The Adventures of a Scrawny Musician and a Compulsive Liar

18. It's A Crap World

            It happened completely out of the blue; like a clap of thunder at four in the afternoon or a bird shitting on your head during your fourth grade field trip to the park.

            In the morning, Natalie and I woke up as usual, our relationship still intact but more like a quivering thin piece of string floating in the wind rather than a chain connecting an anchor to a ship, an unbreakable thick steel chain keeping one from leaving the other. But that wasn’t the most infuriating part. The most infuriating part was that absolutely nothing had changed. She still wore her funky socks with her floral ankle skirts and she still dazzled me with her same old Natalie smile but now I could see the emptiness in her eyes. I could see the fake sparkle. I could see everything. And it scared me.

            Still, she didn’t talk; so I didn’t ask because how does one force his self-destructive girlfriend to drag her battered, bloody skeletons out of the closet when she doesn’t want to?

            Maybe one day, I’ll grow enough balls to find out.

            Anyways, the two of us woke up and we went to eat breakfast at Jojo’s where we were all unusually quiet. Even Isobel, but I get headaches even trying to figure out what she’s up to so for now, I just don’t give a shit. It was around twelve in the afternoon when we stopped for a lunch break in some town that started with an “F” in Texas when everything went to hell.

            Isobel dragged Evan off for a private conversation out of earshot from the rest of us while we waited standing by the bus that was parked outside a deli. From the distance where I was standing, I could see Isobel shuffle from side to side a bit before she finally said what she needed to say. Immediately, Evan’s face turned to stone and he started storming away towards us. When Isobel reached for him to pull him back, he pushed her hand away from him gentle enough to not hurt her, but with enough force for us to know something was up.

            “Dude, what’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked and Evan stormed past him and got back onto the van. I raised my eyebrows at him and I was pretty sure all three of us had surprise plastered on all our faces. Slowly, Isobel started walking back toward us with her head uncharacteristically cast downwards like a scolded puppy and when she looked up at us, her eyes were watery.

            “What happened?” I asked Isobel. She shook her head and just gestured towards the deli as if telling us to go in. I walked over to the window where Evan was. “Come on, Evan. You’re gonna get heat stroke in there. It’s fucking eighty degrees out.” He didn’t even look at me. He just kept looking ahead with his fist held against his mouth and I could see how white his knuckles were from how hard he was clenching his hand. I sighed.

            “I’ll leave the doors open. Maybe that’ll give him some relief from whatever the fuck just happened here.” Nathaniel slid the bus’s main door back open before he slowly backed off. Isobel just walked into the deli by herself, which left the three of us standing outside.

            “We should get a sandwich for him or something,” Natalie said.

            “Yeah.” I replied. Evan didn’t look like he was gonna budge soon. So we headed in after Isobel like the hungry kids we were who did not know that right then and there… we lost her.

            At five o’clock, we arrived in a town that’s name kind of sounded like Armadillo but we were still in Texas. Evan swerved off the freeway onto an exit, which startled us for a moment before we realized it was nearing our dinner break anyways.

            “We’re staying here tonight.” Evan spoke. It was the first time he spoke since we left F-something.

            “What? We’re not even in New Mexico yet.” Nathaniel remarked from the front seat.