“Sexy nightmares, maybe.” Julia looked at her phone. “Ooh, perfect celebration music.” She hit play and the opening chords of “Blister in the Sun” came on. Julia started dancing in her seat. “Harbor?” she asked between lyrics.
“Just for a bit. I’ve got an AP Chem group-study thing,” Dave said. Then, feeling guilty about his word choice, he added, “That girl Gretchen is coming over at seven.”
“Plenty of time,” Julia said, taking the admission without a hint of suspicion. She turned up the music and shifted the car into drive, taking them down Highway 1 toward the coast, shouting the lyrics out at the top of her lungs. Instead of going to the harbor, though, Julia kept driving north along the Pacific Ocean, the mood too celebratory to stop the car. It was a beautiful drive, and Dave would never tire of it. That highway made you feel like no matter how much time you spent with it, it was not enough. An hour passed by without Dave really noticing. The fog reached across the highway like arms looking for an embrace, then it would slowly pull away and reveal the glimmer of the ocean, the brown-green facade of the cliffs. Just as the air was turning colder, Julia turned down the music, looking over at Dave with a raised eyebrow.
“What do you say about crossing another Never off the list?” She looked ahead at the curving highway.
She was talking about number nine, the epic road trip. He pictured them skipping class the rest of the week, going up as far as Seattle, returning down the coastline slowly, sleeping on the beach, hiking through Big Sur, roaming the streets of San Francisco and Portland, enjoying the many aesthetic beauties of their part of the world while everyone else was stuck at school. He thought about Gretchen ringing the doorbell at his house and his dad telling her that Dave wasn’t home.
“Not yet,” he said. “This chemistry project is pretty important and it’s not the best week for a life-changing road trip.”
“I like how you said, ‘yet.’ But I wasn’t thinking road trip. I was thinking I’ll host a ‘BEER’ party in celebration of your prom king campaign success. The dads are out of town next weekend and I feel like being irresponsible. What do you say?”
Dave stuck his hand out the window, making waves in the air, pretending to think it over. “I don’t know, maybe. I am a prom king candidate now; I’ve got a lot on my plate. Press junkets, galas, charity balls.”
Julia reached over and poked him in the stomach. “Goof.”
They drove on for another half hour before turning back around. Julia turned down the music for their return journey as they planned out the party, most of it jokingly, lots of talk of explosions and celebrity DJs. The closer they got to San Luis Obispo, the more butterflies Dave was feeling in his stomach. He kept looking at his cell phone for the time, calculating how long it would take them to get back.
Julia dropped him off at home at a quarter to seven. Dave thought he might take a shower, then worried Gretchen would show up as he was in the bathroom, or that it would seem too obvious that he showered just for her arrival. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, showering specifically for her. It pointed to a certain thoughtfulness. Or maybe it showed he was trying too hard. Or maybe it would just point to him being insecure about his body odor, which wasn’t attractive. Or maybe it implied he thought she would get close enough to smell him, and what if she didn’t actually want to get close to him at all? In the end, Dave stood by his bathroom door, lost in thought, vacillating between lines of reasoning until the moment the doorbell put an end to the debate in his head.
He yelled out, “I’ve got it!” then ran down the stairs, taking a deep breath at the foot of the stairs to settle his breathing, simultaneously realizing that he’d just lived out the girl-coming-over-to-study cliché he’d seen in countless sitcoms. He laughed, caught his breath again, then opened the door.