Once Upon a Road Trip (37 page)

“Not easy being the oldest, is it?” Angie gave a commiserating chuckle. She patted at her pockets to locate her own wallet and drew out a picture. “This is my little sis.”

Grady plucked the photo from her hands and flipped it around. His eyebrows shot upward. “Wow.”

Angie expected that reaction. Her sister was just as stunning as Grady’s, by her estimation. Her hair was a warm, golden brown and waist-length, framing her petite face in loose waves. Her eyes were large and shown a brilliant blue. To top it off, she touted a flawless smile from behind full, pouty lips. “Yeah. She gets people’s attention, too.”

“She’s really pretty,” he remarked, seeming enthralled. “And…you know…dainty. She looks like a pixie.”

Angie nodded. “I know. Most people find it hard to believe we’re sisters.”

“I can see why.” Grady stared at the picture a moment longer before handing it back, looking suddenly abashed. “I mean, you’re pretty too! Just...in a different way.”  

  Angie formed a dismissive smirk, shaking her head as she replaced the picture.
“We’re different on just about every level—which is probably why we’ve never gotten along. But, hopefully once we both move out we can figure out how to be friends.”   

“So, you’ve really never dated at all?” Grady diverted back to a point from earlier in their conversation, which she guessed was an attempt to recover from his verbal blunder.

“Nope.” She shrugged, replacing her wallet. “I couldn’t even get a date to senior prom. And I asked four guys to go with me just as friends, so it’s not like I didn’t try.”

“The guys up there must be morons,” he groused.

“It’s okay—it’s starting to feel more like an accomplishment.” Angie mustered a half smile, glad she’d gotten to the point where she honestly meant it. If the road trip had done nothing else for her, it had at least given her that much growth. She was done with feeling sorry for herself. “I think it was an expected part of high school for people to play relationship musical chairs. But I didn’t want to risk hurting somebody unless I was serious about them.” She paused for a few seconds to consider, drawing her knees up to her chest in reflection. “So I guess I’m kind of…intense. I’d probably be too much for most guys to handle, anyway.”

Grady shook his head, holding up a hand in assurance. “Hey, at least you’re up-front about it and not all into mind games. The girls around here are crazy.”

“I don’t think that’s a regional thing. Most of the girls -I- know are crazy.” Angie laughed. “I mean…I’m not claiming sanity here. I have been driving around the country by myself for weeks.”

“Yeah, but that’s an awesome kind of crazy.” He grinned in admiration.

Uncomfortable with the praise, Angie looked back across the room at Vince’s sleeping form. His face was turned away from them, but from what she could tell, he hadn’t moved at all in the last hour. “Tell me about Vince,” she heard herself say before realizing she’d put the thought into words. She looked back to Grady with a tight smile. Trying not to come across as too interested, she added, “I haven’t had much luck getting to know him since I got here.”

Grady raised a single brow in surprise. “Really? Vince is pretty easy going, usually.” He hesitated, casting a glance toward his sleeping friend before returning his attention to her. “Well, he’s a great guy. We’ve been like brothers since we met in high school.” He diverted his eyes upward , seeming to collect his thoughts. “He started out at some private school in Mississippi, and I guess public school here was kind of a joke in comparison. He was always ahead of everybody and bored to tears.”

Grady chuckled in reflection and then seemed to sober. “He hasn’t had it easy, though. I think his parents get along fine when they’re not drinking, but…they drink too much sometimes. I used to stay over all the time, and it seemed like his parents were always coming home from the bar screaming and cussing at each other. Weekends, weekdays, it didn’t seem to matter. He’d have to go break them up and make them go to bed. I don’t think he’ll ever drink—he knows how ugly it can get.”

Angie felt her brows pinch in sympathy. “Oh. That must have been hard on him.” She secured her arms around her calves, allowing her chin to rest atop her right knee.

Grady shrugged a shoulder. “I know it sounds a little messed up, but he’s been doing that since he was a kid. To him, it’s normal. I think he’s just glad they stayed together this long.” He shifted uneasily. “His parents are really nice people—they just…do their own thing. You know, free spirits. As long as Vince got good grades, they didn’t bother him. Sometimes I wished my parents were that lax.”

