Cross Country Hearts

by Suzanne August

  “Happily.”

  Jasper King shrugs like the AAA guy did and walks away. That’s probably good because nothing positive was going to come out of that conversation. He walks away with his hands fisted at his sides, and I’m sure I must look like I’m in pain while trying not to yell at him.

  The AAA guy must catch onto the fact that King and I are barely on speaking terms because he doesn’t try to make a lot of conversation with us while he drives off the highway and makes it to the closest mechanic’s garage. I thank him as soon as we’re there, and then Jasper and I have to sit in the waiting area while a mechanic looks at the car.

  Which takes almost two hours. For the first hour, I keep myself busy by scrolling through my phone, making myself a cup of coffee, and watching the random crime show on the waiting room’s television. Jasper says nothing. He sits in his chair—the one furthest away from mine—and scrolls through his phone. The silence between us is pleasant and welcomed. I’m delighted he’s not talking.

  For most of the next hour, I’m anxious. At this point, most of the afternoon is already over. If I’m lucky, we’ll get the car and be ready to go before dinner time.

  “We’ll have to get dinner on the go and keep driving,” I say to King.

  He doesn’t spare me a glance. “Fine.”

  “Whatever,” I mutter.

  I look at the time constantly. I’ve pulled on my hair so much that I’m sure I must look half-mad. I’m almost through another episode of the crime show when the mechanic finally graces us with his presence. And he tells me the car won’t be fixed until tomorrow morning.

  What?

  “Excuse me?” I say. I plant my hands on my hips and stare at the mechanic incredulously.

  The mechanic, whose name tag reads Dwight, tries to give me a sympathetic smile, but it does nothing for me. “It won’t be ready until tomorrow morning.”

  “Not now?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Miss.”

  “There’s nothing you can do?” I ask, and I hate how my voice comes out too high, pleading. My chest squeezes. What will my mother think if I tell her we won’t be in Florida by tomorrow night? “I was just driving it, and it was fine before the flat.”

  Dwight lifts his shoulders, spreading out his hands with his palms up. “I’m the only mechanic here, and I’m good at what I do. I’m sorry, but it’ll be tomorrow morning at the earliest before it’s fixed—”

  “I’ll pay more.”

  “—so come back around noon.”

  “Please, I’ll pay more,” I repeat. I try to sound calm and take deep breaths. I hope I don’t sound like I’m hyperventilating.

  “Look.” Dwight’s words lose some of its edge, and his eyes soften, but I hate how it looks like he’s pitying me. “Your car isn’t the only one I’m working on. Come back around noon tomorrow, and it’ll be as good as new—well, as good as it was this morning.”

  On my hips, my hands turn to fists. “But—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He doesn’t sound sorry─more like he pities me. Before I can say something more, King suddenly grasps my elbow and moves to position himself in front of me.

  I rub my elbow. Did he just touch me?

  King says, “Thank you. I appreciate your help. Do you by any chance know where the nearest hotel is?”

  “What?” I gape at him. There is no way we should be staying here tonight when we’ve barely crossed the border into Connecticut. “We can’t stay here. The car needs to get fixed as soon as possible.”

  King doesn’t look at me. He’s still looking at the mechanic. “Ignore her.”

  I’m too shocked—too angry—to form words. I sputter soundlessly.

  The mechanic looks at me warily but addresses Jasper. “There’s a good motel priced cheaply across the road. There’s a diner next to it.”

  “We’re not leaving here without the car,” I say. My fingers itch to tug on my hair.

  Neither Jasper King nor the mechanic acknowledges that I’ve spoken. King says, “Thank you for your help.”

  “King—”

  When he finally turns around to face me, I stop short. His expression is annoyed, his mouth twisted. He does not look happy. Then he adds, to the mechanic even though he’s looking at me, “I’m sorry. It’s been a long and exhausting day for the both of us.”

