Chapter Twenty-Nine

      “So, where did you say we were going again?” I questioned, staring out at the dark, desolate image that met irises. Though it was only about eleven at night, the road was about as busy as a minor league baseball game; there were close to no cars out.

      “I didn’t,” Dylan said, his eyes not moving from their glued spot on the road.

      “Would you like to enlighten me?” I suggested, the mysterious aspect of things not quite one I liked at the moment. Maybe if I had downed a bottle of whiskey the trip would’ve been more tolerable, but no, I was completely sober— too sober.

      “Not especially,” he turned down my rather enticing offer.

      “You shouldn’t even be driving,” I grumbled, “you had at least a red Solo cup full of alcohol. I believe that’s illegal.”

      “And I believe that I happen to be the one driving the car, so, unless you’d like me to kick you out of the car on the side of the road, please stop talking,” he threatened, making a sharp U-turn, the inertia of which caused me to slam my side into the door of the car.

      Inertia always confused me. As concepts in physics went, it was by far the most perplexing to grasp for me. Speed, I understood. Acceleration, easy enough. Even velocity was able to make sense in my mind. There was something about inertia that never stuck. Pretty much, it was the resistance of an object to change when moving or resting. There was something about that definition that troubled me. Overall, I liked science and physics, but inertia was one of those things that just confused me; kind of like love, or relationships.

      “Just like the U.S. government, I have a no negotiating policy; I don’t respond to threats,” I stated, defying his words by opening my mouth and talking as I pleased.

      “You’re something else, you know that, Lizzie?” he let out a concise laugh.

      “Actually, I’m not ‘something’, I’m a person,” I shook my head, as I regained my composure in the aged seat of Dylan’s truck. “Hey, Dylan,” I said, thinking back to a humorous encounter I had had during my short stay at the party, “what’s your truck’s name?”

      “Excuse me?” he said, abruptly pressing on the brakes of the vehicle so I flew forward marginally.

      “What’s your truck’s name?” I repeated, a small grin playing at my lips as I remembered Lauren’s most recent association with an inanimate object. Urnie, the urn— well, ice bucket. I really hoped that that wasn’t how I acted when “under the influence”…

      “That’s what I thought you said,” his foot pressed against the accelerator once again.

      “So, what is it?” I inquired, having a recollection that some boys named their cars or motorcycles from some, unexplainable reason. It probably came from the same inspiration that caused Lauren name her new favorite container of ice.

      “I’m not five, Lizzie, I don’t name every fucking thing,” he scoffed.

      “So, it doesn’t have a name yet?” I concluded.

      “It’s a car, not a fucking human,” he said as if I wasn’t aware.

      “Can I name it?”

      “Knock yourself out,” he granted me the oh-so important permission to coin a name for the automobile in which we were currently riding.

      “Okay, so I was thinking something having to do with the color,” I mused, the invisible cogs in my mind commencing to turn about. “What about Cherry?”

      “It’s too girly,” he replied.

      I resisted the urge to say something or punch him in regards the adjective he had used, though it was harder than making a blindfolded layup. Girly. I hated that word. It was so sexist. The word itself allowed people to compare one item to the stereotype of a girl. It wasn’t explicit in the sense that it specified what type of girl, but rather the broader gender. Girly. It made me think of pink flowers and dresses. Though it was merely a word, the association I had with it and the implication of weakness, delicacy, and the color pink sickened me. To me, the five-letter word was about as sexist and demeaning to the female gender as they came.

      “How about ‘Rex’?” I proposed, after counting to five like the psychologist my mom forced me to see when I was ten had taught me. Basically, Monica Turner didn’t like that I had a short fuse, so figured that sending me to a therapist was the logical solution to deal with my anger “issues”. Sufficed to say it didn’t exactly work out too well.

      “How’d you come up with that one?” he scoffed.

      “I exchanged the last letter in the word ‘red’ with an ‘x’,” I stated rather analytically, if I did say so myself.

      “It sounds like a dinosaur.” I nodded, not finding anything about his deduction to argue about. He was right.

      “Fine, if you don’t like the ones I’ve been coming up with, then you come up with one,” I said, beginning to wonder if we were still in the United States, let alone New York, by the amount of time we had been driving thus far.

      “Fuck,” he said in a steady voice instead of as an interjection.

      “What?”

      “Fuck,” he reiterated evenly, “I want to name my truck Fuck.”

      I let out a laugh, unsure of how one was supposed to respond to something like that. “You are such a teenage boy,” I muttered, considering the thought process behind the, uh, unique name.

