Page 38 of Love at First Ride
Noah grabs it and guzzles most of the contents, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Where are we?’ he asks.
‘No idea,’ I say.
He sniffs. ‘I need to pee.’
‘Me too. AJ said we would stop every four hours.’
‘How long away is that?’
‘Well, you’ve been asleep for about four and a half.’
I roll down my window a little further, sticking my arm out of the moving car in the hopes of getting AJ’s attention. Up ahead, he gives me a thumbs up.
‘So, how come you hated American high school?’ Noah asks. ‘What was so bad about it?’
I let out a half-laugh and check his reflection in my rearview mirror. ‘Well,’ I begin, ‘Coming from an all-girls school in England didn’t help… It was kind of a culture shock.’
‘What’s a culture shock?’
‘Like… there was nobody else like me. Nobody who spoke like I did. I sounded ridiculous. And your brother and his friends didn’t exactly make it easy for me to settle in.’
‘Why not?’
This whole journey I’ve been staring at the embroidered skull on the back of AJ’s leather jacket, and I feel the base of my neck warm at some of the things I pictured last night while lying in bed. ‘They would prank me.’
‘AJ would?’
‘Mainly Chase Brennan. But all those guys Chase hung out with.’
In the back seat, Noah snorts. ‘Chase is a total a-hole. Always has been. What sort of shit they pull?’
The list is long. Some of the more minor stuff I’ve forgotten about. It’s the big things that stick in my mind.
‘Once they filled my locker with condoms. Not just the packets. They removed them from the packets, unravelled them, then made them look like they’d been… uh… Anyway, I guess it was shampoo or something. So, when I opened my locker…’
Noah screws up his face. ‘Gross.’
‘Then, there was the time they photoshopped my face onto a porn star’s naked body then plastered the images all around the school.’
Noah laughs, then thinks better of it. ‘That’s got Chase’s name written all over it.’
‘They put fake blood on my chair in English class, distracted me so that I sat down in it, so then I was walking around like I’d had my period. It took me an hour to realize that people were pointing and laughing at me.’
‘Wow, that’s—’
‘Stupid stuff. I got invited to a house party. They purposefully gave me the wrong address, then they sent someone to film when I arrived and there was no one there. Chase sent the video to my whole senior class.’
‘AJ was in on all of it?’
I swallow. AJ was always standoffish in high school. Like he was too cool for any of it. ‘I don’t know. He and Chase were friends. And Balthazar. Moses Mariano. And Nicole Escribano.’
Noah goes quiet for a moment. ‘Nicole still lives in Rapture,’ he says. ‘Has her own traveling salon. She and Balthazar used to hook up for a while. AJ told me that. Balthazar’s always been a clown. And Mo Mariano…’
‘AJ told me this morning,’ I interrupt him. ‘I had no idea.’
‘That whole thing really fucked AJ up.’
I feel like I didn’t get the whole story from AJ in the diner this morning. Asking Noah behind his back doesn’t sit well with me, but I need to know. I lock eyes with his reflection in the rearview mirror. ‘In what way?’