  The mechanic smiles again, though it’s smaller than the sympathetic one he tried to give me earlier. “No problem, kid. I understand.”

  Deep inside, I know it’s not the mechanic’s fault, but anxiety possesses me. The thought of having to spend not just one night but two nights on the road with Jasper King is too much, and I see it in Jasper’s eyes too. I burst. “This is ridiculous! It shouldn’t take that long to fix something so simple on a car!”

  But before I finish, Dwight is already through the door and back into the garage. I’m left with King, a receptionist who watched the entire exchange with open curiosity, and another woman who is pointedly reading a magazine and not looking at us, though she does eye us with a frown as King pulls me out of the shop.

  “What the hell?” I jerk my arm from King’s grasp and take a step away from him, seething. “What was that, King?”

  “He’s the mechanic. He knows what he’s talking about, June,” he says, his voice almost as cold as his stony, unamused eyes.

  He turns around before I respond, walking in the direction of the road, where on the other side sits—you guessed it—a small motel and an even tinier diner.

  “I’m not staying in a motel here!” I yell at his back. I raise my hands to my head and try not to hyperventilate. “Not in Connecticut. We have to be in Jacksonville by tomorrow night!”

  What does he do in response? Jasper King puts his hands in his jean pockets and keeps walking.

  I run after him. “Stop it. We’re not staying there!”

  He stops at the crosswalk and presses the button for us to cross. “Yes, we are.”

  “No, we can’t,” I say. I’m fuming, but more than that, that familiar anxiety is pooling at the bottom of my stomach again. This can’t be happening. I have no idea how my mother will react when I tell her, and I hate not knowing.

  “It is, June. You’re going to have to suck it up.”

  “King.” I grab for his arm, but he moves away from me quickly before I reach him. The lights on the road turn red, and in the next second, the signal for the crosswalk turns green. He starts across the street, and I’m forced to follow. “My mother is going to kill me! Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost?”

  He barely spares me a glance. “I was there when the mechanic told you how much it was going to be.”

  “Yeah, and if we stay here tonight, we’re probably going to have to stay in a hotel for two nights!”

  He says nothing.

  I throw my hands in the air. “Dammit! Look at me! This is awful!”

  King, without warning, stops walking. I almost collide with his back. He turns on me. “Stop freaking out over this, June! Just deal with it! It’s happened.”

  He’s snapped. Those stone-cold eyes, his flushed cheeks, and his jaw set. He shouts, “I don’t want to be here with you just as much as you don’t want to be here with me!”

  I gape, eyes wide. “Don’t shout at me!”

  His shoulders hunch, and he takes a deep breath. “You need to live with the situation.”

  “Maybe I could live with this if you weren’t here, King.”

  His jaw clenches harder. “For the last time, my name is Jasper. Call me by that, okay? Also, like I said a second ago, I don’t want to be here with you, either. I definitely don’t want to prolong this trip, but I’m sucking it up and living with it. You should just shut up and deal with it, too.”

  I scowl, crossing my arms over my chest. Fine. This is happening, and there’s nothing I can do about it. “I’ll only live with this on one condition.”

  “And what’s that?”

  I can tell he wants to keep s
houting. His jaw keeps clenching and relaxing before clenching again. His eyes remain stone-cold. We still stand in the middle of the crosswalk, squaring off. I take notice that the signal to cross has turned red.

  “As soon as we get to Jacksonville,” I begin, “we’re never speaking to each other again. Not even at my sister’s wedding, when we have to walk down the aisle together. Not even if we happen to see each other at future family gatherings.”

  King actually laughs, and it’s full of dry humor. “Trust me, I have no problems with that deal. And June?”

  “What?” I grit out. A car blares its horn at us.

  “If anything, I should’ve painted you uglier in that painting I made.”

  He turns his back to me and walks the rest of the way to the other side of the street. He pulls a cigarette box out of his pocket and pulls one out, bringing it up to his mouth.

