Tripping

Jack Kerouac

Millie

Cam had her bare feet on my dash, purple nail polish sparkling in the nine am sunlight. The John Lennon sunglasses we'd bought in Kensington Market last summer were pushed back in her blue hair, and she was slouching down in her seat singing off key to Dua Lipa. I'd been in charge of the tent, and the sleeping bags, and the food rations and Cam had been in charge of the playlist(s). Currently playing was the Jack Kerouac, named, as Cam had over-enthusiastically yelled at me over the phone, because he was 'on the road, get it Millie, on the road.'

'I feel like that would be trying too hard to live out our thirteen year old Wattpad aspirations,' is what Cam had told me when I'd brought up the idea of the camping trip. 'Like you'd expect it to be smores and skinny dipping and meeting some cute girl at our camp site but this is COVID so it's gonna be mosquito bites, and sleeping on the ground. And also, we don't even know how to camp Mill.'

'I know how to camp.'

I'd based that assertion on two summers of Christian summer camp when I was in middle school. I'd done the whole race to build a fire thing, and canoeing around the lake thing, and I figured there weren't many more skills I needed. I mean this was Canada, land of the silver birch, home of the beaver, canoe trips were in our genes. And how hard could it be? I'd done the Googling and watched the Youtube videos. I'd bought the dry bag and knew the difference between teepee versus log cabin fire building styles. The first aid kit was ready for any emergency tourniquets, I hadn't worn my life jacket since ninth grade but I'm sure it still floated, and my younger sister Lillian had braided my hair so it was ready not to be washed for a while. I was prepared. I knew what I was doing. And in the past five months, this was the first thing in my life I could control.

It was only now, in the front seat of my mom's twelve year old Volvo with the trunk packed full of as many cans of Heinz beans as two girls could possibly eat, and a canoe tied on the roof, that I was realizing just how bad an idea this was.

Cam looked over at me, white knuckling the steering wheel at ten and two, "Millie stop worrying I doubt they're going to have to use the okay we drowned playlist."

"You made an okay we drowned playlist?"

"Yeah of course. Water Under the Bride by Adele, Something in the Water, Carrie Underwood- "

"Cry Me a River," I add.

"Justin Timberlake, but of course. We do not forget the greats."

"I think Friends With Benefits is still possibly my favourite movie of all time."

Cam ran one hand through her hair turning to look out the window and laughing. "Doesn't really match with your new abstinence thing, but okay."

I frowned, "Well it's a rom com, so happy ending is Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis get married, so all that sex is retroactively God-approved." It was a faulty argument. But to be honest my whole 'new abstinence thing' as Cam put it, was less correlated with my new-believing-in-God-again thing than Cam thought. They were almost separate, though I guess it was maybe too much of a coincidence that Christians tended to promote the big-A to believe that they were two distinct decisions. But really – the abstinence thing just seemed nice. I thought it would be kinda cool to know that the person who was inside of you was planning on sticking around.

"Can God even retro-actively approve sex?" Cam asked.

"Sure," I said. "I don't see why not. He kind of makes his own rules."

Cam was probably less of a fan of the believing in God thing than the abstinence thing. It had taken her by surprise when I'd started going to Church again last fall. I'd been pretty staunchly anti-religion up until that point. We'd been on the same page about that. God was the man of Westboro Baptist Church, and the KKK and the Gregories who lived at the end of my street and thought Cam and I were dating. Cam didn't see the world in enough black-and-white to really think that there were no altruistic, warm-hearted Christian out there. But I think she just never expected me to be one.