Angie frowned. “I don’t think you would have liked feeling responsible for your parents.”

“Yeah, maybe not,” Grady said, brow creased with concern. “It’s just hard to imagine swapping places with him, you know?”

She nodded, knowing precisely what he meant. She’d been trying to picture herself in Vince’s position from the moment Grady began sharing his observations, but the idea impressed her as altogether foreign and devastatingly lonely.

Grady wasn’t one to let silence linger. “Anyway, so Vince started going to church with my family. He’d never really been before, and he had a lot of questions. He picks stuff up fast, so when it got to where I couldn’t answer something, I brought him to the youth pastor. They got along pretty well, so Vince started coming to the youth group with me and a few other guys. We all ended up getting baptized together. Formed a band in Vince’s basement... We were really fired up for a while there.” He recounted with a wistful smile and a liberal use of hand gestures. “Things were pretty good. And they stayed that way until around the middle of our senior year.”

Angie sat up a little straighter, curiosity piqued. “Did…something happen?”

“Alaina happened.” Grady made a face, rubbing at the back of his neck as though some of the tension had returned. “One of the girls we hung out with a lot. She was kind of like you—tough, smart, different. She was just like one of the guys, up until she and Vince ended up in a play together. They had this scene where they kissed. It wasn’t a big deal, but after the play was over, a couple of her friends kept telling Vince that Alaina was in love with him. They begged him to ask her out.”

“And…he did?”

Grady grimaced, lowering his head. “Vince didn’t plan on dating anybody until he got to college. Said he wanted to be in a better position to take care of somebody else. But I…kind of told him it was a good idea.” His tone was rueful. “See, Alaina had this really hostile thing against the whole concept of faith. Something about a bad experience she had at a bible camp, or something. I figured if anybody could show it to her in a different light, it’d be Vince.”

“Ah,” Angie said, keeping her face as neutral as possible. She could already sense he was alluding to an emotional train wreck, and wondered if she was staring at its unwitting conductor. “I take it that didn’t turn out very well.”

Grady shook his head. “He fell for her after a while…started chauffeuring her around everywhere and doing whatever she wanted. He got set on making her happy, and he quit going to church. I don’t know if she actually made him stop coming or what, but I know she was having a lot more of an effect on him than he was having on her. By then, I was busy with my own girlfriend issues, so I really wasn’t looking out for him like I should have.” His expression twisted with guilt.

“After we graduated, Alaina got accepted to a college a few hours away. I guess she started right away with summer classes, because she moved there just a week or two after graduation. Vince got a job in Birmingham, but he worked it out where he was driving to see her every weekend. It seemed like that was going to work fine for them. But then, out of the blue he gets this ‘Dear John’ email after she’d been down there just a couple of weeks—”

Angie winced. “She broke up with him in an email?”

Grady nodded. “I was here when he read it. Something about how they were growing up now, and should be free to go their separate ways. He tried to call her to figure out what was going on, but she blew him off. He had to find out from some mutual friends that she’d pretty much gone wild as soon as she got there—partying every night and going home with different guys,” he went on, solemn in tone. “She told Vince they were through the day after she moved in with two guys she met at some frat party.”

Angie’s jaw tightened in mounting indignation. “So, she basically ripped out his heart and fed it to a wood chipper. No remorse.” She heard the flatness in her own voice as she summed it up. Part of her found it odd how fast Grady’s insights had moved her from being uncertain about Vince to protective of him.

“I don’t know.” Grady gave a slow, sad shake of his head. “But I remember she had this phrase she really liked: ‘Never say you’re sorry.’ She went around and signed everybody’s yearbook with it. So maybe that just became her life’s motto.”

“That’s not exactly justification for being so…callous,” Angie muttered in disdain. “Her parents wouldn’t be just a little disappointed if they knew what she’d been up to?” she asked, hoping he might provide her with a reason for pity over animosity.

Grady snorted. “I don’t think they’d ever believe it. Not that she’d be honest with them about any of it. She always said they didn’t understand her—”

“Oh, boo hoo,” Angie droned, rolling her eyes as she made the motions of playing an invisible violin. 

Grady chuckled, but it didn’t quite pass for humorous.