      “I’m going to take that as a compliment, even though I’m not fully sure it was meant as one,” he declared.

      “Fuck, the truck,” I pondered aloud. “Well, it certainly rhymes.”

      “That it does.”

      “So, how much longer?” I asked hesitantly, barley able to make out the silhouettes of trees that were the only physical thing to see, besides the road.

      “Count to twenty-nine, and we should be there.”

      “One,” I began, “two—”

      “In your head,” he said slowly, “can you handle that?”

      “No, no, I can’t,” I rolled my eyes, “three, four, five, si—”

      “And would you look at that!” he stopped the car. “I believe that we’re now here!”

      “Firstly, where exactly would ‘here’ be? And, secondly, you lied,” I said, pressing on the handle of my door so it would open.

      “What did I lie about?” he sighed, doing the same.

      “You said it was going to be twenty-nine seconds; it was only five and a half,” I informed him, dismounting from machine constructed of two pairs of axles and wheels, in addition to a number of other modern mechanisms.

      “Okay, Lizzie,” he disregarded my comment. “So, do you want to get where we’re going, or what?”

      Before allowing my lips to move, I took in the scene around me. There were trees. A lot of trees. Like, an insane amount of trees. There were enough trees that it could’ve been a freaking forest. In fact, forgetting my mini-blonde moment for a second, it most likely was a fucking forest. Dylan Collins had taken me to a forest full of fucking trees. Yeah, so, maybe I was beginning to regret leaving civilization and the booze.

      “Collins,” I said, cautiously approaching him, “did you take me out here to murder me?”

      “Afraid not, Lizzie,” he laughed. “I’m saving that task for another time.”

      “So, if you don’t plan on murdering me, then why else are we here? Oh no! You’re not going to rape me, are you?” I speculated.

      “No, I really didn’t plan on it,” he sighed, starting to get aggravated with me; who could blame him? Though, he did have alcohol working on his side, something I was lacking, so my irritableness had an excuse.

      “Then why are we here?” I demanded, my eyes not having fully adjusted to the onslaught of darkness being thrown at them.

      “You talk too much, Lizzie,” Dylan proclaimed, grabbing my hand in his own. Though the simile was cheesy and clichéd, our fingers fit together like neighboring puzzle pieces. He began to walk, dragging me closely behind.

      I wasn’t sure where we were going, hell, I didn’t even know if we were still in New England, but something told me that, despite the lack of any light source, Dylan knew. After all, he was the one who drove here. Unless he was playing a really convincing game of “Christopher Columbus” (…because Columbus didn’t know where the fuck he was going, as well), I was fairly faithful that he would land us in the desired destination.

      “Why are we here?” another question stumbled out from my previously parted lips. Dylan neglected to answer, leading me to the bright conclusion that talking probably wasn’t the most intelligent action currently.

      Dylan guided me into the mass of vegetation, seeming to know exactly where we were headed. To me, everything looked exactly the same. It was pitched black outside, surrounded by trees. How the hell was anyone supposed to be able to navigate under the circumstances?

      After slipping over a few branches, rocks, and roots of trees older than my grandparents, Dylan finally decided to unexpectedly stop, causing me to collide into his back.

      “Damn, Liz, you’re a lot clumsier than a sober person has the right to be,” he remarked.

      “Unless you have with you a gallon of beer that you forgot to mention, stop rubbing it in!” I whined, conscious that my attitude towards alcohol probably wasn’t the healthiest for a teenager.

      “Well, actually, I have a bottle of gin with me, but I wasn’t going to tell you until after we got back.”

      “Really?!” my eyes bulged out, as my mouth gaped in optimism.

      “No,” he crashed all my hopes and dreams with the ease of a two-letter word. Bastard.

      “That wasn’t funny,” I crossed my arms tightly across my chest, “kidding about the possession of alcohol is never funny.”

      “I’m so very sorry, Lizzie,” he apologized in a mocking manner. “Forgive me?”

      “No,” I denied, pissed that anyone would actually be heartless enough to do something like that.

      “Fine, don’t,” he shrugged indifferently. He then did something I deemed as relatively odd. He lay down, prone, placing his back on the ground beneath. His hands rested under his head, and his gaze was fixated to the sky above.

      “What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded, staring at him in confusion.

      “Please don’t randomly use the name of my truck in the middle of a sentence,” he requested. I shot him a pointed glare, though I was sure if he received its full effect in the dimness. After a few seconds of a stalemate, my silence was loud enough to trigger Dylan into speaking once again. “Lying on the ground.”

