Once Upon A Road Trip

by Angela N. Blount

  Today Scott and I got a later start leaving than I would have hoped, but we were on the road by 11 AM. We took turns driving lead. It was a long eleven hours, but it felt a little easier to be following someone while I drive.

  We made it into Indiana after dark and looked for a place to stay. I’d originally planned on sleeping in the car, but Scott wasn’t keen on the idea. So we found a Holiday Inn, only to be told that all of the hotels within a 100 mile radius of Indianapolis are booked due to the Brickyard 400 race. The man behind the counter felt sorry for us and offered to check with a local Bed and Breakfast. It’s been so ridiculously hot and humid today...I don’t think he wanted us sleeping in our cars either. While he was making calls, someone canceled a room. We reserved it right away, though it was pretty expensive. Scott told me he had permission to use his Dad’s credit card for this sort of thing. He said his dad is touring Italy and wouldn’t notice anyway.

  We went out to find something other than snack food, and Scott apologized for the big argument we had before we left. He told me he didn’t mean what he’d said...he was just trying to hurt me. (I already suspected that much.) But then he asked if I thought there might still be any chance for ‘us.’ I told him no, and he took that pretty hard. He broke down and cried, actually. I told him we should just get some sleep and he’d feel better in the morning. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about Vince.

  As for sleeping accommodations… they didn’t have any rollaways left, so we have to share a king-sized bed. Granted the thing dwells in two zip codes at once, but considering how awkward things have been, I wanted to have more assured separation. Scott agreed to sleep on top of the covers on his side and I’m sleeping under them on my side.

  Scott seems so dejected. I just hope he can start to see things differently, or I don’t know if we can save this friendship.

  Mileage Log: 6,175 mi

  ~Ang

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  This time, Angeli knew she was dreaming.

  The foreboding forest felt familiar, though a starless twilight made it difficult for her to make out anything aside from looming shapes. She waded through crackling layers of dead leaves, groping her way from tree to tree. A rustling sound launched her heart into a rapid tempo. She froze in place, fighting the instinct to flee.

  This isn’t real, she reminded herself, craning her head back to search through the murky shadows. Though she couldn’t make out anything threatening, her taut muscles refused to let down their guard. As she struggled to collect her wits and will herself into less eerie surroundings, the sound came again.

  “Vince?” Angie whispered, turning as she steadied herself against the nearest tree trunk. Under her hand the rough surface rippled and came alive. An unforgiving force encircled her wrist and jerked her off balance. She thrashed against it as she fell onto her back, yanking her arm free only to sense the other one had been seized.

  The shadows themselves were attacking her, flowing like ink and converging into an amorphous mass. She kicked and twisted, but her attempts to scramble backward were nullified by the pressing weight of the entity. Blackness enveloped her, blotting out her remaining vision. It clung to her limbs like tar and pressed her down with a suffocating heaviness.

  A perplexingly warm, almost pleasurable sensation began to fill her. I’m dying, she concluded somewhere in the back of her panic-stricken mind. She felt and heard something tear near her shoulder. For a split second, she thought her arm was being ripped from her body. And then her sense of reality came flooding back.

  Angie knew she was awake now, but her body told her she was still in danger. Sensing motion around her only compounded her confusion. She couldn’t move. The coarse, tearing noise came again and she realized at once it was the sound of her shirt, ripping. Her eyes snapped open. Scott was on top of her, panting, heated lips on her skin. A dizzying shock of understanding lanced through her brain. Suddenly, death didn’t seem so terrible.

  “Stop,” she rasped, straining to draw up her arms and push him away. They remained pinned at her sides. “Stop it—” she tried again, but her words were stifled by his mouth crushing against hers. Angie twisted against his weight. He was strong, and she had no leverage. Despair began to mingle with her overwhelmed senses, and she heard herself whimper. Something in her mind suggested she give up and lay still.

  The thought settled for a moment, and then ignited her anger.

