“The times they are a-changin’.” Dave stuck his hand out.
“This feels so weird.” She placed the keys in his hand but refused to let go. “My whole world is falling apart. Up is down, black is white, the Cretaceous period came before the Jurassic era.”
“That was so nerdy.”
“David Goffrey Pickleback, you’re really downplaying how big of a moment this is for me. I feel the very fabric of reality unwinding.” Julia could feel the warmth of his palm beneath the keys, and it was strange what a specific desire she suddenly felt to have him wrap his fingers around hers.
“An entire list’s worth of activities we would never have thought to do in a million years, sure, why not? But letting your best friend of over four years drive, and you start having a panic attack?”
“You say that like it’s unreasonable!”
Dave laughed and snatched the keys fully away from her grip. “You goof. Get in the car. I promise things will be exactly as they’ve always been.”
First, they went to a gas station and loaded up on snacks, lowered the top on the Miata and headed for the coast. They began the road trip like all road trips should begin, with music blaring, hearts pumping. Julia stuck her hand out the window and made those stupid waves in the air that people were always doing in car commercials, admitting out loud that it actually felt really great. She removed her hair tie so that her hair flurried in the wind, and she leaned in toward Dave so that the pink strands would sting his face, too. “You’re going to kill us!” he cried out over the music as the wind rushed all around.
She immediately switched the song over to The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” singing along to the chorus directly in Dave’s face.
To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.
“Are we going to play clichéd music the whole way there?”
“You call The Smiths clichéd one more time and I’m going to put this song on repeat, then run us off the cliff so that people think we died in some teenage suicide death pact. Then everyone at school will be sad and they’ll do a big teary gesture by making you win prom king, then you’ll be that guy that gets memorialized by a candlelight vigil by people who didn’t know him all that well. You’ll get voted into the cliché hall of fame.”
“I would throw up inside my grave.”
“You have a very poor grasp on the science of death.”
Dave laughed and grabbed her head again, pushing her gently away from him. She wouldn’t have minded if his hand never left, if it somehow slipped down to her bare shoulder, to her fingers. It was an absolutely gorgeous drive up the shore and into Big Sur, where the slow and winding roads among redwoods and cliffs changed the mood in the car from blasting music to something mellower. They switched over to Neko Case to prepare for the concert. There was not a trace of fog, so the ocean shimmered brightly for much of the ride. Dave borrowed a pair of old sunglasses Julia kept in her car, and he looked cute in them, though Julia bit her tongue to keep from saying so.