Somewhere in Neverland (An All Time Low Fan Fic)

1) A New Adventure

Sometimes, life throws the biggest curve balls, in thousands of different ways. Of course, there's the one we're all familiar with, the baseball pitch, but think of the countless others. Missing a free throw, slipping up five yards from the touchdown, the clock striking just as you fall, a disqualification during your biggest swim meet, a trip during a tennis match. And then, there's the not so sport related curve balls, which is kind of ironic, considering the curvature of a ball is the generic make-up of sports.

A curve ball could come as a long lost friend, a new job opportunity, happy things. But, curve balls have their nasty side: a towering enemy, broken hearts, crushed dreams, the list could go on for days. But that's the thing with curve balls, when life throws them at you, whether they're good or bad, they are unexpected, and it's up to the batter, the person in complete control, to decide if the curve ball will be a homer, or a strike out.

We've discovered curve balls come in all different shapes and sizes, genetic make-up, physical characteristics. But they all seem a little bigger than what they really are, much like the one Life threw us Spring Break of our senior year. We were young, foolishly stupid, and looking for a bit of adventure. So, when my family decided to pack up and head to Baltimore, Maryland for the week to visit my travelling stepfather, it seemed as if Life was pitching straight down the middle; our time for a little excitement was upon us.

Noelle and I packed up almost as fast as me could the Thursday night previous, and by Friday afternoon, we were checked out of school early and bringing up the vacation passengers by one, with a tag along of Noelle's older brother of two years, Mason.

We planted ourselves in my mom's car with my two siblings, and headed out, towards a seven hour strip of highway from Middle-Of-Nowhere, Georgia to Baltimore. Escaping the feeble town was always somewhat of a shared dream between me and Noelle, or at least, it had been, so without looking back a single fraction of a second, we plugged in a headphone splicer to my phone and gazed at the passing highways and forest peering through the windows, if only for a fraction of a second, before they were replaced casually with the next bit of scenery within milliseconds.

"MaKenna! Earth to MaKenna." I glanced sideways at Noelle with a sly smile appearing over my cheeks in a rippling fashion.

Noelle and I had known each other since the day I was born, practically two months after the birth of Noelle. It seemed as if a pinch of fate and a splash of force knocked Noelle and I together, sending us into the same classes year after year, and not to mention Noelle's parents happened to be my god-parents, and vise versa.

I couldn't imagine life without the fiery mass of ginger hair, pale freckled skin, and blue-grey eyes that say next to me, still waving her hands to acquire my attention. There was Mason too, Noelle's older brother of two years, who had been with us every step of the growing process, just beating us slightly. He was always there to influence our childhoods, and it seemed as if, for a period of time, Mason was everything that resembled meaning in life. Of course, then we hit middle school.

"What's up, No Air?" I asked, using one of the many nicknames I'd created for Noelle in the period of our lives. I laughed, a breathy snort of soundful air as Noelle's own face wrinkled around the edges in tints of disgust and guilty humor.

"I don't understand this book. It's just lost it's, oomph." She complained, settling Jurassic Park down into her lap, but with it's body still opened to the pages she'd been reading, as if it was beckoning her to pick it back up in minutes.

"It's all pretty philosophical." I said, laughing as Noelle's snort blew through the air. The book was actually mine, a long ago Christmas from my parents, but the books pages had been read an unthinkable amount of times by my eyes, and when Noelle bargained a borrowing system, I was glad to see it would be getting a bit more use, while I moved on from the declining obsession of dinosaurs to a more fictional and impractical approaching obsession.

"Yeah, that's all that stuff you like." She said, reaching over to pause the music filling our ears still. At that point in the car ride, the music had enabled us to escape to equal positions of solitude in worlds much different from our own, and each others, with only the connecting factor of rhythmic guitar and beating drums to connect our wondering brains in the background.

We passed the time slowly on the road trip to Maryland. Car games were played and disposed of quickly, for nothing seemed so boring as license plate gazing and road sign reading. Noelle eventually picked back up the land of the genetically mutated creations, and by the time my siblings, and Noelle's, were asleep around us, and my mother's driving became comfortable and silent in the dark, we had reached a sign I definitely didn't find boring to read: Welcome to Baltimore!

I seemed to squeal inwardly with a since of girlish delight. This was it, our big adventure, and it had finally arrived in the form of a bustling city. Noelle shook Mason slightly, motioning to the towering buildings and twinkling lights that glistened around us, for even the prized city of Atlanta back in Georgia was but a mere Nowhere Land compared to this city, so full of wonder and awe.

We seemed to be a little too star struck by Baltimore, and maybe that's what got our hopes lifted so high. Of course, later in the story of The Adventures in Baltimore, you, dear reader, will learn that our hopes seemed to be in a place so high in the atmosphere, they couldn't possibly be brought down to feel the wrath of a hammer. But they were, sometime later, but I shouldn't spoil the ending yet, because, in fact, our adventure hadn't even begun.

***

We slunk into the nicer hotel on the highway, paid for specifically by my stepfather, who'd be seeing us tomorrow. My mom had my younger sister slung upon her shoulder, while my brother waltzed in slowly, resembling something on the living dead as he made his way numbly to the couch and pulled the bed from it, immediately laying down and drifting back to sleep.

Mason followed suit with my brother, sleeping snuggled on the other side of him, while my mom went back outside to our tiny little balcony to call whomever and explain how safe of an arrival we'd had in Maryland. And Noelle and I? We changed into sweat pants and oversized band t-shirts, pulling the scratchy comforter of the bed we would be sharing up to our chins, like we'd done so many times before in our many sleep overs and trips, and we talked.

We'd called in the Hotel Ramble, a stupid middle school name we'd progressively thought up after Noelle accompanied me to yet another school swim meet, and these little talks had become something of a noticed ritual.

We began with stupid little jokes, things we found funny in the hotel room. Then, it became a tad bit serious, but to the point of a small joshing. We explained to each other the growing crush we'd have on whichever celebrity at that moment in time, along with which guy at school had caught our eyes. It seemed so simply mediocre, but we couldn't find very much else that didn't occupy our middle school hearts, and minds, but the tradition stayed, on into our grasping adult years.

But the main thing, the thing that made these small little Hotel Rambles so intensely serious, so special to only the hotels we'd be staying at in the new cities, was the fact that we'd explain to each other exactly how our lives were going to change while we were staying there. Maybe it was from the movies, or the large amount of book plot lines that cluttered our brains, but we'd think up the most elaborate ideas, things that would make us tied down to the new town, or city. Things that we would have to stay for, and it would be our official escape from Middle-Of-Nowhere.

The Rambles seemed a bit silly now that I'm looking back on them, but at those precious moments in our lives, before they were changed so drastically, by a plot line the Rambles couldn't even dream up, we held onto them for the tiny ounce of hope that it would all go as we said it would, and that we'd be free to live the amazing lives our brains at brought to the surface.

And so we'd slowly fall to sleep, drifting through dreams, more than likely, of the Rambles we'd just shared. They would usually be intertwined, but there was one thing that, now looking back, I see so clearly was different from reality: we each had happy endings.