Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7)

by Julia Kent

  Maggie looked down at her own belly in disbelief. “What? I don’t—” Her words cut off with a facial expression I knew all too well.

  She pressed down hard on the accelerator.

  How many miles before that next rest stop?

  I didn’t think that anything could make this drive worse. I should have known better. In my life, just when you think nothing more can happen—it can. And does.

  And it’s always worse than you’d imagined.

  We dispensed with decorum and both rolled our windows down all the way. The stench was—

  She farted.

  I started giggling. Haven’t giggled since I was eleven.

  Her face was as red as parts of her hair.

  “I—uh—”

  And then I farted, too.

  “Oh, God,” she muttered.

  You lose all pretense of social norms when you start farting uncontrollably in front of someone. It’s the kind of thing politeness can’t even cover up. It’s like my drunk Dad at a big family gathering. Everyone can ignore old Titus over there, but after a while you have to acknowledge that he pissed in your spider plant, stole your bottle of Percocets from the medicine chest in the back bathroom and left empty beer bottles in random bushes outside your house before passing out on your front lawn and waking up to the automatic sprinklers.

  Farts in a small car are just like that.

  “Sorry.”

  “Quit giggling.”

  “Can’t—” Gasp. Fart. “Help it.”

  “Are we sick? What happened?” She began white knuckling it as her belly made a series of sounds like coal cars creaking along on train tracks so rusted they needed to be sand blasted.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now we both have it.”

  “You sure you have it?” I asked, snickering.

  Her stomach answered for her, and then she broke out in a sweat.

  “Sweet mother of God, what is this?” She hit eighty-two miles per hour and moved into the fast lane.

  Pretty soon she was doing the meditative breathing, too.

  Ten minutes later she pulled over and we both sprinted for our respective bathrooms. My butt cheeks opened up and the gates of Mordor were unleashed. I felt like I was sending hundreds of dwarves and hobbits to their deaths. I had the uncomfortable feeling that my ass was the Eye of Sauron for a few moments there.

  The evil my body poured forth into that poor, innocent toilet was just cruel.

  Wave after wave, cramp after cramp, and as I sat there, a prisoner to my bowels, I realized that there wasn’t exactly a wall of self-consciousness between us anymore.

  We both wandered back to the car, shuffling like something out of a zombie movie. Maggie’s head was down, tapping away on her phone.

  “You calling Lena?” I asked.

  “Why would I call Lena?”

  “Maybe her cookies did this?”

  Maggie looked offended at the thought.

  “I’ve eaten Lena’s cookies loads of times and they were fine.”

  My stomach rawr-ed in answer, the sound like thunder fading off in the distance. I sprinted back to the bathroom and left her hanging.

  By the time I came back, she was leaning against the car, sucking on a bottle of water like a baby cow calf. She downed that bottle in seconds, then wiped her mouth, tossing the empty in a recycling bin.

  “Lena says she ate more cookies than the two of us put together and she’s fine.”

  “Huh.”

  She glared at me. “So what could it be?”

  “Can’t be the coffee. Or the cream. All I’ve eaten since then is cookies and those gummy bears.”

  She frowned. “I’ve had coffee, cookies, gummy bears, eggs, and—”

  “Let’s check out the gummy bears.”

  Her stomach yawped like Mrs. Wilmer’s Labradoodle.

  “Go,” I said with a wave, trying not to laugh.

  She took off for the bathroom and I grabbed the bag of gummy bears. Nothing weird. They were just a five pound bags of—

  Sugar free gummy bears.

  Huh.

  Maggie’s smartphone was in a drink holder. I grabbed it and did a quick search on Google. Came to a product page with—

  Hold on.

  One thousand, three hundred and ninety two reviews?

  I opened the page.

  By the time Maggie came back, I had solved the mystery of our rotgut.

  “I know why we’re shitting water,” I said.

  “So eloquent, Tyler. Really. You know how to sweet talk a girl.”

