A Beginner's Guide to the American West ✓

chapter ten

t e n

*

I’m about to wet myself. I should have gone to the dodgy-looking loo at the petrol station because now my bladder has reached bursting point, after I downed a bottle of water – and then another after, as Arjun predicted, my combination of salty food and a bunch of chocolate induced intolerable thirst.

“Hey, Sam?” I call out.

“Yes, my man! What can I do for ya?” He meets my eye in the rear view mirror, turning Carrie’s music all the way down.

“Any chance there’s a loo nearby?” I ask, then change my tack when I look out of the window and see that we’re still in no man’s land. “Or, like, a big bush?”

He laughs then presses his lips together and shakes his head. “We’re on protected land right now, my friend – can’t have you getting done for public urination, not with the number of state troopers I’ve seen prowling around. Reckon you can hold it another”—he checks his watch—“twenty minutes?"

I honestly don’t know, but I don’t seem to have much choice so I nod and hope that if I stay still enough, my bladder will fall asleep. I need to distract myself, else all I’ll think about is how much I need to pee, but Arjun’s asleep, his head rattling against the window. So I find my earphones from deep at the bottom of my backpack, and I start one of four audiobooks that I remembered to download before the trip.

I grew up surrounded by stories, from my dad’s teetering piles of books around our tiny house in Scotland, to the stacks that doubled in size when he met Mum and we moved in with her only a few months later, but reading is a painfully frustrating task. The words jump around on the page like one of those weird eye worms that moves every time you try to look at it, and it wasn’t until I was in Year Four that Mum realised something wasn’t right. I was ten before I got a dyslexia diagnosis.

I had glasses for a while, but I was forever misplacing them and they didn’t help that much anyway, so now it’s just something I deal with. And to satiate my love for books, I listen to them. Mum got me my first audiobook when I was nine, and it changed my life. It’s like being a kid again, when Dad – and later Mum – would read to me until I fell asleep.

Eyes closed, I set the narration to 1.3x speed and try to sink into the story and focus on anything but how much water I’ve drunk since my last wee.

It works, because twenty minutes later, we pull into the campsite where we’ll be spending the night, and I haven’t wet myself. As soon as Sam comes to a stop, I vault across Arjun and past the twins in the row in front, and I launch myself out of the van towards the rundown building with a dangling restrooms sign.

I make it just in time, skidding to a stop in front of the urinal and battling with the zipper of my shorts for almost too long.

The release is akin to a religious experience, and I let out an audible contented sigh that turns into a groan of release, and ... I’m not alone.

There’s the sound of a flush from one of the stalls and the man who comes out gives me a strange look and a wide berth. Who cares. He’d be giving me a stranger look if I came in here covered in my own piss.

When I make it back to the group, they’re unpacking their bags from the trailer. Arjun already has both of ours out, two backpacks at his feet and his hands on his hips as he looks out at the view.