Half-glass full and cynical Calista Dames can sketch out her life in a series of plans, predictions and preparations. She's the girl who knows what she's doing and where she's going, the girl with all the questions answered, the girl with a foundati...
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CHAPTER TWELVE
TEQUILA IN MOTELS
It was crazy, yes. It was insane, totally. It wasn't what practical and very sensible Calista Dames would do.
But goddamn it, I wanted to do things that Calista Dames would totally not do, and that was to take a chance to follow some boy and his band to Miami for a festival. In my defence, Astrid was also pretty down for it so if this was a stupid mistake, Astrid was partially to blame.
Astrid said she liked the other boys in the band. She liked Aaron, and to be honest, I think she has a little bit of a crush on him, which helped her be a little more agreeable to my extremely insane plan of ditching our pre-booked Spring Break plans to join a band on their gig. It was the type of insanity you see in movies or read about in books but somehow...I was into it.
I was never that girl who was easily seduced by the idea of being whisked away by some magical smooth-talking boy- maybe because I was always too cynical to ever imagine that girl would be me. I thought secretly, no matter how bitter you were, every one of us dreams of the fairytale of casanova men and dancing girls, or casanova girls and dancing men (you know, because gender roles are limiting and dumb).
I thought all of us craved a love story- we crave validation and attention from somebody who would give it all. And sometimes they do, sometimes they do for a while and get tired of doing it, sometimes they put half-made-up efforts into it and we're willing to settle. It was an intrinsic part of human nature and whether we want to deny our lust for a story or not, I was definitely not an outlier in that fact. So I said yes and jumped on this crazy adventure. Not because of any other reason, it was because I wanted to.
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After stuffing ourselves full of food, we decided to hunt around for a motel. We were cruising around the van. It was Flynn's turn to drive so I accompanied him up front in the shotgun seat. The three other boys were piled up in the back with Astrid and had drifted off to sleep because of how full they felt from dinner. Astrid was listening to music while Flynn was explaining to me how technically it was illegal for him to drive in the US since he carried around a Singaporean driver's license. I asked him why didn't he just take the test and convert his license.
Mischief sparkled in his grey-specked stare, "Well, I'm actually entering the US as a tourist so..."
"You're technically illegally here then," I accused him jokingly.
"Yeah, I suppose. Depends on how you look at it. Our band has just been playing around clubs and bars in New York and we managed to get squeezed in to open for a Spring Break festival in Miami. Then Aaron and the others will probably go back to college when the semester break ends. And I'll go...I don't know, wherever I want to go."
"Do you ever get tired of it?" I kept my eyes on the road as the van ate it up, disappearing underneath us. "You know, travelling so much."
His brown hair is all messy and full of static in the periphery of my vision, his daydream eyes remained at the smudged window in front of him. On my lap was my iPhone being charged, the screen showing the Waze app that was navigating us to the motel we saw advertised when we Googled 'Motels near us'. The reviews seemed decent enough to convince me it was a real place that I wouldn't be killed in.
