5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Nick

It was mid-July, and I needed to start packing for a three-week road trip with Logan. The goal was to leave by the last week of July and arrive in California by August fifteenth, giving us a couple of weeks to meet up with our parents and move into our dorms before classes started on the twenty-eighth. I also needed to be there early for tennis practice.

Most of our rooms had already been packed up and shipped off to California, where our stuff would stay in storage until Logan and I arrived. Then, our parents would arrive to bring our cars and the rest of our clothes by the twenty-fifth.

It would've been easier and less expensive had Logan not insisted on taking this trip, but I understood why he needed to. He'd been planning and saving for it forever. It was especially sentimental now that Hunter couldn't go. I totally got it. That didn't mean I wanted to go, not with Logan, anyway. He'd probably kill me in my sleep. I still felt his fists on my face from last month. This trip was going to end in disaster. I felt it in my bones. But Mom insisted I go to fix things between Logan and me.

Why should I? He was the asshole. Logan was the one who should try to improve things.

I could've put my foot down and said no, but a part of me wanted to help him fulfill his dream. He didn't deserve it, but this was for his mom. I would've felt like an asshole had I insisted on not going.

We hadn't fought again since that day I ruined his record, but we also stayed out of each other's way. At least things had been calm for now.

Caleb sat on my carpeted floor, tossing a tennis ball in the air, hitting the ceiling, and catching it. The ‘ thunk , thunk , thunk ' grated on my damn nerves. With his last throw, I caught the ball mid-air and tossed it into a storage box.

"Moody today," Caleb groused.

His blond hair was perfectly parted down the middle, falling down in feathered waves. A small mole sat right underneath his left eye, and he had one of those upturned noses that the girls liked so much.

"Well, you would be, too, if you had to go on a trip for three weeks with someone who hated you."

"Please, you don't like him either."

"True, but that doesn't make this any better."

"Yeah, your stepbrother's kind of a dick."

I smirked at him as I grabbed my backpack that I used for camping out of my walk-in closet. "So are you."

"Fair, but I've got the looks to compensate."

I rolled my eyes. "Or it's your looks that make you an arrogant dick."

"You adore this arrogant dick."

We barbed each other all the time, and while Caleb came across as arrogant, he'd always been there for me. He was someone I could go to when I needed to talk about shit. And he'd supported me after Lauren and I broke up.

We high-fived each other. "I'm going to miss you, man. I wish you were going to Stanford with me."

"Well, you're just smarter than I am. I couldn't get into that school to save my life. I'm stuck with Old Dominion. Plus, I have to stay in state if I want my parents to pay for college."

I opened my dresser drawer, pulled out several folded T-shirts, and put them on my bed, needing to sort through which ones I needed to pack for college and which ones to take on the trip. "If you focused more on school rather than fucking the entire cheerleading team, you could've gone places."

He scoffed. "There are just some things more important than grades." Caleb stood and patted my back. "Seriously, man, I'm going to miss you, too. Stay in touch, okay?"

"I will. I still have another week, so we should do something fun before I head out."

"Maybe we should throw you a going away party."

"That sounds cool."

There was a sudden knock on my door, and Caleb went to answer it.

"Ah, it's your grumpy stepbrother."

"Fuck off, Caleb," Logan said, walking in without asking, carrying a small box of folded state maps. "Don't you have a girl to fuck?"

"Knock it off, Logan," I snapped. "What do you want?"

"We need to go over the plans for the trip."

"Later, I'm still packing."

"Now. I need to make sure we're both on board with the directions and where we're going to stay along the way."

Caleb raised his hands and headed toward my doorway. "I'm gonna split and get ready for my date with Carla tonight. Call you later, Nick."

"See ya, Cale."

My best friend stopped and turned to face Logan with a smirk on his face. "Oh, and Logan? Fuck you, too." With that, he left, closing my door behind him.

"Your friend is a sex-addicted asshole."

"Shut up, Logan. Caleb may be an ass, but he's my ass. I don't say shit about your best friend."

"He's not a good friend."

"I said, fuck off." I cleared off my bed of clothes, tossing them onto the floor. "Now sit, and let's get this over with."

Logan put the box on my bed, pulling out several maps and a composition notebook stuffed with notes, drawings, and cut-out pictures glued to the pages. I knew very well how precious the book was to him since he started working on it back in middle school before his dad married Mom.

He opened up one map and spread it out on the bed. "The plan is to take Route 66 until we reach Staunton, Virginia, where we'll take Route 81. By the time we pass Knoxville, Tennessee, we'll connect to Route 40 until we reach Nevada. There, we will then head north to Lake Tahoe, but we'll also take some side trips, one being the Ozarks in northern Arkansas and down to Austin, Texas. But Lake Tahoe will be our last stop before heading to Stanford, where I'll drop you off, and then I'll head to Berkeley. We'll be making a lot of stops and camping often to save money."

"Whatever. I mean, you've been planning this, not me. I'll just do what you've planned."

He sighed and pinned me with his hazel-green eyes. I had to admit they were pretty and looked like gemstones or something. I hated my brown eyes. They were boring. "Yeah, and you've got to be my co-pilot. I can't read a map and drive at the same time."

"What if I'm driving?"

He gave me a blank look that said I couldn't be that stupid. "Seriously?"

"Fine, so what are your planned stops? We're camping often, but are we also staying at any motels?"

