Catching Up to You

Chapter 16 - No Detours

"Why didn't you tell your older sister the truth? I don't have a friend who's picking us up." Angel's eyes were still squinting on her. The middle of his arms were drenched sweat wiped away from his forehead and face. His complexion had gone tanner in spite of being only under the early spring sun for a few hours.

"I didn't want to worry her," she promptly said without even looking up to him. She was too occupied thinking of other solutions as she felt seventy-miles-per-hour winds and streaks of white trucks and black cars sweeping by her.

"You know, my offer still stands about teleporting to Disney." He snapped his left thumb and pointer fingers together repeatedly.

"All you need to do is to tell me and we'll be at Animal Kingdom, munching on turkey legs in no time."

Cringing at her last memory of eating the dry, tasteless meat - and remembering how more than half of the leg was left uneaten, she said, "I don't think that's what you do at Animal Kingdom," Linny smirked at her companion's naivete during moments like this one. The serious tone in his suggestions amused her. She often thought to herself, was he trying to be funny or did he really mean what he said out loud? Usually, heterosexual men and boys these days - or at least the ones she's met throughout her life - have been the more emotionally guarded type, the type that she used to have a complicated history with.

If Linny had to guess, he looked like he could be in high school - less like a burly jock and more like a theater kid with a boyish charm. Every time he smiles at one of his ideas, he does so with a little over-the-top enthusiasm that would make her feel a bit sorry for him for seeing her less-than-excited reaction.

If there was anything Linny knew she wasn't, it was that she hated giving up, almost as much as . Something didn't sit right with her when she was finally given an option to opt out. Here she was, prepared to take on a Moby Dick-sized challenge that would give her stories to tell. She had practiced replacing the tires days before the road trip's start date and even learned how to read a paper map - she thought that it would be an impossible task as someone who had gotten lost multiple times using Google Maps in downtown Boston.

"Hey, let me take a look at your hand." She beckons him with her hand as if he was a lost labradoodle.

"Say what?" He obediently opened his right palm to her. His fingers were long and slender, almost alien-like. Linny gripped his wrist and pressed all of his fingers down except his thumb. She pulled his arm a few inches closer to the side of the road, still leaving some room between them and the blur of vehicles.

"We're going hitchhiking!" She yelled - or forcibly squealed, in hopes to emulate a similar level of enthusiasm as her now confused partner had been displaying earlier.

"Oh, so your wish is to continue this road trip by sitting in a cramped vehicle with strangers? It looks like you have a death wish for the both of us," he looked at her with furrowed eyebrows, scowling as long as he could. After all, what choice did he have as her guardian angel?

"Alright, but can I choose who we go with?," he pleaded.

"No, that's cheating. I don't want you to use any of your powers." Linny said with an adamant frown.

"Why not?" He pouted, giving her an incredulous stare. "You can't just waste this once in a lifetime opportunity. You're going to-"

"This is also one of the last chances to feel like I have a choice." Her voice, a little shaky this time.

"But you always had a choice," he said softly, but Linny was too busy flagging down the neon-colored RV that had just started to slow down towards them.

"Ya' need a lift!," the driver yelled out to them. Linny could hear herself struggling to swat the flies of doubt away from her newly added bucket list goal. She usually wouldn't say "yes" to a stranger who'd be picking her up in the middle of who knows where, but instead of an old, grumpy, truck driver cap-wearing, pot-bellied male figure behind the wheels she had been expecting, it was an East Asian woman in either her late fifties or early sixties behind the wheel. Her wrinkles and tiny figure might have exposed her age, but her fuschia pink pixie hair hinted at a life that any complacent individual wished they had lived.