The low fuel light blinks on as we pull into a Walmart gas station and I feel the tension in the car ease. We should have filled the tank at lunch but got distracted posting selfies in the truck stop. Classic first-timer fuck up, a road trip lesson we’ll laugh about tomorrow. We made it this far, and by morning we’ll be able to count two more state lines between us and what we left behind.
I park next to a pump and turn off the engine but neither of us moves to open a door. We’re warm inside, and the unfolded laundry piled in the back seat still smells like home. Another first-timer blunder—by the time we realized it was still in the dryer, we’d already loaded the car. The clean scent filling the interior mingles with pine pollen and the buzz of a couple of hitchhiking flies. Every time we open a door, a little bit of who we were this morning escapes.
The longer we drive, the more fast-food bags we’ll collect on the floorboard, the more unfamiliar landscapes we’ll pass, the more new, the less old, the more pressure we’ll be under to make good on our promise to leave and never go back. Leaving home feels like fishing, but instead of holding the pole, I’m the smallmouth bass at the end of the line pulling it tighter and tighter until it finally breaks. Anticipating the snap, the line hums with energy.
Marti sits with her eyes closed in the passenger seat. She’s the first girl I ever kissed on the mouth. Her eyes were open then. She told me I was her first too, but I don’t really believe her. It doesn’t matter to me though, being first. What matters more is that she helped me load the Sentra and convinced me that not leaving home as soon as we graduated two years ago like we said we would wasn’t the important thing; The important thing is that we’re going now. She looks like she’s asleep, but I know she’s just hoping I get out to pump the gas so she won’t have to.
In the rear-view mirror, a neon sign lights up an empty Taco Bell parking lot and my stomach growls on cue. I don’t remember the last time I ate a Cheesy Gordita. I toss my debit card in Marti’s lap and kiss her. She grimaces, but yells large diet as I close the door, and I jog across the street to break a twenty-dollar bill on dinner.
No matter how many others there might have been before me, I’m the one driving the car Marti’s riding in and I’m the one who will help fold the laundry when we get to where we’re going, when we know where that is. And right now, I’m the one who knows how many packets of fire sauce to grab out of the little plastic stacking bins next to the soda fountain.
