story time

In the post below, I talked about the story I wrote for my friend. I'm too lazy to blog anything else. So I'll post this here. Names changed for reasons.

It's dark by the time we're out of the movie theater  It's always dark by the time we're out--and that's good, that means night driving. That's the best part.

            Gabby and I have a ritual and it is usually some variation of Starbucks-movie-Taco Bell-driving. I can't differentiate between one night and the next in my memories. It's more like it's just one night, and it has never ended, continuous and simply one in my memory. The details get confused. They switch around to different times and places they're not supposed to be. They're versatile,  I've never tried to fix them---what does it even matter?

            But tonight we go to Hy-Vee. I'm going to say that this is the night we go to Hy-Vee for the first time, a new check-mark in tradition. We're looking for a friend of mine, but it turns out that she doesn't get off until later, so we start actually looking for food, wander over to the bakery section where she starts to freak out about what processed pastries to get because we're going to go on a little gift delivery service to our friends (we have about eight if we add them together) and their parents. We end up agreeing on Zebra-Cakes and Twinkies and because we are especially juvenile Gabby gets us the Welch's sparkly grape stuff that comes in the glass wine bottle. By the end of the night it's going to look like Oscar from Sesame Street lived in there. I noticed her eyeing the shrimp earlier at Hy-Vee suspiciously. That's because she's afraid that if she eats them they'll somehow pop back into life in her mouth.

            After our first stop (a drop-off to Katie's parents, whose mother drinks a glass of wine every night and cooks fancy food with foreign names and whose father is about 5'4) we start driving around some more, and the conversation leads to this:

            "Ok," Gabby starts, "so when we go on our road trip to Canada we both agree that we're staying somewhere with Magic Fingers, and I get first dibs on all the attractive men because you love me and we'll eat lots of junk food and get FAT which already happens when I got to the Zaputil house."

            I turn off of Collins near Noelridge, which turns out to be a bitch because the speed limit is 25 and there's some Popo crawling around, searching for dumb miscreants like us. "Agreed. It's going to be like Stand By Me only with an actual car and more bodies."

            She laughs, gets the reference. I'd always found it weird that the movies we could relate to were about lower class pubescent middle school boys from the 60's. Gabby wants me to drop her off at the park some time so she can sit there alone and watch Stand By Me on one of our portable DVD readers. I'm willing, but I still can't decide on whether or not if I'm going to 'forget' her after I leave her there. 

            We stop at Anna's next. There was this giant bucket of popcorn sitting in the back that Gabby had gotten for free at the Collins Road Theatre but never finished, and it sat there greasy and expectant. I parked on the side of the street and she ran out and threw it all around the yard, kind of flailing on the snow and then setting the bucket neatly on the front porch. I'm laughing because it's the stupidest thing and it's so small but that's the whole point of these car rides, small adventures.

            "We have no friends," Gabby gasps as she lets out a never round of laughter. She's got this crazy hair-do, black curls that sprawl everywhere, and she says it's because they're full of secrets. I start laughing because it's so true and so awful. Long story short: we only have eight friends because we excommunicated the other five, and the really mean part about is that some of them don't even know. We're not very nice people. We're Mean Girls without the actual cojones to be outright mean.  

            We're the pair that sometimes takes passengers on our little adventures, but only for a little bit until we genuinely get bored. At Homecoming, when she saw who we'd be eating with, she told me to gun it in reverse. "I'm not even joking, let's leave," she'd said. I had started laughing. She accused me of thinking she was joking. I told her I was laughing because I knew she was dead serious.

            So then it's the third stop and that involves us scaring the hell out of poor Sarah's mother by creeping up on their porch because Gabby didn't know if Sarah was home and leaving a careful snack on their unlit porch. We felt bad about it until Sarah texted us twenty minutes later---thx 4 the snack lol.

            Then there's nothing left for us to give. We have no friends.

            So we drive to some random parking lot or another. I think this was the time we went to Franklin. And it's winter, so I start acting like an idiot and pull donuts in the empty lot, which makes us laugh and scream (I momentarily lose control for about five seconds, and that's the moment when I'm actually just screaming).

            It's just us. A true friend is someone you can talk about with for anything, laugh about anything with, but most importantly share silence with. It's quiet except for the gentle muted roar of the highway, far away from us. Escape routes. Roads to take us places.

            I think about the where and when and how. The truth is it's nights like these that remind me that it's OK to be a stupid kid once in a while. I remember what it was like to be 13 and pining to be 16. I'm not 13 anymore. I remember Gabby at 13 and 14 and how she was already planning her emergency exits. Which was kind of like Gabby when she went through what she calls her lesbian-looking phase at the end of sophomore year, the one where she didn't shave her legs for, like, two months. But considering my whole middle school career was my lesbian-looking phase I didn't have much leg to stand on.

We go driving at night because we're challenging tomorrow. We drink stupid Welch's wine because we don't want to drink the real thing. Gabby's mom still tucks her in.

            That's why I'm fond of these nights. It's one long road in my memory, all these city lights and conversations and passing places. Sometimes I think that maybe that's the trick, getting myself onto the right road. I hope that even when Gabby goes a different route, she's still always shotgun. That's friendship.

            At the end of the night, when I'm dropping her off, I say, "I love you."

            Gabby says: "No."