Future Perfect by Jen Larsen

Author:Jen Larsen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The week crawls by. I avoid Hector, and skip lunch, and watch Jolene wilt. By Friday morning I cannot stand it anymore.

Omar has a show tonight—in an actual San Francisco gallery, Laura says. She was ready to take off herself, speeding up the highway and leaving us all behind, but I had that overwhelming impulse to sweep us all away. Shoot past school and keep going, catch Highway 1 and drive until we see the city lights.

So we are playing hooky, as my grandmother would call it, on a Friday morning. We’re driving fast and furiously up the coast, taking the long way to San Francisco. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately made the choice to reject all the things I’m supposed to be doing, leaving behind the should and barreling directly into the want. It must be what Laura feels like all the time.

Laura is in the passenger seat next to me, her head bumping against my shoulder and her feet, both of them, out the window. Her long, graceful toes look like they should be dragging across the cliffs that loom up on our right, scraping across the tops of the pine trees that crowd us up against the bluffs, dropping straight down into the sea. Black water, white froth, a wide-shouldered blue sky, it’s everything, rushing right through us so it’s everything we feel. Jolene is curled up at the back door, both arms crossed on the window ledge. Her eyes are closed and her face is turned up to the sun. Her hair is just as gold and white as the clouds and it is whipping around her head, streaming along the side of the car like a torch. I can feel my hair in a nest around my face, a cloud of salt smell and tangles, and I laugh.

We’ve been quiet for a hundred miles, the wind scouring us clean and everything strewn behind us, left to scatter in the wind, melt in the seawater and dissolve in the sun. I drop my foot harder on the pedal, take the series of curves ahead of us in long, languid loops. Jolene smiles but doesn’t open her eyes.

Home is hours away and the ocean is so close I could run my fingers through the waves and I am almost convinced that we will be all right.

I thought about calling Hector—this is the kind of thing he is best at, this driving-too-fast kind of freedom, and that is when I like him the most. When he grins at me and his face is exactly like a thrown-open window and there is nothing but pure happiness in him. It opens something in me, too. Just for a little while. But he still hasn’t called. It feels like he should know everything that’s happened, but he’s too far away to talk to. He’ll come find me when he is ready. At least, I think he will. I’m not sure how else to handle it. We’ve never had an argument before.

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