We all got together at the house just after dawn and decided that it would save gas if we drove together. My sister thought it was a grand plan, and as the boys tossed their stuff in my car’s trunk, I got the thing started. Hardly a goodbye and we were on the road still slightly groggy from going to bed too late and getting up too early. They sat in the back seat and Noel in the front leaning the seat back a little to catch some sleep - he said - until I tuned the radio to that all-news station and he decided that it was impossible to get any shut-eye in that position anyways. Several rude remarks about how nasal those woman reporters were and how many bugs were hitting the window later and we had one of those rollicking conversations going about things that we don’t really remember all these years on but seemed incredibly important at the time. Maybe they were and the point isn’t to remember them but to forget them before they have a chance to haunt you.

He flipped through my music looking at the titles and deciding on whether or not he actually like anything I had in there. “Mostly stuff I’ve never heard of,” he told me which conflicted me. I always wanted people to like the music I had but as it turns out most people don’t like to hear anything they aren’t already familiar with, especially when they’re in the car on a summer morning and the coffee’s just working its way into the bloodstream. Listening to generic music on the back roads: it seems like a summer tradition in retrospect.

We drove for what felt like hours but was probably only two. I remember saying something about living in Japan - like I knew anything about Japan at all - and how you didn’t even have to drive a car there and how you could go from one side of the country to the other just taking trains. Also something about living with your parents for so long you forget what it’s like not to have a family, so unlike here where we all split and separate and fracture and go our own ways like the country is some great field for us to spread out roots it. Maybe it has something do with size… so many places to go and so much empty space that we feel as if we must eventually drift away to different parts of this vast wilderness and only talk to eachother over buzzing wires. Did I say that our telephony is an analog to their trains? I can’t remember but in the last analysis that doesn’t really work as the Japanese have more wires hanging around than we do or more waves in the air or however it is they constantly talk to eachother. But then, I don’t know much about Japan and never have.

We began to feel almost there as soon as we could see where the land stopped like an abrupt drop-off and the horizon met with that beautiful blue of the lake or ocean, and Noel chose another disc, some punk-pop band that always leaned too close to utter cheesyness for my tastes while at the same time serving up catchy hooks and listenable melodies, a phrase that popped into my head and made me wonder why I sounded so much like a music magazine. I remember us all singing so loud it made our heads hurt, but the songs are lost in the time between now and then. Again I suppose that doesn’t really matter as much as the way we grin about that time we made the car swerve back and forth on the road like you were drunk doyouremember?

Thinking of it now, we were real children and didn’t probably deserve to be driving anywhere listening to any sort of music, or perhaps we were adults only playing at being teenagers strung out on caffiene and hopped up on sugar. In any case we had the sort of fun that doesn’t involve having to think about how much fun is going on which I think is the best sort: you can shut down all the neurons you use all week and shove the girl troubles and job troubles and school troubles into the back of your head and act like if you just sing a little louder and drive a little faster and act a little weirder the weekend will last forever.

We got there, paid the girl in the suffocatingly small building, parked. We took off our shoes, slathered lotion all over eachother and grabbed the sports equipment from the trunk before running over the dunes to the beach. This was of course before me and her - but that’s another story about the same beach that I’ll save for a different time, when we’re all old and all the connections have started to fade and we need to break out old mysteries to make our bland pasts more intriguing. Do you remember thinking we should have kept our shoes on when the boardwalk started burning our feet? I do.

Tags: fiction