  NO! She channeled her focus into her arms, wrenching them with all of her remaining strength. Her right arm found freedom and she made the most of it, whipping her face to one side while she lashed out with a clenched fist, catching her assailant in the throat.

  “GET OFF!”

  Scott grunted, clutching at his neck as he was hurled onto the floor. He rolled onto his back, coughing hoarsely.

  Angie sat up and snatched the blankets around. She turned on the lamp beside the bed, clutching at its base as the closest thing she had to a weapon. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded, in a shrill voice she didn’t recognize. Her muscles ached from resistance, and her soul ached from betrayal.

  Scott held up a hand and squinted against the light, continuing to cough and sputter. He rolled further away until he’d braced himself against the wall. When he looked up at her from behind his tangle of long, wild hair, she saw a flash of something carnal. Fear cooled her outrage. For an instant, she fought the impulse to hurl the lamp at him and bolt for the door. He looked down and then back up, and the feral look was gone.

  “I’m…sorry.” He groaned, stretching out his neck as he continued to hold his throat. “What happened?”

  “What happened?!” Angie repeated, incredulous. She glanced down at her torn shirt, grateful she had slept in her street clothes. It was then she realized that her hands were shaking. “You—” she clenched her teeth. “You…hurt me. You tried to—”

  “I didn’t mean to.” Scott gave her a bewildered look.

  “How could you not mean to?” she shot back.

  “I dunno.” Scott groomed his dark bangs back from his face with one hand, shifting until he’d reclined himself into the corner of the room. “I musta done it in my sleep. I’m really sorry, okay?”

  “No. NOT okay.” Angie pulled the top blanket with her as she stood. It dawned on her then that he was wearing only boxers and a sleeveless undershirt, and she struggled to recall his state of dress when they’d turned in for the night. Hadn’t they both been fully clothed? Her memory refused to cooperate.

  Darting around the foot of the bed, she retrieved her overnight bag from the low dresser. The clock told her it was 4 AM. She was exhausted, but she knew she wouldn’t be getting any more sleep.

  “Oh, come on, don’t leave!” Scott pleaded.

  Angie fished a fresh T-shirt out of her bag. Her thoughts were in such disarray, she wasn’t aware of how badly she wanted to flee the room until he asked her not to. But where could she go? The idea of staying in her car until dawn unnerved her, but so did the thought of staying anywhere near Scott. Though her senses had been pushed to a heightened state of alertness, she knew she was too tired to continue the trip straight through — never mind the fact that the maps were in Scott’s car.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. The accusing mantra echoed through her mind.

  She turned to face him and snapped, “You don’t touch me. Never again.”

  “I won’t.” He raised his hands in surrender, face crumpling into a pained look of regret. “I don’t know what happened, Angie...I swear. I’m sorry.”

  She regarded Scott at a distance. Guilt began to worm its way into her cluttered mind. How much of this was her fault? She’d put herself in a compromising situation, after all. There were those that would say she was asking for something like this to happen. She tried to imagine explaining it to Vince, and jolt of dread shot through her. What would he think of her now?

  “We should get some more sleep, you know?” Scott said, rubbing his eyes with his palms as he sli
d down from the wall to lay flat. “I’ll just…stay on the floor. Okay?”

  Angie said nothing. Moving to the bathroom, she closed herself in and locked the door. She sank to the cold floor and dropped her head into her hands. Was it possible he’d attacked her in his sleep? It would be so much easier if she believed him. And somehow, less painful than the only alternative.

  She shuddered. All Angie could be sure of was that she’d never felt more trapped — or more in need of a shower.

  Chapter 32

  Angie accepted a plate of cookies from her elderly hostess before escaping to the living room of the archaic farmhouse. Agitated over how nonchalant Scott’s behavior had been since their arrival, she left him in the kitchen chatting with his grandmother. After the long day’s drive, involving incessant tension and repeatedly getting lost in rural Wisconsin, she was eager to wind down with her journal.