"Yes," he said, spreading out the Tennessee map and pointing at the center. "We're going to drive through to Nashville. Well, we'll stop at Long Hunter State Park, right outside of Nashville, where we'll pitch the tent. We can stay there for two bucks a night. There's a lake we can swim in, hiking trails, and we can fish, but we'll need a fishing license and have to rent fishing poles, so not sure if that's something we want to do. I plan to stay there for three days because I want to check out Nashville, too, along with visiting the Grand Ole Opry ."

I hated the idea of traveling with Logan for three damn weeks, but I had to admit the trip sounded fun, and he was really organized. "What about Graceland?"

"Yes, that's the plan. Once we head out of Nashville, we'll drive for a few hours until we reach Memphis. We can stop for lunch and tour Graceland. We'll stay overnight there at a motel before moving on the following morning."

For the next hour, Logan and I actually got along. We looked at the maps, determining where we were going to stop and camp or what we planned to explore, and how long it would take to get to each destination.

"Can we stop at the Grand Canyon? That's kind of been a dream of mine."

Logan smiled for the first time since he came into my room. It lit up his entire face, softening the usual hardness and frustration. "Yeah, that's the plan. I really want to go there, too. There's so much more to see as we drive. We can't see it all, but like I said, we'll hit the key spots in each state and some out-of-the-way adventures."

He folded the maps perfectly, which was always a pain in the ass, and put them in the storage box with his notebook. "That's it. We can talk more later, but I just wanted you to have a good idea of what the plan is."

"Sounds good."

He held out his hand. "Give me your driver's license."

"Why?"

What was he up to?

"If you want to get into some bars while traveling, we need to change your birthdate from 1968 to 1966. Not all states are like Virginia. Some states have a drinking age of twenty-one."

"You changed the year on your I.D.?"

"Yeah, I mean, it's not hard to do. Our IDs are only paper. Only a slight change and no one's ever noticed mine."

I folded my arms, reluctant to trust him. "You're not trying to fuck me over, are you?"

He mirrored my stance and rolled his eyes. "And blow my chance of going on this trip? Not likely."

"Fuck it. Fine." I pulled out my wallet from the back pocket of my jeans and handed him my I.D. "Don't ruin it."

Logan pulled out his driver's license and showed it to me. The date on the pale green paper looked fucking real. "I can do this. I'll bring your license back to you tomorrow."

"And what if we get pulled over?" I asked, handing back his license. "Our birth dates won't match with what's on record."

He shrugged. "This is not the original I.D. It's a copy, and we'll only use it for bars and clubbing."

"If you say so."

Logan grabbed his box from my bed and held it at his side, shifting awkwardly on his feet, refusing to look at me. "Nick, I need us to get along as much as we can. I want to enjoy this trip. This is the chance of a lifetime for me, and I don't want it ruined with us fighting all the time. I… know a lot of our problems are my fault, and I'm going to try to do better."

My jaw fell to the floor, not expecting those words from Logan, of all people. He never apologized for shit or admitted that he was an asshole half the time… most of the time. "Uh, yeah, I'd like that." I was too stumped to say anything else.

I stood and headed toward my closet. "Wait, before you leave…" Tucked away on a shelf was a brand-new copy of Rubber Soul . I pulled it down off the shelf and handed it to him. "This doesn't replace sentimentality and memories, but I still wanted to replace this for you."

He took the record and looked at it, frowning, his long bangs falling in his face.

"I shouldn't have borrowed it. Again, I'm sorry. I figured you still wanted to hear the music, even if I did ruin your record."

His brows furrowed, and his hazel eyes turned red, but he took a deep breath, shoving the emotions back. "Thanks."

That was all he said before walking out of my room, leaving me wondering if we would ever really get along.

I bounced Hannah on my knee as I dug into my mashed potatoes with her spoon and brought it to her mouth. She grabbed my wrist with two chunky hands and took a bite, getting more food on her face than in her mouth.

We all tried to help with Hannah, especially since Mom had to go back to work. When we couldn't watch her, she spent the day with our elderly neighbor, who babysat her for some extra income.

Before I could take a bite of some roasted chicken, my fork hovering over my mouth, Hannah yelled out, "Mah! Mah!"

I brought the chicken to her. She plucked it from the fork and picked the meat apart with her fingers, staring at it cross-eyed, before shoving greasy bits into her mouth.

"Are you going to let me eat, Hannah Banana?"

Mom snorted a laugh. "That girl has a voracious appetite, just like you did when you were little."

I kissed Hannah's blond hair, which was finally thickening. "Like sister, like brother." However, she had some Logan in her, too.

Wyatt put his fork down and wiped his mouth before taking a sip of beer. "So, are you boys ready for your trip?"

Logan nodded. "Yeah, we went over the plans today."

His dad smirked. "Yet, I didn't hear any fighting. Color me shocked."

Logan and I both rolled our eyes, making our parents laugh.

"Mia and I would like you boys to have something."

Wyatt pulled out his wallet and grabbed a credit card, sliding it across the table toward Logan. "We got this for your trip. It has a two-thousand-dollar limit on it. That's a lot of money. We want you boys to use it for gas and food or if you have an emergency. You all have quite a bit of money saved already, and you'll use that for anything else you might buy."

"Thanks, Dad and Mia," Logan said.

"Yeah, thanks."

"There are rules," Mom said. "This money doesn't only come from the goodness of our hearts. You are to call us every single day. Call us collect if you have to. We want to know if you boys are safe at all times. Understood?"

"Yes, ma'am," we said.

"Keep to the speed limit and wear your seat belts. If you two get pulled over or arrested, we're not going to bail you out if you do something stupid. You're good boys, but things happen."

Logan and I nodded.

"We'll be careful," I said.