Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“No.”
The word peels back layers of sleep as effectively as if cold water was splashed onto my face.
“Oh, absolutely not. Tyler!” The voice climbs an octave mid-word, becoming almost supersonic. “You’re fucking kidding me. No! You said you fixed this!”
Whoever is talking—and I’m guessing it’s Ariana unless Scotty has more talents than he’s let on—is more upset than I’ve ever heard.
Not that I’ve known her for that long. The idea of being adopted by the first extrovert to latch onto me had seemed great a few months ago.
Now I just feel like I’m back in college, trying to be friends with the drinkers, the party-ers, and the guys who won’t make it through their sophomore year.
Given that I’ve been out of college for five years, it’s a sad-as-fuck realization, and one that just helps drive away that last bit of sleep like a spike to my eyeball.
Fuck.
It also finally occurs to me that we aren’t moving. The motion of the car, which always makes me both a little nauseous while lulling me to sleep—once I’ve taken the appropriate amount of Dramamine—is no longer happening. My eyes open, and I find the starlit sky above us, remarkably stationary.
Yeah, okay, so we definitely aren’t moving like we should be.
“Are we there?” I sigh, my voice a mumbled, groggy croak. “At the motel, or—”
“No,” Ariana scoffs, cutting me off and all-but spitting like a pissed-off cat. “No, we aren’t fucking anywhere, are we, Tyler?”
Without another word, she yanks her door open and plunges out into the Texas night faster than I could have expected was possible.
Scotty and I share a confused look in the rearview mirror, and in seconds I’m out as well, closing the door markedly softer than she did so I don’t cause the old, taped-up car any further damage.
Though judging by how hard Ariana’s motions were, she doesn’t share my consideration.
Sure enough, she’s right. We aren’t anywhere.
I shiver in the cool night air, belatedly wishing I had my hoodie to slip on over my tee. The temperatures here really do range pretty dramatically from when the sun is up to when it isn’t, and I wrap my arms around myself as I walk behind the car to join Ariana on the shoulder a few yards back.
“I fucking asked him to fix the goddamn battery,” she snaps, running a hand through her long, thick black hair.
She’s any guy’s dream, especially when she delivers her cheeky, mischievous smile that shows off both dimples.
But right now she looks more like she might be willing to kill a man.
Specifically, the man in the driver’s seat, if I’m lucky.
“Maybe it’s not the battery?” I ask, having no notion about anything car-related.
But the look she gives me has me lifting my hands in surrender, and I step back to avoid being hissed at or set on fire by her gaze.
“I was just being optimistic. Though I don’t know what it means if it is the battery. Is that, uh, a good thing? Or…?”
She shakes her head. “No. It’s a ‘we-need-a-mechanic’ thing. And I doubt there are any around here, in bum-fuck Texas, at—”she glances down at her phone—“nine thirty at night.”
“Well, how far’s the nearest town?” I ask, trying to remember what the last sign I saw was. After leaving their friend’s house late, Ariana had been in a bad enough mood that I figured we’d stop early. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, really.
And now it just means I have no idea where we are, made worse by the fact my phone is telling me I have no fucking service whatsoever.
Wonderful.
“Wolf Lake, I think,” Ariana answers absently with a dismissing wave. “Wherever that is.”
“Wolf Lake?” I repeat. My eyes narrow slightly as I think back. “That’s where we were this morning. You know, where Tyler embarrassed us with the sheriff?”
Ariana just looks at me, then shrugs. Judging by her slightly dazed look, I wonder if she went against her earlier statement that she wouldn’t be ‘sampling the goods’ before we got to Dallas.
I’m not judging.
Not when Tyler is a shit-show stoned, sober, or really in any capacity whatsoever. But it makes it a bit harder to have someone on my side, since I know Scotty is out of it and barely able to stand, if the movement from the corner of my eye is anything to go by.
“Yeah, uh, it wasn’t like a big town or anything,” I remind her, unable to not think about the sheriff’s face. His grin, his hair.
His warning.
But I push that away, telling myself it was his way of getting us to leave so Tyler wouldn’t get himself fucking arrested, leaving us stuck until he could bail himself out.
There’s no way it was a real, honest-to-god threat about being killed in some small town in Texas with an ancient gas station attendant and a surprising lack of tumbleweeds on the roads.