  Her thoughts were still a jumble. Travel had been a numbing and welcome distraction, but being in the same room with Scott again seemed to trigger a torrent of anxiety. With him so close by, Angie had cut short all of her check-in calls. That included her call to Vince.

  The sound of his voice had caused her a forceful upwelling of emotion, nearly bringing her to tears before she could regain control. Vince seemed to realize something was wrong. He’d learned to read her voice too well for her to hide it. She’d made reassuring excuses, promising to tell him everything the following night once she made it back to Minnesota. Before hanging up, he mentioned a present would be waiting for her at home. “Nothing extravagant—just something to remind you where my heart is,” he’d said.

  Now, settling down onto the far side of a plastic-covered chartreuse sofa, she let herself wonder about Vince’s gift. It brought her some measure of comfort to think about him. But at the same time, a sense of trepidation had taken hold. As they’d said goodnight, Vince had again said ‘I love you,’ just as he had the last several nights — persevering despite her continued lack of reciprocation. She couldn’t imagine how much her omitted words must be hurting him.

  But once she told him what had happened, would he regret having been so vulnerable with her? Would he still even want her?

  Angie opened her journal, hoping to sort her thoughts onto paper. She wrote two sentences about the day’s travel and then stopped, rereading them over and over. Knowing it wasn’t what she’d set out to write about, she erased everything.

  How do I even start?

  She held the mechanical pencil hovering over the first line, dimly aware that her hand was trembling. Whatever had happened the night before...was it even something she wanted a written record of? Every time she tried to review it, her mind bounced to something else. Anything else. To her, it seemed every bit as reflexive as it would be to jerk her hand away from a hot surface.

  Angie had no idea how long she’d been staring at the same blank page before Scott’s grandmother came hobbling in to collect her plate. She looked up and forced a smile of appreciation for the sturdy old woman. “Thank you.”

  Scott crossed the room and slumped into a chair in the corner, cracking open his own journal without sparing Angie a glance.

  “Well, it’s past my bedtime.” Scott’s grandmother announced. “I’ll be up with the sun. You two sleep in as long as you like.” Her leathery face crinkled with warmth.

  Angie forced herself to hold a smile as she nodded and thanked the woman again. She felt herself abruptly consumed with the awareness that she would be left alone with Scott. Anxiety knotted in her stomach, but she convinced the rest of her to remain still.

  Though he told his grandmother goodnight, Scott seemed to be ignoring Angie with the same determination she’d been using to avoid him. She forced herself to stare into her open journal for several more minutes, sketching a picture in one corner after she’d resigned herself to the fact that she wouldn’t be accomplishing much else. Just as she considered retreating to the guest room, Scott spoke up in a low voice.

  “I don’t know what to do, sis.” He spoke in a defeated tone without looking up, apparently reciting from something in his journal. “Me and Angie had a fight last night. A big one.”

  She looked up and stared across the room at him, dumbfounded.

  A fight? Is that what he’s calling it?

  “There’s no chance for us now. I know that,” he read on in lament. “If you ask me, romance is a pretty sucky thing to happen to a friendship. But I dunno—maybe friendships need to go through hard stuff like this to prove what they’re really made of.”

  Angie couldn’t decide if she was more angered or baffled by his words. He was only partially making sense. Was Scott intentionally editing his own version of events, or was his memory that distorted? Some small piece of her mind wavered then, suggesting that her own recollection could be faulty. Even now, her impressions from the previous night lingered more like an obscure nightmare than lucid reality.

  But surely he was trying to manipulate her by reading this out loud.

  “She never talks anymore. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.” Scott paused, but he wasn’t finished. “So what are we now? Maybe we’re still friends. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to call her my ex, or what.”

  Angie stood up, fury trumping confusion in an instant. “To be your ex, I would have had to agree to the whole girlfriend thing in the first place,” she said in a steady, definite voice. “Which I didn’t.”

