Now

Now

They told me not to do this.

They:
My mother, my father, my older sister, my guidance counselor, and, I think, my English teacher.

I, of course, didn’t listen. I didn’t regret listening. But sometimes, when I was like this, with the knob for the strap on Ian’s guitar jabbing me in the side, and an endless stream of nothing rolling past my window, and me in the second-to-last seat of the van—sometimes, when I was like this, I had a tiny nagging thought at the back of my mind: maybe they had had a point.

We were heading for someplace in Virginia. I was the girl who was supposed to know all the details about, so maybe I should have known with a little more precision where I was headed first, but I wasn’t taking turns driving, because I tend to mutter under my breath when I’m driving, and that annoys Pete. It annoys Pete so much that he offered to take all my turns driving. I didn’t object.

We:
Ian, Pete, Adnan, Mark, Kay, and, of course, me.

“Yo, Sloan.” That was Pete. Pete, the hotshot with the drum sticks always in his pocket, because he thought they made him look cool (on him, they sort of did), was generally annoyed by me. Or at least he pretended to be annoyed by me. He thought that I was going to be some sort of Yoko Ono, as ridiculous as that was, and break up the band just for shits and giggles.

“Pete,” I replied tiredly. For the past day and a half I’d done nothing but sit on this van and I was tired. Exhausted. And this was only the beginning.

Pete shot me half a glance over his shoulder. “Pass me a soda or something.” Pete didn’t use questions with me. He gave orders. This made Ian pretty angry when Pete was really a jerk to me, but for the most part, we’d all gotten used to it somewhere in the past three years. Ian was really pissed when Pete gave him a hard time about being the in the wedding—they’d been friends since kindergarten or first grade or something—but he’d already been smart enough to ask Mark to be the best man.

This:
Marriage, right out of high school, to travel with my husband and his band (as clichéd as that seems) while they did the music-festival route.

My parents hadn’t really been upset about the whole marriage thing. I mean, they thought it was a mistake, but they didn’t throw a fit, or anything. My parents, being my parents, didn’t really care about the sex things or the dating things or the marriage things, so long as I didn’t come home pregnant or with my eyes about to explode from an STD or whatever. They didn’t really care about drinking things, if I was doing it responsibly: a drink at a party, whatever, come home completely trashed and puking, issue.

They weren’t really cool with the traveling thing. They wanted me to go to college, even though my plans were only at either this one state school or the community college. I’d never really had to make the decision, because Ian and I had already decided on the wedding route before either school wanted me to confirm I was coming. I was thinking about going to culinary school when this whole thing was over. I didn’t need a fancy, expensive college education to have a bakery.

Adnan was cool with the marriage thing, but Adnan was one of those kids who expected every relationship to end in marriage. I think it was because of his religion, but maybe he was just a romantic, not that you’d ever guess it from hearing him. But any time any long-standing relationship ended, poor Adnan was just about miserable. Maybe he liked me purely based on the fact that I would console him at times like this, assure him that they’d both find someone better to get married to, even when it was Jen Micaveli, the head cheerleader. I knew for a fact that Adnan had never talked to Jen Micaveli, but still he cared.

So Adnan usually was kind of on my side when Pete started in on me. He also had this tendency to curse people out mercilessly. It was almost a compliment, being cursed at by Adnan.

“Pete, you asswipe,” he called now, “Sloan doesn’t have the fucking sodas. I do.” It was possible to likely that Adnan had a mild form of Tourettes. It didn’t annoy any of us to have it checked out, but sometimes we had to kick him when he was humming in the middle of the night.

“Don’t mess with me, dude,” Pete warned, taking one hand off the wheel and reaching it back for the soda. “I’m thirsty, man, and you don’t make a thirsty drummer drive, or else he might do something crazy like come back there and get a soda. Give. Now.”

Kay was asleep. Ian was asleep. Mark was asleep. Adnan and Pete were about to start fighting, because, even though they liked each other, Pete was an abrasive person, and Adnan couldn’t step down from a fight. That was why he had gotten suspended so many times in high school. If you wanted a fight, try Adnan Ganim.

I did have a cooler at my feet, one full of sandwiches. I took one out, unwrapped it from its butcher-paper shell. Before we left home, Kay and I had made approximately one billion sandwiches. Out of the six of us, Kay and I were the only ones to pay attention to practical details: The Girlfriends. The boys would have gleefully charged into this with subs for lunch and their instruments, only to realize less than an hour later that they were starving.

So we had made a lot of peanut butter, some peanut butter and jelly, and a few turkey sandwiches. I was eating the last of the perishables, here. The next two days had the potential to be a nutritional trial by fire, not that any of the boys would notice.

Instead of listening to the argument that was about to ensue, I shifted Ian’s guitar onto the floor and let him rest his head on my shoulder as I watched the endless stream of nothing pass us by and by and by.