  I’m still seething, watching his back, as someone shouts, “Get out of the road!”

  I walk the rest of the way, back straight, hands fisted. My chest heaves from anxiety or anger, probably both. I don’t feel any better about the situation, despite the deal we just made.

  Four

  “Don’t be smart with me, Judith Rae.”

  My mother is disappointed, which is worse than what I thought she would do— kill me.

  “What happened, June?” she asks, and the deep undercurrent of worry that I hear in her voice cuts me. “Are you all right?”

  I sit on the bed in my motel room, which I’m thankfully not sharing with Jasper. I made it to the motel’s front desk only moments after him. After I found out he had only enough money for one night in a room, I’d paid for the both of us. It put me in an even worse mood, if possible. The room is small, and the furniture is old, and although there’s the faint smell of cigarettes, it’s comfortable.

  “I’m okay,” I say to her, then I bite my lip and tell her what happened. When I get to the mechanic and how much it’s going to cost, I hear my mother take a sharp breath. I clutch the phone tighter in my hand. “Mom—”

  “That’s a lot of money,” she says, interrupting me. “You just popped a tire a few weeks ago.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay to drive the rest of the way to Florida?” she asks. “If you’re only in Connecticut, you could go back to Boston tomorrow, and I’ll figure out something else.”

  I feel a sharp pain in my stomach, but I know nothing is stabbing me. I cover my face with my free hand and try to take deep breaths. What’s always worse than seeing my mother’s expression of disappointment is hearing it. April has always been the overachiever and success story. My mom has always looked at me and wondered if I’d make it out in the real world.

  During my first two years of high school, I snuck out at night and skipped school during the day. I am a star soccer player and will even be soccer captain next year, but oftentimes my mother would get the call that if my grades slipped any further, I’d be kicked off the soccer team. She’s always disappointed in me.

  It’s only been during my junior year when my teachers and my mother sat in a room with me and explained how these actions would affect my aspirations for soccer—and maybe the threats my mother made about sending me to a different, private school helped too—did I decide for myself that things needed to change. If not so I wouldn’t be perpetually grounded for life, then for soccer and for staying in the same school with the same friends I’ve had since childhood.

  And hearing my mother now, sounding worried but at the same time as if she’s doubting me all over again… I take another deep breath. “We’ll be okay, Mom. We’ll get to Jacksonville.”

  “Okay,” she agrees. “But you know, I can’t afford to pay for new tires and the mechanic every other week.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” I promise, and this time I feel annoyed. Her doubt makes me feel guilty, but at the same time, it’s so familiar to me, so consistent, that I can’t help how I feel every time I hear it.

  My mother must catch my tone because she says, “Don’t be smart with me, Judith Rae.”

  I roll my eyes. “I promise I’ll pay you back.”

  There’s a pause on the other line as if my mother is debating whether or not I’m sassing her before she finally says, “I need you to keep me updated. If you don’t get to Jacksonville tomorrow, make sure you’re here on Monday, all right?”

  “Yes, mom.”

  “Don’t use that tone with me.” She scolds me like I’m a kid and not someone old enough to drive her car.

  “What tone?”

  “That one. The one you’re using right now.”

  “I’m not using a tone!” I say, incredulous.

  “Watch yourself,” she warns. Her tone, laced with worry and disappointment, now has an added element of annoyance. It matches mine.

  “Mom, I’ll be there. I won’t miss April’s wedding. I wouldn’t ever.”

  There’s another pause over the line. I imagine my mother, one hand on her hip, stance rigid, as she contemplates the conversation we’re having. She’s disappointed and has worry lines on her face, but her mouth twists in irritation. This is how she always looks when we talk to each other.

  Now she says, almost too calmly, “Please be careful.”

  “I will be.”

  Another pause. “You’ll tell me if anything is wrong?” This is a tad softer, her rigid calmness melting.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Do you promise that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Judith.”

