Home is a Four Letter Word

chapter twenty-five

Early May

"Okay, where the hell are we going?" Connor resituated himself on the truck's bench seat.

"Just trust me."

"Okay, yeah sure." He nodded with a flat-lined grimace. "You're finally going to murder me... this is how I go."

Jake broke into a smile. "Shut up, I'm not gonna kill you."

"Oh, even worse then..."

Connor stared out at the road in front of them—an unfamiliar route that neither of them seemed to have traveled before. Jake had had his phone silently on navigation the whole time on the seat beside him, but he had never actually been out this far from home and the amount of time they had spent on this road was starting to make him nervous. The screen said they only had five minutes left, but a part of himself still prayed he wasn't accidentally taking them to Pennsylvania.

"There's worse?" Jake looked over, trying not to distract himself from thinking they could be lost.

"Yep."

"What's worse than that?"

"You're going to feed me asparagus." He shook his head. "I knew I shoulda never told you about that..."

Jake cracked into laughter—real genuine laughter that he felt in his soul because Connor's witty remarks and sarcastic comments had come to grow on him.

"You're an idiot."

He furrowed his brow as he drove further into the middle-of-nowhere, the contemplation that they were lost embarrassingly close enough to admitting to Connor. It took Connor looking over to him with a serious face to think that maybe he had already figured that much out.

"Oh, forgot to tell you... I have to be home in twenty minutes."

That is not what I expected you to say.

"What?"

Looking at the disappointment that dawned on Jake's face, Connor broke into a grin. "I'm fucking with you. You really think my mom cares?"

"Well... I actually have no idea what your mom is like."

"Oh..." Connor frowned. "Right... well anyways, yeah she doesn't care."

"So you just do whatever you want? No curfew? No hourly text updates? No neighborhood stalking you if you don't respond within ten minutes?"

He shook his head. "Nah, she doesn't care. She's not really home much, if you couldn't tell already. I've been on my own since I was a kid."

What?

"Really?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"You never had like a babysitter or something? She just left you at home alone?"

Jake would have been surprised, but the look on Connor's face was even more so.

"No, no." He corrected him. "When we lived in Cleveland, my aunt stayed with us for—well most of my childhood. But, she overdosed when I was eleven... and then we moved in with my grandparents a couple years after that, so I guess I haven't been completely alone my whole life... it just feels like it sometimes."

"Jesus." Jake hadn't realized he muttered out loud until Connor looked away.

"Sorry." He closed his eyes in what seemed to be regret. "That was oversharing."

"No, no." Jake shook his head because he didn't want Connor to feel like he needed to censor anything. "Keep going... uh... what's the rest of your family like?"