  “Facts are facts. Sorry to offend your sensitive sensibilities.”

  “I live in a dorm with hundreds of eighteen and nineteen year olds, Tyler. You can’t offend me.”

  “It’s the gummy bears.”

  “The what?”

  “The gummy bears. Evil little sweet gooey, sugar-free messengers of doom.”

  “How do you...?”

  I waved her smartphone. “Process of elimination.”

  “Very funny.”

  I frowned, caught off guard. What did she mean?

  Then I got my accidental pun and smiled at her.

  “Jesus,” I sighed.

  “Yeah, I prayed to him a few times, too, back on the toilet.”

  “This is a shitty situation.”

  “Caused by evil gummy bears. Tyler, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  I shoved her smartphone in her face. “Read.”

  Five minutes later she said, “I’m going to kill Darla.”

  “Darla?”

  “She’s the one who gave me the gummy bears. Gave me a bag, Charlotte a bag, Amy...oh, we have to call and warn them.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Why not?” Her voice went high, and yet there was a hitch in it.

  “You really want to tell them what’s happened? It’s kind of one of those ‘let’s never speak of it again’ things.” I sniffed, like a snobby British dame on a show.

  “I think I can—”

  Her phone buzzed in her back pocket just as Mordor’s fires flamed back up. I ran to the bathroom. This was turning into a game of shit tag.

  When I came back feeling as hollowed out as a soft-boiled egg, Maggie was smiling.

  Grinning from ear to ear. It was infectious, and I joined her.

  She held up her phone. “That was Darla, telling me not to eat the gummy bears.”

  I groaned. “Too little, too late.”

  “It seems her hometown was struck with some mystery illness. She said the CDC was practically pulling their version of a Stephen King novel by putting the entire region under a dome when they figured out Darla had given her mom the sugar free gummy bears to use as a wedding party favor. Half the town was at the wedding and ate those little colonoscopy prep kits masquerading as candy.”

  “Peters, Ohio?” I asked, remembering the news report.

  “How did you know?” She looked shocked. When she frowned, the scar on her cheek stood out, making her look fierce.

  “It was on the radio earlier, when you weren’t talking to me.”

  “I was talking to you!” Her face went tight with anger. “You were the one not talking to me!”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, Tyler, not ‘whatever’. Whatever means you don’t want to acknowledge I’m right.”

  “No, Maggie, ‘whatever’ means I don’t want to keep talking about this.”

  “You avoid talking about things when you get uncomfortable.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Some people process their discomfort. Sit with it. Learn to coexist with it.”

  “You’ve been to a lot of therapy.”

  She was breathing hard, her face gone slack with surprise. With great intent, she caught my eyes and said, “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Everyone has a choice.”

  “It was therapy or death.”

  “Plenty of people go through the kind of shit you’ve been
through and don’t get therapy.”

  “And plenty don’t, and wind up dead from drugs, cutting, whatever.”

  “Whatever. There’s that word again.”

  “Your word, not mine.”

  How did we go from joking to angry so fast?

  And then—the telltale shift. We sprinted back to our respective bathrooms again.

  It was time to relieve ourselves of all this toxic crap inside.

  Chapter Seven

  Maggie

  We were at an impasse. It seemed impossible to have an actual conversation with this man. Ever. Even in the midst of shitting our brains out because we ate sugar free gummy bears that included a sugar substitute developed by North Korea and used as a biological weapon against people addicted to online shopping.

  And sweepstakes.

  I finished in the bathroom and wondered how my body could hold so much, retrieved the half-eaten bag of gummy bears and tossed them in the trash, then returned to the car, pointedly walking to the passenger’s side. Tyler could take the next shift, and I would suffer in gut-cramp silence, waiting for this nightmare to end.

  He came back and, wordlessly, opened the driver’s side door, sat down, then came to a deeply-disturbing halt.

  “What?” I asked as he gaped at the gearshift.