  “I said I promise,” I grit out.

  “All right. Good. I’ll be seeing you in two days, right?”

  I hear the warning in her tone. “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  She hangs up. I throw my phone onto the bed and tangle my hands in my hair. I suck in another breath and hold it before letting it out slowly. I had thought my mother would be angry, but her disappointment in me is worse. It’s like a permanent emotion she has when she’s around me. Like it will never go away, and I’ll always just keep doing things that don’t measure up to April.

  I love April. My sister is one of the closest friends I have, yet it stings that she’s the favorite. That I’m always going to come second to her, not only in the order of birth but in the eyes of our mother, too. It doesn’t matter how I feel about something as long as it benefits April.

  I’m my mother’s troubled child. She’s never said it to my face—she never would—but sometimes I see it in her eyes or her expression when she can’t deal with “my antics.” She’s never had that look on her face when she talks to April.

  I go out too much, and I don’t focus on my schoolwork like I should—like April did when she was in high school. I don’t get all-around good grades, and I have friends my mother doesn’t approve of. April was the opposite at my age. It’s easy to see why she could be the favorite. She was the easier daughter to raise.

  And still, it stings.

  I bite my lip again. I need some fresh air. Not only did the argument with my mother give me a headache, but the faint smell of lingering cigarettes is getting to me. I swipe my phone from the bed and grab the motel key card on the way out the door. Out in the open hallway, I’m met with cool air and sky painted in the dusk. The balcony overlooks the motel’s parking lot, but I rest my arms on the railing and admire the view anyway.

  April has always told me that nothing I could ever do would ruin her big day, even when I jokingly insinuated that I might get ridiculously and embarrassingly drunk at her wedding reception. She wouldn’t doubt the joke for reality, either.

  The thing about April and me is that we’re not close in age, and because of that, we’ve always been at different life stages. We’ve never stood on the same ground in our lives. She’s one of my closest friends, but we could never have a heart-to-heart on equal grounds when our lives are so different simply because the gap in our age means that—right now at least—our lives are in
two different worlds. She’s been to college, she’s snatched a good man, and she’s settling into a career while I’m still discovering myself and have no idea what’s going to happen after high school.

  And yet, despite it, she’s always promised that I would be a bridesmaid at her wedding. Even before April got her first serious boyfriend her junior year of high school, she’s always said it. I never believed her. I’d wave it off and laugh because bridesmaids are supposed to be there for the bride and organize anything that doesn’t have to do with the wedding itself. Who would ever trust me to do that? No one can even count on me to remember a wine opener when I promise I’ll bring it.

  Yet, one day last year, she called and told me I was finally going to be a part of her wedding.

  For the past few years, ever since April and I have gotten closer because the distance between us made us realize how much we mean to each other; I’ve always tried to be there for her.

  I sigh and lean into the railing. The sun has settled into the mountains in the distance, setting everything in shadow and brushing the blue sky around the mountains with light pink and soft purple hues. It’s a beautiful view despite the parking lot immediately at its forefront.

  Behind me, the sounds of footsteps climbing the stairs draw my attention. I tear my gaze away from the view and catch Jasper just before he enters his hotel room. He freezes mid-step when he sees me, an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He’s wearing another black shirt that’s not the same as the one he had on earlier. This one has a logo of some band I’ve never heard of. His dark brown eyes watch me warily, and he’s carrying a bag of what smells like Chinese food.

  I glare at him. I still haven’t gotten over the argument—or all the arguments—we had today. And after the conversation I just had with my mother, I’m in no mood to see him.

  “What?” Jasper says, and he already sounds irritated.

  It’s good that we’re on the same page with our feelings about each other. I roll my eyes. “Nothing. I just turned to see who was coming up the stairs.”

  Jasper takes the cigarette from his mouth and leans casually against the motel’s wall, almost like he’s interested in what I have to say, though we both know he’s not. He asks, “Finally finished with your fight?”