  Scott looked up at last, mouth twisting at the corners. His hazel eyes narrowed into a tempestuous glare. “So what, making out doesn’t count for anything? Cuz I’m pretty sure you liked that as much as I did.”

  Taken aback by his accusatory tone, Angie’s spine went rigid. Humiliation burned like bile at the back of her throat.

  He thinks I deserved it.

  Rather than speak another word, she fled — through the kitchen and down the hall to the tiny spare bedroom that was hers for the night.

  She locked the door behind her and pressed her back against it, slowing the rapid breathing that accompanied her sudden upheaval of emotion. So stupid, her mind condemned her. She decided then that she would depart right away in the morning, only saying goodbye to Scott’s grandmother if possible. If he caught her leaving and tried to guilt her into a parting hug, he would just have to be disappointed. The mere thought of him touching her again made her stomach churn.

  Lightheaded, Angie turned out the light and eased forward to the foot of the bed. She bent and crawled to the middle, laying herself flat over the patchwork quilt.

  After all this, I’m still just a gullible little girl.

  If she’d been so wrong about trusting Scott, what else was she wrong about? Steeped in a fog of despair, Angie found herself second-guessing the road trip, Vince, and even the conviction of her life holding any purpose. In that moment, she’d never been as disappointed in anything as she was in herself.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  If Angie dreamt at all that night, the memory of it eluded her. It seemed as though she’d been adrift only a few moments before being startled awake to a fear so raw, she had to clamp a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

  She sat up, heart pounding. The guest room was dark, but she knew where she was. A shadow broke the shaft of light that spilled in from narrow gap between the door and the floor. Keenly aware of the sound that had shocked her into consciousness, she tuned in to the faint scrape and click of the locked doorknob being tested. The shadow shifted away and she heard the door to the nearby bathroom open and close.

  Aware she’d been holding her breath, Angie leaned forward over her lap and sucked in a gasping gulp of air. She lifted her hands and held her head between them, rocking forward and back. You’re overreacting, she told herself. No one was trying to get into her room. For all she knew, it was only Scott’s grandmother wandering the halls. The logic should have reassured her, but she couldn’t shake the sensation of an invisible clamp squeezing at her ribcage.

  Desperate to
find a position to ease her strain, she managed to stretch herself out onto her hands and knees. No longer surreal, images from the night before came tearing through her brain. She felt her skin chill as sweat broke out along her brow and down her spine.

  A dull pain clawed at her chest. “Oh…God,” she choked, a whispered plea for help.

  Coherent thought scattered in all directions. Was this what a heart attack felt like? No, that didn’t make sense. She grasped at mental fragments until she’d pieced together a more plausible explanation — she was losing her mind. The idea sat better with her than an untimely death, but just barely.

  Before she’d had time to mourn her sanity, the intensity of her distress began to recede. Like an ebbing tide, tension pulled back from her in steady waves. Her lungs relished their restored freedom. Limbs heavy and quivering, Angie sat on the edge of the bed for a long moment as she regained her bearings.

  Normalcy seemed far more hesitant to return than it had been to flee. There was no clock to tell her how much real time the episode had consumed, but she knew by the sounds coming from the bathroom that it hadn’t lasted long. It was as though she’d spent a minute in Hell, and it had felt like an eternity.

  A prickling urgency lingered. She stood up as soon as she felt able and went to the door, reassuring herself that it was still locked. Pawing along the wall, she located a wooden desk chair near the corner of the room. She moved it over, setting the slatted back against the door. However paranoid she thought it was, she needed the additional line of defense — her peace of mind demanded it.

  As she made her way back to the bed and crawled under the quilt, Angie heard the rattle of the bathroom door. She froze. A lesser form of the same mindless, instinctive fear gripped her once again. Her elbows locked under her, sending a trembling tension through her arms and shoulders.