  “This is a stick.”

  “Aren’t you Captain Obvious?” An alarm bell got louder in me. “Don’t tell me,” I groaned.

  He winced, his fingers wrapping around the steering wheel, shoulder and neck muscles rising like muffins in an oven.

  “I can’t drive stick.”

  “Fuck!” I shouted. “Seriously? You seriously can’t drive stick? You expect me to drive twenty-nine hours the entire way while you just ride along in luxury and call me Princess and make fun of me and—”

  “WOULD YOU JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR A MINUTE!” he roared, turning to me in a kind of rageful agony that was as masterful as it was horrifying. The veins in his neck bulged, his hand whacked the dashboard, his thighs rose up off the seat as he dug his heels into the car’s floor and he went apoplectic.

  A wall of pain came right at me, as if he’d unleashed a weapon made of nothing but pure emotion. The air crackled with electricity and made my skin flare, my hair stand on end, and my body became something otherworldly. Something detonated in my core and the nanoseconds of pause between his action and my reaction collapsed into nothing as I gave it all right back.

  You do not get to dump your rage on me.

  “DON’T YOU DARE SCREAM AT ME!” I roared back, the impulse to meet him toe-to-toe kicking in before my own innate filter could catch me and make me not do it. My limbs throbbed with the race of blood to the fight, my mind completely emptied of any thought.

  I was pure instinct.

  A second wave of inner direction hit me and I scrambled out of the car, my legs pumping and taking me past the dog walking section into a thicket of woods. I stayed along the edge, blind with confusion and anger, nothing more than cortisol and adrenaline and a giant burning ball of very, very pissed off Maggie.

  The feeling was so unfamiliar.

  It felt like being reborn.

  Tyler

  See what happens when I say words? My throat thrummed and my body turned inside out, like I was nothing but road rash.

  Maggie fled, her body rushing away from me like the wind pushed her. Like it was a mother protecting its child.

  Or like I was a danger, and Maggie was carrying a newborn baby away from me to safety.

  I stared dumbly at that fucking gear shift, wondering how I hadn’t noticed it before. Stupid manual transmission. Fucking stick shift. God damned world that made things I couldn’t do or couldn’t get and fuck the world for being this way.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  Salty spit formed where my throat pounded.

  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was tears.

  Except I didn’t cry.

  Here’s the thing: I was one hundred percent dependent on that woman who just shot off like a rainbow running a marathon into the woods, fleeing me.

  I had no control here. I had three hundred and fifty bucks and a borrowed acoustic guitar. A shirt. A pair of jeans. Two socks and two shoes. That is it. That’s all I was.

  That’s who I was.

  Tyler the Fuckup.

  And now I was sitting in a car I couldn’t drive wondering how to ask the impossible from a chick who I’d just opened up and lit into like I’d never done before.

  I hadn’t screamed at someone like that since the day I told my dad his friend did what he did to me and Dad said it was my fault.

  So why the fuck would I scream at Maggie? The spunky chick with Day-Glo blue eyes and a smile that made me feel like it was okay to be myself. Whatever that meant.

  Thank God she screamed back. She should have. The salty taste in my throat backed up and fuck—now it was in my eye. I got out of the car and took as many breaths as it took to calm down. To think. To stop this fucking assault of feelings.

  Twenty minutes later it didn’t go away. Someone put a metal band around my chest, around my head, and they were tightening the screws.

  She came around the corner, a flash of color, and disappeared into the bathroom. My chest tightened at the sight of her body, tall and curvy, tense and focused. I’d made her so angry she’d screamed back and now I wished I’d never appeared on her porch this morning. Never tried to make any of this work. Never gotten to the library and emailed Darla and pieced together this insane series of events that left me with a pain in my chest, a salty taste in my throat and a feeling like I’d just fucked up the one chance I had at having a friend. More than a friend.

  Someone real.

