3 by Moskowitz, Hannah (best time to read books .txt) 📕

3

By Hannah Moskowitz

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Hannah Moskowitz

To Kat and Jeff:

Thanks for the ride.

1

Aanya drives with her left hand over the side of her convertible so she can make waves with her long fingers while we ride the interstate. When she first got this car, on her sixteenth birthday, we used to break every speed limit on every road, and I would throw my arms in the air like I was on a roller coaster and then reach over and grab the wheel so that she could do it too. She didn't even have a full license then, just a learner's permit. We should have gotten in trouble, but we never do, me and Aanya. Never did.

              Now, the waves she's making are slow and heavy because we're driving as slowly as we reasonably can. Car horns are complaining at us the same way they used to when we tore down the streets. “Aw, bite me!” she yells at a guy who zips past on our left and gives her the finger. He merges in front of us and she makes a face for him to see in his rearview mirror.

              I laugh. Her phone jangles, and she waves at me to get it. “You've got a text,” I say.

              “Jake?”

              “Obviously,” I say. Aanya's one of those types who hand-picks a few people and dives right into them and never comes up for air.  In Aanya's world, when she's not at home playing Perfect Only Child, there are two people in the world and two only: Jake, her boyfriend since the seventh grade, and me, her best friend since second.

              “He's just sad he didn't get to come send you off,” she says.

              “I don't think he'd even fit.” The tiny backseat of Aanya's car is packed with boxes. Most of my stuff is either in a U-Haul somewhere on this same highway—decently ahead of us, since it's likely going at a more reasonable speed—or already at Dominic's house, probably stacked up nicely in the room that used to be his home office. He already painted the walls for me, grass-green like I asked. He's a good guy.

              “We'd make him squish,” she says. “We could crush him under your Lego collection and bam, squished Jake. They're like a home-squishing machine.”

              “I don't have that many Legos.”

              “I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the rattling in my backseat. Look at this asshole,” she says, and leans on the horn.

              “Maybe we have to go a little faster.”

              She turns her head to me, frowning under her bug-eye sunglasses. “Taylor, no.”

              “I know.”

              “What does the text say?” she says.

              “Reminding you about Kelly's party this weekend.”

              “Kelly's party without youuu,” she whines. “This is the end of the world, you know.”

              “Missing Kelly's party is the end of the world?”

              “No, screw Kelly, I don't care about Kelly.”

              “Well that's not very nice,” I say, very dryly, because Kelly is bubbly and bland and a difficult person to stir up a lot of feelings for.

              “It's a symbol,” she says. “A symbol of our apartness.”

              “It's just three hours. We'll see each other all the time.”

              “That's what people always say right before they break up.”

              “We're not dating.” I bring my hand up to the steering wheel and link her pinky with mine. We're wearing matching nail polish.

              She curls her finger to give mine a little squeeze. “Which is why it would be all the more tragic if we broke up.”

              I take my hand away as quickly as I can without being noticeable. It's not like me; Aanya and I have always been touchy, heads on shoulders, elbow-in-elbow while we're walking, which is why I reached out to her just now in the first place. It's my instinct. But I'm nervous that if I keep touching her right now, even this little bit, she's going to physically feel what I'm thinking, and she won't like it. Because of course I am sad to be leaving Aanya, and the suburb of Miami I've lived in since I was born, and my other friends from school, and the bench outside the pet supply store where I had my first kiss and the crack in our cul-de-sac where I used to hide my worm collection and the graffiti penis Aanya and I left on the top of the school gym that no one's found yet.

              I'll miss it. I know it, but I don't feel it. I just feel the wind tapping my face as we inch along.

              Aanya would be heartbroken if she knew I'd been dreaming of this for years. My mother had a few serious boyfriends before Dominic, and I had to nurse her through more than one broken heart, but as soon as we met Dom, I knew he was the one. It's been four years now: three years of commutes to and from his place in Arcadia when I was too young to leave alone and sleeping in the pull-out-couch in the office that wasn't yet my bedroom, giggling about him and my mom having sex a few doors down, and then a fourth year of wandering our empty house on weekends once I was old enough to leave alone, when Dominic couldn't come to us because he had work or custody of his daughter and my mom had to drive down instead, and I had to stay home and do Chemistry homework while I dreamed about what it would be like to have a dad.

              Aanya, from her perfect two-parent, one-child household, couldn't understand. She'd be too hurt to realize that it's not so unreasonable that I'd trade living five minutes away from her for three hours and a family.

              Jake texts again. “What does he want?” she says.

              “Eh, who cares.”

              “Nooo,” she