Chapter Eight - The First Road Trip

CHAPTER EIGHT

The First Road Trip

WE PACKED WAY too much.
Two people, three bags, a cooler full of Little Debbie snacks, and enough chargers to power a small country.

She brought five outfits “just in case,” and I brought one pair of socks because I forgot how time works.

That’s how it started.

Us, in a car that smelled like gas station coffee and cherry ChapStick, windows down, playlist on shuffle, laughing before we even hit the freeway.

The first hour was all vibes.

We argued about the best fast food fries.
(She said Wendy’s. I said curly fries from Arby’s. We both knew we were wrong.)
We sang every word to that one 2000s song like it was a religion.
And we made a sacred pact:
Whoever falls asleep first buys the snacks at the next stop.

She made it two hours before dozing off mid-sentence.
Mouth open. Head bobbing like a broken action figure.
I took a picture.
She woke up, caught me red-handed, and said:
“If that ends up on the internet, so do your baby photos.”

Fair.

We stopped at a weird roadside diner around sunset.
Neon sign half-lit. Menu older than both of us.
She ordered a grilled cheese and got a plate of toast and regret.

But it didn’t matter.
We couldn’t stop laughing.

She tried to convince me the waitress was flirting with me.
I told her the waitress definitely wanted to fight her.
It turned into a fake drama series we called “Diner Tensions: Season One.”

We made up the theme song in the parking lot and danced like idiots under the buzzing lights.

That night we checked into a motel that smelled like bleach and broken dreams.
There was a stain on the ceiling that looked like a horse doing taxes.
She named it Carl.

We lay in that stiff bed, watching a bad movie with great intentions, eating snacks from the cooler and pretending we weren’t already falling deeper.

At one point she turned to me with chips in hand and crumbs on her shirt and said, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had doing nothing.”

And I swear something shifted in me.

Because that’s how I knew:

This wasn’t just a trip.

It was a chapter.
A memory we’d quote forever.
One of those anchor points in the story you can always come back to.

We drove back with no music for a while.
Just silence.
The good kind.

She rested her hand on my knee like it had always belonged there.
And I drove slower than I needed to.
Because some part of me didn’t want to get home yet.

Not when this felt like home already.