More than Distance

26

Doing it again with Carla now brought back a rare yet pleasant feeling of nostalgia, except for the heavy silence between us. In fact, Carla barely even looked my way at all. At first, I figured she was focused completely on the race, but after an hour of driving I realized she just didn’t want to talk to me.

This was going to be a long journey.

We rolled past a car that had “Wash Me” written on the back in scraggly, dusty lines. Carla took a photo and crossed it off the list. “That’s three!”

“Nice one.”

She settled back in her seat. The pointed silence crept across the car again. I’d kill for some music right now, but we weren’t allowed to play any because it would interfere with the mics. But a road trip without music wasn’t right at all.

I cleared my throat. “Tell me about your life while I was gone.” My eyes left the road to glance at her. She stared out the window at the bleak landscape, her arms crossed over her breasts. She wore a pale orange dress that had ridden up to her thighs. Smooth, curvy, very tempting thighs. I forced my eyes forward again. “Daniel hasn’t told me much.”

She didn’t answer at first, but then uncrossed her arms. “There’s not much you don’t already know. I graduated from high school, went to UCLA, majored in theater, and worked as a model on the side.” She gave a slight shrug and I got the feeling I wouldn’t get much more out of her without some prying.

“Who’d you go to prom with?”

She turned toward me with her mouth open, but quickly recovered. “Um. Brad Johnson.”

“Brad Johnson? That guy? No way.”

“What’s wrong with Brad Johnson?”

“He was head of the chess club.”

“So what? That just meant he was smart.”

“You hate chess. And he was a full head shorter than you, last I remember.”

“I don’t care about that.” She crossed her arms again. “He was a nice guy.”

“Nice.” My hands gripped the steering wheel so hard I was surprised it didn’t break. “He wasn’t your type at all.”

She huffed. “What do you know about my type?”

“I thought I was your type.”

The look she gave me could have melted the skin off of a lesser man. I pointedly raised my eyes to the cameras filming everything we said and did. She took the hint and her fierce expression dropped down a notch.

“Of course you are,” she said, in a monotone that wouldn’t convince anyone. Only a few hours in and we were already doing a s**t job pretending to be a couple. I hoped they’d edit all this out later.

“Surely there was a better choice than Brad Johnson.” Why was I bringing this up again? I had no f*****g clue. I was a dog with a bone and couldn’t let go of it.

“He was the only one who asked me.”

I gave her a skeptical look. “You expect me to believe that?”

“Believe it. I wasn’t exactly Miss Popular in school.”

“Bullshit. You should have had boys falling all over you. What kind of i***t wouldn’t want a model who can fix cars?”

“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said, her voice razor sharp.

“That was different. You and I—”

She turned toward the window again, her posture stiff. “It’s fine. We don’t need to talk about it.”

“No. I handled it all wrong and—”

“Please, let’s just drop it.” Her voice wavered, almost like she was about to cry.

Shit. I had to fix this. But nothing I said could make up for or explain what I’d done six years ago or how I’d avoided her ever since. I scrubbed a hand over my face and tried again. “Carla—”

She suddenly jerked up, grabbing the camera. “Look! Tumbleweed!”

A big clump of dead sticks and weeds rolled across the freeway in the wind, like something out of an old west movie. Carla snapped a couple photos and then turned to me, our argument forgotten for now. “That makes four! Now we can head directly to the challenge and skip the other locations.”

* * *

We crossed the Nevada state line and came upon Buffalo Bill’s immediately, a casino with a roller coaster and flashing neon signs, before we were driving through endless desert again. The sun beat down on us and we cranked the air conditioning up even higher. And then, finally, we made it to the sparkling city in the middle of nowhere, Las Vegas.

“Remember when we went to Vegas with your parents?” I asked.

“Of course.” A tiny smile touched her lips. “That was a fun trip, even though we were too young to do much beyond stuffing our faces at the buffets.”

“We rode the roller coaster at New York-New York eight times.”

Her face was full of memories. “You and Daniel kept trying to convince bartenders you were both 21, but it never worked.”

“Can’t blame us for trying.”

“You were fifteen!”

“Hey, I looked at least eighteen.”

The smile on her lips died and she looked away again. “Then we had to end the trip early.” I’d tried to bury that memory. Carla had started throwing up on our second night in Vegas. Her parents thought it was the stomach flu and they took us all home, but she didn’t get better. A few days later she was diagnosed with leukemia.