Jax looks back at the road, and I swear pink dots appear on his cheeks.Oh, fuck-me-sideways, is he blushing?Is he fucking blushing? I want to give him so much shit!
He clears his throat. “Ah, we chatted about the agriculture industry at The Basement Lounge,” he says.
She stares at him for a second, then goes back to the bags. I watch all this happen, darting my gaze between these two idiots.
“I never actually said I was a vegetarian.” She pauses, until it breaks on a sigh. “Guys don’t usually listen to girls like me when we speak.”
I frown. “Girls like you?”
She snorts. “You know.”
“No we don’t,” Jax says.
She groans. “Well, I don’t look like Blesk.”
The fuck?
“No, you don’t,” Jax says. “You look like Elise, and that’s fucking perfect, and anyway, I got the usual must-haves, Starbursts, Skittles, Maltesers, but I couldn’t find any Pez, which is disappointing, but I found these weird Vege-Strip things that look kinda like jerky but aren’t.”
Nice nervous sentence, fucker.
Elise’s cheeks glow pinker.
Jax starts the car and tries not to look too proud of himself, but Ican see the smugness radiating from him. I want to taunt him mercilessly. I chuckle, shaking my head, causing him to jab me in the stomach, but I make a loud, exaggerated groan so Elise notices what he did.
“Fuck you, Slater.”
“Elise, he hit me.”
Jax ignores me, glimpsing at Elise again in the mirror. “But I did get us boys real jerky, pork crackle, and a cheese sausage each. I hope you don’t mind?”
“I’m eating my cheese sausage,” I say defensively. “It’s hangover food and it’s essential to my lifestyle.”
“Oh, of course,” Elise mutters, shoving candy into her mouth. “I don’t expect you guys to go without.”
Jax shoots me a grin as he slides The Best of the Beatles into the CD slot.Back in the U.S.S.R.comes on, and Elise sings immediately, and Jax joins in, and then I do, too, and for a minute it almost works—the music, the preservative-filled sausage, and the road—until I glance down and notice both iced coffees on my lap.
I stare at the coffees…
Australia goes by in the window. The iced drinks thaw on my thighs, from cold to lukewarm. As we travel north, the countryside changes. It’s like someone asked a child to draw a country without context, with zero references, no design brief, and unlimited colour pencils. Forest here. Mountain there. Tropical reef here. Red desert down there. No one edited it for consistency. God just said ‘yes’ to everything.
Somewhere around the third hour, a town appears on the horizon, and Elise looks up from her phone. “Okay, so apparently this town has the highest number of feral cats per square kilometre in the Southern Hemisphere.” She pauses, and we wait for another piece of insight. She has been reading up about every town we drive through. “That’s it. That’s all Google has on it.”
Not surprising.
My mind goes back to Blesk, and I wonder what she’s doing right now. Whether she’s on her phone, waiting for her brother to rescue her from whatever I did…Fuck.This feels so wrong. Something feels so wrong.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
erik
Nineteen-Years-Old
I sweep the curtain to the side, staring down from her bedroom window. She is walking down the path, a little skip in her step, her hair bouncing as it does when it’s in a high ponytail like that. I remember wrapping my fist around it once while we were watching the Brady Bunch. I remember how she kept her eyes on the TV.
I cut to the person beside her, some fucker holding two bags. I look at her—no bag. Glare at him—two bags.
I flatten my hand to the glass. She suddenly stops in the middle of the driveway, glancing over her shoulder, then forward, then her eyes lift to the window I am standing in.
