The Adventures of a Scrawny Musician and a Compulsive Liar

19. Letting Go

            I have never truly understood the meaning of awkward until the moment one of my best friends cheated on my other best friend and now the third best friend and I are sitting cross-legged on the floor while the aforementioned ex-lovers sit opposite each other in silence. It was ten in the morning and storming hard so none of us particularly felt like going out. It’s been two days and I’ll be honest, I was surprised when every morning I woke up, went down to the lobby to eat breakfast, and saw Isobel still sitting there calmly eating her cereal across a stony-faced Evan that was not amused by her antics.

            Nevertheless, she stayed and now we were stuck in this weird town in New Mexico. We had a week left before break ended so we were kind of behind schedule.

            I cleared my throat. “Um. Maybe, we should, uh, get going?”

            Evan’s blank face turned towards mine while Natalie played with the string on her hoodie and Nathaniel snapped his gum between his teeth in boredom. Isobel was just sitting there quietly.

            “It’s raining hell out there, man. Plus, it’s making my hair frizz up. Looks like I have a goddamn Jew-fro.” Nathaniel muttered and messed with the hopeless mass of brown curls on the top of his head.

            “Laurie’s right. We should get going. There’s not much time left before break ends.” Natalie murmured as she flicked her hoodie string to the side and smoothed down her skirt. Nathaniel shrugged and we all turned to Evan for his answer.

            To our surprise, he shrugged and said, “Sure. Why the hell not?” He got up, left the hotel room, and slammed the door on his way out. Once he left, it was quiet and the awkward tension that never left just began to build. It wasn’t only Evan that lost his trust in Isobel, we all did. Finally, Isobel quietly gets up and leaves the hotel room probably to either follow Evan or go back to her own.

            “Well.” Nathaniel stood up from the worn peach carpet and snatched up his car keys from the dark wooden end table. “There’s no better time than the present.”

            “Okay. This was a really bad idea. I literally can’t see shit.” Crouched over the steering wheel and squinting out the front windshield, I tried to watch the non-busy New Mexico highway through the frantic sweeping of the windshield wipers against the hell of a storm outside.

            “We believe in you, Laurie. You can do it,” Nathaniel spoke with a monotone voice from the backseat. He was fiddling with his phone while Evan was staring out the window in silence and both Isobel and Natalie were asleep. I guess the rain did that to people. After twenty minutes of trying not to veer off the road and kill my friends, I started to get the hang of driving and focusing on one thing for longer than forty-five seconds.

            Of course, with my luck, it didn’t last very long.

            Out of nowhere, this gigantic rat-looking thing jumped into the middle of the road and scared the mother-living crap out of me. This in turn made my hands flail at the steering wheel and we swerved off the road and onto the muddy desert grass on the sides of the highway.

            “Aw, shit.” I could feel the wheels of the bus sinking into the sticky ground below.

            “Laurie, what the fuck?” Nathaniel’s head popped up behind my right shoulder.

            “Don’t worry, man. We’ll just get out and push this thing back onto the road.” Not really aware of my gangly limbs, my foot slammed on the gas and all I heard was a weird clanking noise before the car settles into an eerie silence. We all just stare at the steering wheel while I stutter, “Um, um, um…” I kept stuttering stupidly as I flailed and my foot pressed on the gas as a reflex. There was a loud clanking noise before the van became eerily silent, devoid of any rumbling or welcoming car-purring noises to soothe my state of mind.