I laugh. “Okay, I will.”
“No, seriously,” Brad says. “I swear it won’t even be weird or anything if I watch a video of you and Sean doing it because I won’t even glance at you I promise! I’ve been learning this new video-editing program, we can just blur you out!”
I hear a scuffling sound in the background.
“Hi, Ellie.” It’s Thomas. “Please excuse my el-pervo boyfriend. What he meant to say is that he is so excited for you, and I cannot wait to meet this hot stud-cake you’re with and get back safe.”
More scuffling.
Brad again. “And take a video!”
I’m laughing. “Bye, guys,” I say. “See you when I get back.”
“HAVE FUN!” they call into the phone together. And then they hang up.
“Everything cool?” Sean asks. He turns toward me and there’s the slightest hint of a smirk on his face, and immediately I start blushing until I realize that he’s not smirking at me, but what’s behind me: Jamie-girl and Jamie-boy emerging from the front door of their building, red-faced, each hauling one end of an enormous blue duffel bag, like the kind of bag you might have if you were going on a three-month-long sea voyage for which you also needed to pack your own food. Sean leans toward me. “Which do you think is most likely to be in that bag, a month’s worth of clothes? Or the chopped-up bodies of the last two people they hitched a ride with?” But before I can answer, grunting Jamies-boy-and-girl are shoving their bag into Sean’s open trunk and piling themselves into the car.
“Seriously,” Jamie-girl says, as she shuts the door behind them. “You guys are sooooooooooo lucky you met us. A Jamie-Jamie road trip is a special and unique thing. No one who goes on one ever forgets it.”
“Well, that”—Sean turns to me and grins—“That I do not doubt for a second.”
Nineteen
Six hours into the trip and the Jamies are in the backseat doing something that sounds an awful lot like sex although I’m not planning on turning around so I cannot say for sure.
All I know is that there’s a rhythmic thumping against the back door; and it’s growing faster. And for some reason that I do not even care to think about, the car is starting to smell like yogurt.
Sean cracks the window and turns the music up. I stare straight ahead.
Truth is, even this might be preferable to what they were doing for the first five and a half hours of the trip, namely singing along loudly (and badly) with the Monster Hands CD, telling us a very, very, very long story about how they met, followed by them fighting about: 1) the details of their meeting (they disagreed on what Jamie-girl was wearing that night), and 2) a joke Jamie-boy made about Jamie-girl being controlling (which, while possibly true, was mean and not very funny).
I glance over at Sean again. He turns the stereo up. The Monster Hands song, “Some Things I’d Rather Not Discuss (About My Face)” is playing:
Stop looking, stop stop looking at this, stop looking at this thing on my faaaaace. On my faaaaaa…
Monster Hands is just about to hit the chorus when the music stops. Just stops, completely.
And then, quite suddenly, a new noise emerges from the backseat, a little yip yip yip like a tiny dog yelping in pain.
Yip yip yip. Yip yip yiiiiip.
I feel a laugh starting to bubble up from deep in my stomach.
Yip yip yyyiiiippp. And then I realize something. These sounds are not coming from Jamie-girl, but from Jamie-boy, which makes the whole thing even funnier
Yip yip yip yip.
I hold my breath and press my lips together, ball my hands into fists, squeeze my nails into my palms, but the yip-yip-yipping is faster now, higher pitched.
Yipyipyipyipyipyip.
I turn toward Sean, his face a mirror of my own, lips pressed together, cheeks puffed out, eyes starting to water. My chin starts trembling with pent-up laughs and then…
“Woof,” Sean whispers. And then it’s all over. A laughter bomb explodes in the car. The more I hear Sean laughing, the more I laugh, and the more I laugh, the more he laughs, and really at this point it’s completely out of my control. If someone waved a thousand-dollar bill in front of my face and said I could have it if I stopped laughing that second, I wouldn’t be able to. My stomach hurts, and there are tears trickling down my cheeks.
It’s a full minute and a half before our laughter subsides, both of us gasping for hiccuppy breaths.
And then, finally, the car is quiet except for a soft shuffling and the sound of a zipper being zipped. I turn toward Sean again, and he shrugs and I shrug and then Jamie-girl says, loudly, “We’ve been in the car for like six hours now, and it’s like twelve-thirty, don’t you think it’s about time we stopped for the night?”
And Sean says, “There’s a little place about ten miles from here in New Mexico that I’ve been to before, we’ll stop there.”