Outside || Luke Hemmings

Chapter 14

We had been driving for the biggest part of the day and it was now 3 PM.

'We've almost reached the top of the island' Luke said.

He had been trying to distract me pretty much all day, and I felt terrible for being such bad company.

I smiled at him, or at least I tried.

'Would you like to stop there?' I asked him.

Luke nodded. 'Unless you don't want to, I mean, we can always find another place to stop. We can stop anywhere we want'

'Nope, it's you road trip. If you want to go there then we're going there. Besides, I don't really care where we're going, everything is new for me anyways'

Luke grinned. 'Okay, but if you see a place you'd like to go to all you have to do is tell me' he assured me.

I nodded and looked back out of the window.

I couldn't help but think about my parents, what would they have done if they'd find out I'm in a car with a stranger, driving across the country just because we can.

I couldn't even imagine how angry and disappointed they'd be.

But then I remembered the letter. I hadn't burned it yet, in fact, it was in the pocket of my shorts.

I couldn't get myself to destroy it. Together with the sweater and the dress it was all I had left of them now and it was a reminder that they wanted me to do what I wanted to do.

'What place are we going again?' I asked, not remembering if he actually said the name or not.

'We're going to Cape Reinga' Luke answered excitedly.

'That's one of the few things I looked up, there's this ridiculously long beach and a lot of people said it was beautiful, and it was at the top of the island, so I decided that's where I wanted to go. After this we'll make our way back down again. I'll show you what my plan was once we're parked'

I nodded and looked back out of the window.

20 minutes later Luke parked his car and pulled out a piece of paper from somewhere beside his seat.

He opened it and revealed a map.

'This,' he said dramatically. 'Is the wonderful place called new Zealand.'

He put the map down on his lap and half on mine since it was so big, and pointed to a dot. 'This is where we came from. And we're all the way up here now' he explained as he pointed to another dot at the top of the map.

There were big red circles drawn around several dots.

And Auckland had a cross through it.

'What are the circles for?' I asked, while I leaned a little closer to Luke so I had a better view at the map.

'the circles are the places I want to go to, and the one with a cross through it is where I've already been.'

I looked at him and smiled excitedly.

'So we're here now,' I started 'and...once we're done here we're going...here?' I asked, pointing at another circle, closest to the one which showed where we are now.

'Exactly, and if we see something else along the way, we'll stop there and continue our way afterwards' Luke answered with a smile.

'Okay, well let's get out of the car then' I said.

I was done sitting in the car and feeling sorry for myself.

We got out of the car and made our way to the beach.