Angie frowned as something nagged at the back of her mind. “I think I remember Vince acting different online. It would have been…a little over a year ago? He came up with a couple of new evil villain concepts around then, and a lot of really dark plotlines.” She wanted to kick herself for not making the connection until now.

I never thought to ask why.

Grady nodded. “It tore him up. He got depressed, and I ended up staying with him a lot. He had me really worried for a while,” he confided. “I guess that’s how he coped. He kept himself busy with college and his job—filled in any leftover time with the internet and gaming.”

Angie stood and stepped up to the dresser. She remembered seeing one particular picture had been laid face down, behind a handful of ceramic dragon figurines and next to a childhood photo of Vince with his father in a fireman’s uniform. She cast a glance over her shoulder again to make sure Vince was still asleep before she picked up the frame. “Is this…her?” she asked Grady, motioning with a tilt of her head to the prom portrait featuring Vince in a tux, poised genteelly while holding the arm of a tall, slender girl in a crimson gown.

Grady peered up at it and nodded. “Yeah.” He then added offhandedly, “See why you remind me of her a little? I bet you can pull off a dress pretty well, too.” 

Angie studied the picture, struggling to ignore his attempted compliment. True, they both shared darker features and hair, but that was where any physical similarities diverged. Angie didn’t consider herself to have the keenest eye for beauty, but she did have a decent grasp of symmetry — and this girl’s face didn’t have it. Her smile was lopsided, with a greater upturn to the left side that was emphasized by the framing of midnight curls she wore down over bony shoulders. There was a slight turn to her pronounced nose, and her eyes were deeply set — giving them a beady quality that struck Angie as sinister. She had to wonder if her perception of Alaina would be the same if she hadn’t first heard of the wanton harm the girl had inflicted.

“No…I don’t see it,” Angie said at last, setting the frame back down onto its face before crouching back to Grady’s level.
And I don’t want to.
“Girls like her give all of us a bad name. It’s probably a good thing I won’t be meeting her,” Angie added, surprised by the anger creeping into her voice. What had gotten into her? From what she’d been told, it wasn’t as though the girl in question had claimed to uphold some value system that she’d subsequently violated. Common decency wasn’t truly common, after all. For all Angie knew, Alaina’s choices had trapped her in a bleak cycle of self-perpetuating misery.

Not that it should matter to me
, she reminded herself.

“I think I’d pay to see you two duke it out,” Grady said, with a halfhearted  grin of amusement. He had a definite charm to him, Angie decided. But given a few hours to observe him, she’d begun to suspect that he was more of an affable yes-man than an independent thinker. While she couldn’t fault him for it, she was rapidly becoming worked-up , and she would’ve preferred the company of someone who could keep her in check.

“It’d be a short catfight,” Angie asserted with quiet confidence. She palmed the knuckles of her right hand, eliciting a low chorus of cracking from the joints before adding, “I’d promise to rearrange her nose, but I think that’d just be doing her a favor.” She winced then, as her conscience gave her a sharp scolding.

Grady clamped a hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter. He looked off across the room then and froze, letting his hand fall away. “…Vince?  You okay, man?”

Startled by the abrupt change in his demeanor, Angie followed Grady’s gaze to the futon. Vince was now sitting up, glazed eyes fixed on the television screen near them that had long ago returned to the movie’s menu display. If he’d heard Grady’s question, he showed no sign of it. He couldn’t have been like that for more than a few minutes, she was certain, but that fact didn’t do anything to lessen the eeriness in his stare.

“Is he awake?” Angie asked Grady in alarm. She knew of people who would sleep-walk, but there was something disconcerting to her about the idea of sleep-sitting.

“I don’t know.” Grady got to his feet and crossed the room. He crouched down at Vince’s feet, placing himself directly in his friend’s line of sight. “Vince?”

Angie followed close behind, unnerved by the vacant manner in which Vince continued to stare through and past Grady. She would have been tempted to describe his state as catatonic, but she didn’t want to jump to conclusions. It occurred to her then that his breathing seemed heavier than it should for someone at rest. While Grady tapped the top of his friend’s foot, seeming at a loss, Angie eased herself onto the futon beside Vince. She noticed then his hands — clenched into fists at his sides — were shaking.