Though I doubt he’ll enjoy us needing to call him or some mechanic from his town for help.
“Do you have service?” Her question is hopeful, rather than mocking, but I still shake my head and hold up my phone to show her the picture of me smiling, dirty, and holding the neighbor’s Pomsky.
But no bars.
She grimaces and does the same, showing me her phone and the artfully edited selfie of her in her room, but the same no bars.
“Tyler! Scotty!” Scotty pokes his head out of the car, his eyes obviously wide and unfocused even from this far away.
Tyler leans around the now-open hood, a scowl on his handsome face. “Service?”
Tyler shakes his head, grumbling a few words that definitely aren’t so nice.
Scotty actually fumbles for his phone, drops it, then picks it up to stare at the screen for a solid ten seconds before he too shakes his head with the saddest look I’ve ever seen on anyone over something that isn’t a death in the family.
“No service,” he laments at last before looking up at all of us like a little kid who’s been told he can’t have more candy. “Can you fix it, Tyler?”
“Of course he can’t,” Ariana mutters from beside me, though she’s quiet enough he can’t hear her.
“He can’t fix a fucking thing. Christ.” She looks at me, a desperate hope in her eyes.
“I don’t suppose you’re hiding any ex-mechanic training under all that hair?
” she asks jokingly, gesturing to the mess of blonde hair that’s now half out of the braid I put it in hours ago.
I snort and give her a quick eye-roll. “No. I wasn’t the fixer in my friend group. That was…” But I trail off.
She doesn’t know them anyway.
And it doesn’t matter anymore. The old pain hits me harder than I expect it to, even after a year of having lost my friend group. It drives through me like a railroad spike, though with less dire consequences to my physical body.
Fuck, I think to myself as I trail after Ariana while she marches toward the front of the car to glare at Tyler.
This is such an awful time for longing and bad memories.
But still, that small voice in my head whispers.
The one I constantly have to duct tape and throw in a box.
Emma could’ve fixed this easily. She never would’ve let the car get this bad in the first place.
There would’ve been a plan. Directions. Carter would’ve made sure everyone stayed on track, like the Boy Scout leader he is.
But Emma isn’t here.
Carter isn’t here.
They’re never going to be here.
Lights behind me make me pause, and I turn to look over my shoulder, down the empty desert road that never changes for miles and miles.
Now, however, headlights are breaking through the blackness, and my heart cautiously unclenches as a large, loud truck slows to pull up beside us on the road, not bothering to pull over onto the shoulder.
It’s not like there’s enough traffic on this fucking road to merit it, anyway, I figure, and I walk again to catch up with Ariana and Tyler as they approach the stopped vehicle.
The back window of the four-door truck rolls down, and when pale eyes peer at us from inside, a cloud of smoke puffs outward as the man sucks on his vape. My steps slow, and I look right at him, only for him to just stare right back, unbothered.
He takes another inhale of the cartridge in his hand and blows it out the window before cracking an unfriendly grin at me. But a second later his face is out of view, and the window is rolled back up, obscuring any details of the passengers in the truck once more.
But it was enough. A shiver trails down my spine and my fingers clench around the phone I’m still holding. My toes curl in my sneakers until I shake it off, quite literally, and finish walking to Tyler and Ariana, where they’re standing at the passenger window.
“Battery, I think,” Ariana is explaining, much to Tyler’s clear disapproval of her being ‘the man’ of the group to strangers.
He makes a face, shifting his weight with one hand on his waist, and shakes his head like he wants to say something.
But a look from Ariana just makes his scowl harder. “And we don’t have service out here.”
“Bad place to break down,” agrees the passenger, leaning out with his arm resting on the window frame.
He eyes up Ariana, who doesn’t seem to notice, before looking at Tyler with a look that feels calculating rather than truly interested.
“Pretty big stretch out here where there’s no service.
No-man’s-land, and all.” Finally, he turns his eyes on me, though I can’t see much of his face as he is backlit by the truck’s interior lights.
I meet his gaze too, unlike Ariana or Tyler had, and give him my own surveying appraisal, with my hands on my hips and my brows raised.
I’ve had enough depression binges of low-budget horror movies to know we shouldn’t trust strangers on a Texas back road where there’s no service, no gas station, and no one to hear us scream.