that contradicts her words.
“Well, thank you. Goodbye, Journey.”
She ends the call. That’s it. No remorse at all for her rudeness, at least not that she is showing. She’s being obnoxious, but something’s going on. Who acts like that? Have a good life, my ass. Yeah, okay, well, it’s time for Plan B—as soon as I figure out what that is.
3
I betJourney does not remember what she once told me. I’m not sure why this one thing stuck in my head all these years, but it has. She had no clue what she was giving me advice about, but I was in a mood during one of our parents’ parties. We were young, probably sixteen, right around the time of … it …
I define it as the pivotal time in my life. There was a brick wall in the middle of my path, and I had no choice but to take a left or a right. I’m not sure if I went the right way, but I figured one of the two directions had to be correct.
I’ve had my license all of three weeks now and I think I may develop carpal tunnel from my death grip around the steering wheel. I’m not scared or nervous, but I feel like I have too much responsibility with my hands on the wheel. Mom and Dad told me I could go to and from school with the spare car, but if there was any other place I needed to go, I would have to ask first. Neither of them is home, but Pete paged me with: 9-1-1 and to us, 9-1-1 means come to my house, but don’t call first.
Something must be wrong at Pete’s and if I told Mom and Dad Pete is in trouble, they’d tell me to take the car and go check on him.
When I pull up, he’s sitting outside of his aged colonial house. The blue paint has been chipping off the wooden shingles for as long as I’ve known Pete, about ten years. His parents inherited the house from his grandfather when he passed away, but from what Pete says, they can hardly afford to pay the electric bill most months. I pull onto the bumpy driveway, composed of broken pieces of pavement. I feel like I’m offloading as I come to a stop. Not that I’m aware of what offloading feels like, but I imagine it’s something like this angle I’m parked at.
Pete stands from the front steps beneath the awning of his front door and shuffles toward the car. I crank open the window as he walks closer. “Everything okay?”
Though he was just calmly sitting on the step, he sounds winded through his response. “Yeah, yeah, I just need to get out of here for a few. Do you have time?”
When I’m in between football and lacrosse seasons, I don’t have a lot going on except for schoolwork and I like to get that done as soon as I get home so I can have the night free. “Yeah, I’ve got time. Where do you want to go?”
“The usual,” Pete says as he opens the passenger side door. “This downtime between ball games is killing me. I just need to get the hell out of here for a bit.”
Pete and I have been playing sports together since elementary school. We’ve practiced together, trained together, and went to junior championships, both landing a spot on the varsity teams for football and lacrosse during our sophomore year. We were two of the three sophomores chosen to move up last year. “You got it. I’ve never driven there before. Finally, we don’t have to depend on anyone to go anywhere,” I say.
