Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [34]
I assumed that there would be potholes and detours and wrong turns along the way to Yeehaw Junction, Florida, or Satan’s Kingdom, Rhode Island. I had always imagined that those near-disasters were what made road trips so exciting, and I kind of looked forward to them. I wanted to run out of gas on the interstate, get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, or have my credit card rejected by the sketchy motor lodge and spend the night in the rental car, just so I could return to Pineville safe and sound and regale you with the tales of all these crises averted.
I did not want to get carjacked fewer than twelve hours into our trip.
It’s only by chance that this notebook was spared. It was safe inside my messenger bag, right beside me in the booth at the Bandit (yes, har-dee-har-har on me) Diner as I tucked into a cheeseburger and fries and listened to Hope try to talk me into jumping out of a plane at a nearby skydiving center.
“It will be fun!”
My first instinct was to say, “Cheating death is not fun.” But then I remembered, I’m on a road trip! That’s what you’re supposed to do on road trips! Cheat death! Court disaster! Of course, Hope and I had no idea that our own mini-disaster had already played itself out, by peeling out of the parking lot with all our possessions.
I always think of the notebooks as lost, as in, “I lost your notebooks.” I implicate myself as the guilty party when, in fact, I didn’t lose your notebooks at all, they were stolen from me, along with the Barry Manilow decoupaged toilet-seat cover and Hope’s ninety-nine-cent Ambervision shades and everything else. The car was found, of course. But no object was left behind, no floor mat unturned. Everything was stolen, right down to the last loose penny and forgotten half-chewed Twizzler. Some of our clothing and personal effects were eventually recovered, but they still felt dirty after a dozen washing-machine bleachings. But the notebooks, they were long gone.
On the outside, the notebooks had all looked the same: one hundred sheets, two hundred pages, 934 × 712 in/24.7 × 19.0 cm, wide ruled. Just like all the black-and-white notebooks I’ve been writing in since high school. I didn’t peek inside before I put this one in my messenger bag and separated it from the rest of its doomed lot. I had randomly grabbed one to read when Hope left me alone at the table to call her parents or go to the bathroom. I didn’t know that this was the only one that wasn’t about you, but was intended to be all about me.
As soon as Ms. Daisy Schlemmer and Mr. Harlan Oakes, both nineteen, from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, discovered that the Death Valley Diaries, the other eleven composition notebooks left in the car, were just that, composition notebooks, and that they couldn’t use them to fund their meth lab, couldn’t use the materials to get high in another way, not from smoking the ruled paper or extracting the ink and injecting it straight into their veins, I can only presume Ms. Schlemmer hurled them out the window and into a snowy drainage ditch as Mr. Oakes slammed on the gas.
You never blamed me. And yet sometimes I feel like you punished me with silence when I returned. As if you were so committed to the economization of words that you didn’t want to squander any more by repeating what was already put to paper. And if two tweakers destroyed your notebooks, your stories, before I got