      “Really?” sarcasm saturated my tone.

      “Yes, you should join me,” he patted on his stomach as an invitation for where I should recline.

      “So, let me try to get this straight in my mind,” I said, looking down at him, “you brought me out here, away from the party, to the woods, so we could lay on the tick infested ground… sober?”

      Though I wasn’t really worried, adding the word “tick” to my sentence made it sound more legit. I didn’t really mind bugs; I wasn’t a fan, but I wasn’t the type of person to shriek every time a fly flew twelve feet away from me. To me, both insects and humans could coexist peacefully.

      “Lizzie, shut up and just lay down,” he commanded. I was tempted to object, but sought against, and simply gave in.

      I lowered myself to the plane of untrimmed grass, pebbles, and an assortment of autumn leaves, positioning my head on the middle of Dylan’s chest. There was practically no difference between the texture on the earth beneath me and his stomach.

      Though I was pretty adept in the region of sports and fitness, I never did acquire a six-pack. It was always one of those things I kind of wanted, but was too lazy to actually do all the crunches, sit-ups, and other backbreaking exercises in order to obtain the product. I was healthy enough. But, damn, Dylan had some pretty solid abs on him.

      “Look up,” he instructed. As he spoke, I was able to feel vibrations from his vocal chords.

      I did so voluntarily, wondering what exactly I was supposed to be looking for. “All I see is the sky,” I said, trying to understand what was so special about the atmosphere that hung overhead day in and day out.

      “What else do you see?” he torso rumbled again.

      My eyelids flickered, trying to comprehend the meaning behind his words. I saw navy blue painted across the sky, splattered with a collection of iridescent, exploding orbs of gas that were millions of miles away. When looking at stars, it always made me put my life in perspective— the fact that I was on the planet for not even a sliver of time in a star’s existence was mind-boggling. My time was limited, and, in reality, unless I did something meaningful with my life, I was irrelevant. You only lived once, so doing something extraordinary to make a difference was how to live it; that was the true meaning behind “YOLO”.

      “I see an infinite future,” I said, admiring the intricate simplicity that the universe truly was. “What do you see, Collins?”

      “Freedom,” he responded thoughtfully, “I see the world beyond high school and that there’s more to life than school and social hierarchies.”

      “Dylan,” I began.

      “What?” he grunted calmly.

      “Why did you take me here— wherever ‘here’ is?” I questioned.

      “Well, for starters, we’re actually at a campsite, which is why it’s so flat and empty,” he paused, slightly shifting his position, “and I took you here because I wanted to show you the sky.”

      “But I see the sky every single time I look up,” I pointed out.

      “Yeah, but what do you notice as you look at it now?” he prompted.

      “Well, aside from our voices and the wind, it’s completely silent—”

      “Exactly!” he clearly got the point he wanted across. “When are you ever in a situation when everything around you is soundless?” I opened my mouth, but he kept talking. And to think, he was telling me to shut up earlier.  “You’re not, Lizzie. We live in a society consumed in always thinking ahead, surrounded by noise. What’s wrong with living in the moment and enjoying the silence once in a while?”

      “Absolutely nothing,” I breathed, a comprehension of why we were “here” washing over me.

      “It’s the little things in life that matter most,” he proclaimed. “You should never take something like the stars or stillness for granted, because they’re so much more than that.”

      “Kind of like you,” I said quietly.

      “What do you mean?”

      I thought for a second about what I had actually said, wondering what I really meant by it. “Well, I guess, there’s more to you than people think.”

      “Maybe,” he shrugged, my head going up as he did so. “But, then again, the same could be said for you.”

      “That it could.”

      “You know what, I’m going to figure you out, Liz,” Dylan made one of the most horrifying yet intriguing assertions I had heard in a long time. “I don’t care if it takes a day or a year, I’m going to figure you out.”

      “Many have tried, all have failed,” my heart race picked up a bit, as I severely hoped he didn’t actually follow through his plan.

      “I like this,” he said, surprisingly dropping the subject.

      “What?”

      “The quiet, the night, you— everything, really,” he yawned. “Oh, and one more thing, Lizzie.”

      “Yeah?”

      “Shut up.” The sides of my mouth jerked up slightly as I obeyed his wish, to not spoil the moment. It was a serene scene to the average observer: two teens lying in an empty field talking about life and the stars. But, to me, it was so much more.