  I had nothing to offer. Not one damn thing. She had more money than me. The car. A family who supported her. There wasn’t a single thing I could give her. Why was she here? Why was she helping me? I was the jerk who turned her down the one time she did ask for something from me.

  The one time I had something to offer.

  I owed her everything. She was the only connection I had between total failure and a thin shot at making it. Everything I was—relied on her.

  I really hated her for that.

  And I really, really didn’t want to hate her.

  The whole shitting our brains out thing didn’t help, either.

  Maggie

  I stayed at the edge of the woods until the gummy bears made me go back. They excavated my upper intestines and gurgled so badly it was like a volcano was erupting inside me.

  A shit volcano.

  An apt metaphor for this road trip.

  As I scurried to the bathroom and took care of business, I realized that this was truly doomed. I needed, somehow, to get out of this mess. Could I drop Tyler off at a truck stop with a fist full of money and my cell phone? He might get to L.A. faster that way. As I thought more about it and tried to fight the growing sense of hysteria that bloomed in me like a Venus Flytrap plant, the idea both sickened me and made me feel better.

  It was, if nothing else, an alternative.

  Having an option meant that if I didn’t choose it, at least I’d made a choice. I had some control. I wasn’t unmoored and at the mercy of forces I couldn’t see, like a pawn in a giant game of magical chess between the gods.

  The illusion of control is better than the lack of an illusion. It’s something, and when you feel like everything’s a threat and you’re not safe, then pretending becomes your only anchor.

  Except.

  Except, right now, it wasn’t Tyler who was making me feel unsafe.

  It was me.

  I’ve stood up for myself before. Taken self-defense lessons and finished more workshops on how to be assertive than anyone can teach. I’d dog-eared Brene Brown’s books on overcoming shame and I’d worked my way through The Secret and every self-help book Oprah has ever recommended.

  That’s a lot.

  My body started to shake, and not from t
he fact that my colon was tapping out a funk beat that rivaled any Bruno Mars song.

  I was shaking because I had to face my own reality.

  Which meant I had to go out there and face Tyler.

  As I walked to the car, head held high, I saw him sitting on a park bench, hands splayed on his knees, staring toward the woods.

  I halted, uncertain what to do next.

  He looked up and immediately said, “I’m really sorry I screamed at you like that.”

  All the racing lectures, the angry retorts, the ways I was going to get him back died in my throat. I hadn’t been sure I was going to use any of them, but if I had—they were gone now.

  His eyes were so beseeching. Forgive me, they seemed to say. I’m sorry.

  But the words—oh, the words meant something, especially coming from him.

  “Thank you.” I stood, transfixed, just staring into his soulful eyes.

  He ran a hand through his short hair, mussing it in frustration. “I don’t yell at people like that. I think I’ve only ever done it to my little brother, Johnny, and once to my dad. I meant it, Maggie. I just...shit.” He frowned, clearly struggling to convey an idea to me.

  I sat next to him, on the other side of a bench that easily seated four adults. I turned and looked at him.

  “I get it. It doesn’t make it okay, but I get it.”

  “No. Not okay. I don’t make any excuses.” He looked down at his hands, his face a mask now.

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t have reasons.”

  His head popped up and he gave me a bemused look. “People who give you all their reasons for treating you like shit are just giving excuses. Same thing.”

  “It’s not the same thing, Tyler. Not if the apology is heartfelt.”

  He made a hmph sound. “The apology is real. Not sure I agree with you about excuses versus reasons.”

  “We don’t have to agree on everything.”

  “Like that would ever happen.”

  I laughed lightly and he gave me a loopy, tentative grin. When he smiled, he became a different person. I could see how some kind of burden etched itself in his body, his skin, in the lines of his face and the planes of muscle across his chest and shoulders. The smile took a burden off him for seconds and set him free.

  And then he went back to being Frown.

  “I just hate,” he said, taking in a shaky breath that made me lean closer, “being in this position.”