Sixteen Hours

Sixteen Hours

An Unexpected Truth:
We were headed for Georgia, not Virginia.

Apparently Kay has a head for the details. Or maybe it was just that I was a bit too engrossed with reading The Prince one-handed and not shoving Pete onto the floor and listening to Adnan’s snoring to realize that we’d been driving far too long to be going to Virginia. I used to drive to Virginia all the time when I was a kid, and I knew that it only took six hours.

It didn’t really matter where we were going, though. I was with my best friend, and her boyfriend, and my boyfriend and his best friend who was my best enemy and a really loud Arabic kid who cursed like a sailor. I was amongst good company.



Perhaps I wasn’t overtly fond of the idea of sixteen hours in a van that was becoming rapidly more stuffy and cramped and uncomfortable, but it could have happened with worse people around me.

Our first day driving had been the short one, with seven hours done. Our original plan had been to leave much earlier than we actually had, somewhere around ten in the morning instead of three in the afternoon. Mark had taken his guitar in to some local music shop to get restrung, but they weren’t finished when they were supposed to be, so of course we couldn’t leave until Mark had his bass back, because that was “a key element in this whole operation, Kay, so stop trying to micromanage the details, please. I love you.” (-Mark)

And then Pete’s ex-girlfriend had come around because she was psychotic and, for some reason I would never, ever understand, wanted Pete to take her back. This, of course, was insanity, since Pete was a crazy player and had more likely than not slept with at least three girls since they’d broken up two weeks previously.

And then Adnan had argued that since we were so late already, he had time to do some prayer thing with his family one more time before we left. Kay and I thought that he might as well, but Pete and Ian and Mark were eager to get on the road, which was hilarious, because it was because of them that we were late, anyway.

They argued and I sat on a swing during the whole time that Adnan would have been praying, and then we got on our way. After seven hours and determining that I would not, under any circumstances, be permitted to drive (which was good, in retrospect, because I thought we were headed for Virginia, though this may have been a direct result of my not being permitted to
drive), we parked illegally in a park for the night.

Nobody had really wanted to sleep in the van for the night, so we’d all gotten out blankets and camped outside, except for Adnan, because he thought it would be great to have the whole van to himself. And so Ian and I took the right side, and Pete took the back, and Kay and Mark took the right side, and we formed a protective huddle around our much-loved, much-hated van.
In the nighttime, it was a bit chilly. I wrapped myself in a blanket, and Ian wrapped his arms around me, and whispered in my ear. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

Cognitive Dissonance:
I was glad that I was here, too, and I really loved Ian, too, but I didn’t know how to put these things into words, and wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to, anyway.

I turned around and snuggled my head into his shoulder. “I’m your wife,” I murmured. The words felt bizarre in my mouth—after a mere three weeks, they were a little unnatural.
Sometimes I still slipped up and called him my boyfriend. Sometimes I still said I was his girlfriend. Sometimes I still felt like his girlfriend.

But this—lying here with his arms around me, able to feel his heartbeat and his warmth, and knowing that I loved him—was not unnatural at all. It was natural, and comfortable, and I’d been doing it for three years, so I was practically an expert. And Ian knew that I loved him, even if I didn’t necessarily say it all the time.

Only when we were alone like this did Ian allow his sentimental side to come out. “Really, Sloan.” He was toying with my hair. It felt nice. “I don’t know what I would do without you. You make shit go through smoothly.”

I wasn’t sure I would describe myself as smooth, but I was okay with that, too.

“I love you,” I said. Maybe I wasn’t sentimental, even when we were alone, but I had coached myself to be able to say those words. It was important to be able to say that, I thought. If I never said it, maybe he wouldn’t be able to believe it. If I rarely said it, the words were more special in the times that I did.

He kissed the top of my head, my cheek, my lips.

I was not a romantic, not a traditionalist, and it had not been my idea to get married. He’d been convinced that, if I went to college and he went to Georgia with Pete and Adnan and Mark without anything tangible to hold us together, we’d drift apart and he’d never see me again. And, in a less obvious way, Ian was the same kind of a romantic that Adnan was. I was, as far as I knew, his first serious girlfriend.

And even though he wanted me to marry him—which I agreed to, happily and easily—he didn’t ask me to give up college. He was certain that, as long as we were bound by law and I couldn’t actually dump him without seeing him first, that he would be able to win me back over, regardless of what happened.

A Simple Fact:
Ian was remarkably cocky at times, but he also could be extremely insecure.
But really, who could blame him?
Some things you just know, and sometimes you have to assume the worst, to stop yourself from going insane with worry.

So I hadn’t planned on any of this happening. But then again, I wasn’t really able to see college in my future, either. Sure, I had been receiving the pamphlets ever since I took the PSAT junior year, and sure, I had made my visits, and sure, I had filled out all those applications. But I had never really cared or worried about any of it.

I, for example, was not Pete’s twin sister, Alyssa. Poor Lys had studied and studied practically from the time she dropped out of the womb. She’d done her extracurricular activities, and she’d taken her SATs five times. The girl was a machine. A legitimate machine. And now she was going to Cornell in August—but not before she did mission work in Honduras.

Sometimes, you really couldn’t blame Pete for being the way he was. Because even though she really was plenty of fun when you managed to drag her away from her books, Lys could be a very trying person. And Pete hadn’t had a single second of his existence when she wasn’t around. So that sort of had to be a hard thing to deal with.

Pete and I were the same, in that respect. We just didn’t give a crap.

In any case, around April I was faced with two equally impossible-seeming possibilities. Marriage, college, marriage, college, marriage, college.

The choice is pretty obvious, considering I ended up, two and a half months later, with a ring on my finger, sleeping outside an illegally parked van with Ian, not even sure which state I was in.

As bizarre as the situation was, I felt, at that moment, incredibly content. One might even go so far as to call it happiness. But that peaceful, stress-free, on-our-way feeling was certainly, and without a doubt, the best I’d felt in a very, very long time.