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(vol ii.)— FORTY: FROM BERKELEY TO BEACON
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SARAH'S BEEN ON her fair share of roadtrips. Her mom gets two weeks guaranteed vacation time a year from the hospital (a fact Sarah's utterly grateful for, because she feels like those said two weeks and a few major holidays are the only days a year she really gets to spend time with Berkeley's best anesthesiologist who's almost always on call) and every time they fall during the summer months, the Cho girls take a beach trip. It's usually to Laguna Beach, which may seem, like, super dumb because they've got plenty of beaches less than an hour from them and driving just shy of seven hours to Southern California seems majorly unnecessary, but it's their favorite beach and everyone deserves a break from home every now and then.
Her favorite roadtrip was three and a half years ago, when she was fresh out of middle school with a few too many butterfly clips in her hair and terrifically unrealistic teen romcom-esque expectations about how the next four years of her life were going to go. Like, she definitely ended up majorly wrong about high school, but at least her rude awakening was prefaced by a car ride spent listening to the Pride and Prejudice audio book, a week and a half at the beach, and her mom's homemade kkwabaegi that she didn't have to share with Sam and Darcy since they were four hundred miles away and Sarah was in the solidarity of the Cho family's rented condo.
Specifics aside, Sarah has a general enjoyment for roadtrips as it is. This one is no exception, despite the fact that the first leg of the trip consisted of at least three loud and meaningless arguments between her two best friends as well as Sami's refusal to meet the speed limit—still, the sound of Folklore playing through her headphones and her frequent texting with Isaac had proven to be just enough to keep her from screaming. Things were better after they got to the little diner Sarah remembered from her last trip to the McCall house at the halfway point between Berkeley and Beacon, where they dished on Sami's date-but-not-a-date plans with Scott over what Sarah affirms are the best pancakes in California; nay, in existence. Plus, some little girl in the parking lot told Sarah her car is cute (it's a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a very adorable cat keychain hanging from her rearview mirror and about five sapphic pride bumper stickers).
It's better now that she's driving—maybe her need for control factors into it, like, a smidge, but she's pretty sure the main improvement is that the car is finally moving faster than a snail's pace for the first time since the trip started. Sami's driving is painfully slow (anyone who goes less than three miles over the speed limit is slow to Sarah, but Sami's on another level), but at least he gives her gas money. She's also taken out her headphones and is playing the Encanto soundtrack which has resulted in a very loud and very unharmonious rendition of a singalong.
