A Beginner's Guide to the American West ✓

chapter fifty

f i f t y

*

I’ve found the perfect trip for next year. Five days after getting home, I woke up with such a horrible tightness in my chest, I was sure I was having a heart attack, until I realised it felt like homesickness – just not for home home. It’s now been over a week since the trek ended, half as long as the roadtrip was, and I ache for it the way I ached for home when I was away.

But it’s a different kind of yearning: being homesick away from home is temporary, when I know I’m going back. But being homesick for a trip that I’ve completed and will never do again is a totally new kind of pain. Waking up to that was, well, it was a wake-up call in a sense: I don’t want our talk of another trip to be just talk. I need it to be reality, with every fibre of my being.

So this morning, after texting Arjun and Young-mi that I missed them so acutely that I had literally mistaken it for some horrible illness, I spent a couple of hours holed up in my room on the internet. I only came down when Mum asked me to keep an eye on Flo while she and Dad took Pebs and the dog for a walk, so now I’m holed up in the kitchen on the internet.

And I’ve found the perfect trip.

It’s pretty much the polar opposite to the one we just did: this time, it’s all hotels and hostels rather than camping, and it explores the eastern USA, from Philadelphia and D.C. to New Orleans and Miami. I’m drawn to the photos of music-filled bars in Nashville and cave-exploring in Virginia; Graceland in Memphis and white sand beaches in Destin.

I want to do it. I need to. I need to wrap myself up in these cities, and my friends. I need us to go here together. I’m about to paste the link into our group chat when Flo sits opposite me and nudges my laptop screen forward to get my attention.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hi.”

“Everything ok?”

She nods. “You need to get dressed.”

“We’re not going anywhere, Flo. Even if I was fit to drive, Mum took her car, which is the only one I can legally drive.”

“I know,” she says. “Lily’s picking us up in ten minutes. It’s a lovely day so we’re all going to the park and we’re going to have ice-cream and read.”

“Thanks for consulting me before deciding what I’m doing with my day,” I say, though I’m not going to decline. It is gorgeous outside, and it’d be nice to go to the park. And I haven’t seen Lily for a while – we’ve got some catching-up to do.

“My pleasure,” Flo says.

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I did give you notice: ten whole minutes. So put your computer away and get out of your jammies.”

“You sound like Mum,” I tell her. I push the screen back and return to the group chat, where I paste the link and double check it’s the right one – I’ve been caught out before with the old copy-paste method – and send a string of heart-eyes emojis and a quick message imploring Arjun and Young-mi to check it out.

Eight minutes later, I’m dressed and back downstairs, dragging a brush through my tangled hair. Two minutes later, Flo reappears just as there’s the rumble of an engine outside, then the thud of a car door and the dull ring of our ancient doorbell. Another thing Dad keeps saying he’ll replace.

Flo skips over to the door and flings it open to reveal Lily on the other side, dressed like the epitome of summer in a sunflower-yellow dress that looks incredible against her brown skin.