On The Road

Harper pokes my arm a couple of times, like a child.

“What?” I ask in my most mother-ish tone, the one I knew she hated.

“Are we almost there yet?” She is so infantile sometimes.

I grit my teeth. She is going to cause me to have TMJ someday, for sure. “No. We are not. Now I would really appreciate it if you would STOP ASKING me that.”

She huffs. “Oh, come on. I don’t ask that often.”

“Um, how about every fifteen minutes or so, for the past, oh, two and a half hours?”

“Whatever.” She glances out the window at the vast expanse of nothingness, and then forward at the narrowing road that seemed to stretch into infinity. “Question.”

“No. As I have made abundantly clear, we are not almost there yet. We are not even close to almost there yet.”

“Actually, I was going to ask if we are lost. Methinks we are.”

“No, we are not lost. I never get lost. Just check the map. I need to know the name of the road we are on.”

Harper un-wads the huge atlas she had stuffed beneath her seat, and says, “Well, according to this map, this road doesn’t actually exist.”

“Great. Okay. Okay. I’ll do it without the map then.”

“Annnnnd we’re lost.”

I whip my head to the side and say sharply, “One more time, Harper. You say that one more time and I swear, I will turn this beast around and we will go home.

She rolls her eyes and says, “Oh, okay then,” because she knows I won’t do it.

I turn on the radio; Hank Green sings out noisily from the 8-track tape we made. Admittedly, the method we had used to transfer one of Hank’s CDs to tape format was less than ethical, but it isn’t our fault that the only one of our vehicles that got decent gas mileage doesn’t have a CD player. Desperate times call for desperate measures. (And, honestly, who is going to care that we made a CASSETTE TAPE? The police have more important things to worry about than petty… piracy. But it is for a good cause.)

Harper leans back against the seat with a dramatic sigh, and begins to hum along to the music, a little off key.

Five songs, and at least that many “Are We Almost There Yet-s” later, I turn to Harper and say, “So. I might have made some… slight miscalculations regarding our position.”

She dons a mimicking falsetto. “’Oh, I nevah get lost. Nevah.’ Pfft. Yeah.”

I breathe deeply and mutter, “Whatever.”

“Oh, don’t be bitter,” She sings. “You know what? You should let me drive.”

“No way. I’ve been in the car with you driving. I prefer to not get whiplash. While driving down a straight road.”

“I’m not that bad,” she scoffs.

“You drive like a drunk person.”

“So? I can get us un-lost.”

“How’s that? You can barely read a map, for crying out loud,” I say.

“Maybe not, but I have something called bohm bohm bohm… intuition.”

“Lovely. Intuition. But no sense of direction.”

“I do so!” She insists. “I was a Girl Scout, thank you very much.”

“Going to one troop meeting does not make you a Girl Scout. Plus, you were only in it for the cookies.”

“Mm. Thin Mints are the bomb diggety. And how was I supposed to know Girl Scouts don’t get the cookies for free? Misrepresentation, if you ask me.”

I shake my head; she is a real mess sometimes.

“Anyways,” She adds, “Just give me twenty minutes. If we aren’t un-lost by then, I’ll let you drive again. Pinky promise.”

I can tell there is no use arguing. I pull over, unbuckle my seatbelt, and say as firmly as I can, “Twenty minutes. Max.”

She nods and hops out of the car. Then, gripping the wheel tightly, she winks conspicuously, and says, “Fasten your seatbelt ma’am. Keep all hands, feet, and other body parts inside the vehicle at all time. You’re in for a while ride.”

Reviews

[Lavorther]

It is very entertaining to read about the girls bickering, its so natural. The story is very funny too, like the part about the Girl Scouts.

I spotted a typo in the last sentence:
"You’re in for a while ride."
I think that should be "wild" instead of "while".

Also, the last few sentences are in a different font.

[Kayle Ann]

Ah, thank you! And yeah, I know. It's weird. I did that part later on at night, and I just copy and pasted it from a Word document I had it on. No idea why it did that. I'll fix it!