18. Konnor
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
konnor
We hit the road.
According to Elise, Blesk appears to be on the opposite side of my hometown—The District. Not gonna lie, pretty freaked out about that. I know Erik is from The District, never really put together that she is, too.
Jax drives while Elise sits in the back seat, watching the world go by. According to Erik’s phone, he’s on the highway headed north.
I put my feet up on the dash and lean my seat back slightly.
Old jeans, hoodie pulled down over my stinging eyes.
I should be thinking about what I’m going to say when I see Blesk, but every time I try to land on something, it slips.
What am I even doing in this car? Erik is her brother.
She didn’t call me. Elise brought Blesk a change of fresh clothes, which is more than I’ve managed…
“I’ve never been on a road trip before,” Elise says, drawing me out of my self-deprecation.
“Really?” I pull back my hoodie and sit up, twisting in my seat to look at her. She has her legs scooped up to the side as she leans against the door and stares out the window.
“Never?” Jax glances at her in the rear-view mirror.
“Nope.” She drops the p hard.
“What about with your family? Vacations or something?” He keeps both hands on the wheel and a keen eye on the road, but glances at her every so often.
“No, my mums work non-stop. Trying to save the world from scum and pollution. I had a nanny for a while, but then I was just sort of on my own. I liked my nanny, though. She was good fun and would paint my nails and stuff. My mums hated that.” She chuckles under her breath.
“Mums?” Jax asks, bumping my arm.
“Mums?” I repeat with a grin.
She giggles. “Boys are pathetic.” She shakes her head at our eagerness. “Yes, mums. I have two mums.”
“What do your mums do?” Jax asks.
“They’re both lawyers. They saw a lot of messed-up stuff, a lot of messed-up people. Things they couldn’t fix, even when they wanted to. It was hard for me to have a life, because they saw the worst parts of it.”
“So no road trips with friends, no school-leaver weekend? No summer camps?” Jax asks. “No road trip songs or games? No road trip junk food?”
Where’s he going with this?
He sounds genuinely disgusted, and I can’t stop myself from laughing at his mock distress. As if never having been on a road trip is one of the worst things he’s ever heard. I wonder what he’d make of my life?
“Nope, none of the above. Although I don’t need road trips to have junk food,” she says adamantly.
“That sucks, Elise,” I add.
“Oh, man, no. This is no good,” Jax says in comical disapproval. “Junk food on the road is totally different from junk food at home.” He continues to shake his head and frown. “Nope, this will not do at all.”
I grin from ear to ear when he pulls into the strip lane and takes an exit off the highway. I look back at Elise, who is peering at me, confused.
“What’s he doing?” she asks.
“You’ll see.”
We pull into a petrol station, and Jax and I jump out of the car, leaving Elise blinking through the window at us. We shove each other a little as we strut into the servo. The sliding doors open, and I make my way straight for an iced coffee. I grab two, then put one back.
Then pick it up again.
I hover over the snack bar for too long.
Does she eat chocolate? Is she allergic to anything?
I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I want to know!
What do I know about Blesk Bellamy? Her brother is a dickhead.
She is terrible at puns, but that’s the best part.
I know the exact way her voice broke on the bridge of Hero Boy.
I know her giggle is something I’d do a lot of embarrassing things to hear over and over.
I put both iced coffees back and stand there like an idiot, staring at them as if they’ll tell me whether she wants them or not…What am I doing here?
Fuck.
Erik is her brother.
She didn’t call me.
She ran from me because…
The sentence won’t finish.
Fuck.
I grab both iced coffees again and head for the counter, shaking my head at myself.
Jax appears with his arms full, packages crunching in his grasp. He dumps them all down and pulls a couple of magazines from the rack, then grabs a CD: The Best of the Beatles.
We pay.
As we climb back into the car, Elise beams at us. Jax leans over the seat and hands her the bags. “Now, I know you don’t eat much meat, right?”
Elise’s head comes up from the bags. She blinks at Jax, then at me. I shrug. “How do you know that?”
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 I can 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.