Endless Impossibilities: Bridget

"Hey, Bridge," Dex says from the backseat of Scott's car, when you're about a half hour from the lake. "Can I have a drink of your Sprite?" You pass it back to him and he takes a long, grateful drink.

"You guys are gross," Scott tells you both cheerfully. "Sharing stuff like that is how people get herpes."

"You'd be the resident expert on that," Dex says, and you shoot him a look that means, please don't be shitty.

You're determined not to let anything spoil this trip. The prospect of this stretch of real freedom is just about the only thing that kept you going the last couple months of your grounding. You sort of got in trouble—the huge kind of trouble involving a ride in the back of a police car, and a misdemeanor-but-still-technically-criminal record, and mandatory counseling about underage drinking—over the winter break and your parents are determined never to let you live down your greatest fuckup of all time. They always take punishment far past the point of it having any redeeming value as a learning experience. It wouldn't do to tell them so, but mostly what you learned from the whole thing was that you genuinely dislike your mom and dad as people. You also learned it's important to be extremely careful about your future misdeeds, and to avoid telling them any substantial truth about yourself whenever possible.

Anyway, the point is by March you were already going out of your gourd with miserable boredom, because they revoked most of your phone, tablet, and computer privileges for the rest of the school year along with everything else. You came home from school every day last semester, did punishment chores for your mom, and then read or did jigsaw puzzles or some shit, alone in your room, with the door open because teenagers who break the law are not entitled to their privacy. Your mom actually said that.

Maybe once a week Dex or Scott would come over and spend some time with you, which Mom allowed in Dex's case because he's the last of your friends that she actually halfway approves of—since he's been your best friend since kindergarten and he wasn't even at that disastrous party where you got busted for drinking (horror!) light beer—and in Scott's case because he's charming as absolute fuck and gets away with whatever. Everyone loves him, even when they know he's kinda full of shit.

Well, everyone except Dex, lately.

Never once that whole semester did they come to see you at the same time. Things haven't been the same between the three of you since that wretched party where Dex got annoyed and left early, you got arrested, and Scott barely managed to slip away undetected. Having only part-time access to your phone, which your mom went through on a regular basis and wouldn't let you put a code on, and having only scant opportunity to talk to either of them in genuine private, made it basically impossible to figure out what the deal is with them. Whatever it was, neither of them wanted to dig into it with you over a twenty-two minute lunch period, and in fact, neither of them even wants to acknowledge anything is going on. They've been pretending to be fine with each other, as if you're too stupid to notice how obvious their excuses were to avoid each other.

So this trip isn't just a friends trip. You spent a semester being miserable every day at home, and miserable every day at school, alternating which of them you spent time with, and you're kind of fucking over all of it. This trip is a reboot. It's a palate cleanser. And it's a celebration of getting out from under your mom's boot-heel.

Your mom would be extremely pissed if she had any idea what your real plans are for the next two weeks. She and your dad think Dex's thirty-something civil engineer uncle is actually going to be here with all of you, because she may have exchanged phone calls with him, as portrayed by the weed-dealing but very respectable-sounding older brother of Marcie from your chemistry class. Which, incidentally, Marcie's brother probably ought to take up acting, because he talked to your mom three times and painted such a fully realized picture of the kind of fucking narc she wanted supervising her daughter that she actually said maybe the first time, instead of absolutely not.

Seriously, you could practically see the pleated trousers the character must be wearing. The hundred bucks you paid him to talk your mom into this whole idea was money well spent. It only took three calls worth of Uncle Dan spinning good-natured yarns about church and how he doesn't approve of really even for adults, and he understands a parent needs to be strict but would she consider letting you go as a special favor to Dex? He just couldn't see his nephew being able to have fun the same way, without Birdie there, just think on it, if you don't mind?

It's kind of weird, actually, that you've known Dex since kindergarten and your mom still doesn't know that his real uncle Dan is a queer Detroiter with a fondness for black leather and stiletto heels. He's both a rollicking good time and an absolute sweetheart of a human being. He's actually considerably more wholesome than Marcie's brother.

You come out of your reverie when Dex passes you back your Sprite without saying anything, then looks out the window. Scott twists around to make a face at him, but you smack him on the shoulder. "Dude! Don't look at him, look at the road," you order him, and he flashes you one of his brilliantly charming smiles before shrugging and squaring back up to the wheel. "I might be a fucking delinquent," you tell him, "but I don't believe in dying for your distracted driving!"

"Google says we're almost there anyway," he says, and you grin happily at him.

"You guys, this is going to be the best time ever," you say, for about the thousandth time, ignoring it when they both kind of roll their eyes at you behind their sunglasses.

You notice Scott studying Dex in the rear-view with an unreadable expression, which doesn't thrill you, but that's fully half of why you needed this trip in the first place. It's going to be a chance to unwind, which is egregiously overdue, but you are going to get to the fucking bottom of this shit. They're going to grow up and talk about it, and stop being nice to you and crappy to each other. Because honestly, what the fuck? Senior year sucked. Deep down, you know, they miss your legendary best-friendship as much as you do. It's a bit stupid that this job is falling to you, but that's all right. None of you had an easy time this year. You can't wait for everything to be back to normal.

"Bridge, would you pull up the directions on your phone?" Scott says after a few minutes. "My signal's cutting out and I don't want to miss the turn."

"You didn't save the route offline?" you ask in surprise, then pull your own map up, because you did earlier, just in case you got a chance to drive.

"I didn't know I could," Scott replies, sounding confused.

"Maybe because you have about forty fewer IQ points than Bridget does," Dex offers, and you shoot him another pained look, because how is their thing supposed to resolve itself if he keeps taking pot shots like that? But he misses your look because he never even bothered to stop staring out the window.

"You and me both, buddy," Scott says, sounding totally unbothered about it, then grins at you and reaches over to scuff your hair affectionately.

"Don't mess up my braid!" you scold him, and you're about to twist around and call Dex out on his rudeness when Scott darts one hand over and straight into your armpit, which is your most ticklish spot and he knows it. You shriek and bat his hand away, which makes him laugh. "Pay attention to the fucking road!" you tell him. "Jesus! You're determined that all of us are going to die in a fiery blaze!"

"Hey, you said not to mess up your hair," he replies with patently false innocence, then turns his most heart-stoppingly handsome smile on you before adding, "Map, Bridge? Are we still doing that or are we just gonna drive north till we get turned away by the Canadian authorities?"

Oh, right. You pull up your offline map of Indiana and Michigan and put the voice directions on over the car's speakers so they can't be missed. That makes talking about anything particular more difficult since you're getting up to the point of the drive where the instructions come at more frequent intervals, and the roads here are a little hard to spot from a distance, and not all of them are marked.

That's all right, you decide. Your attempts at sustaining a fun conversation for the last three hours haven't gone all that swimmingly anyway, so it'll be better once you're actually at the cabin and enjoying the fine weather, and once all three of you have a little booze in you. You spend the remainder of the drive pointing out things like hawks on poles, or interesting foliage, or literally anything else neutral you can think of to keep things from descending into weird tension.