Survival Of The Fittest

((Raina Rose continued from I Know What My Fortune Is))

It had taken a lot less convincing than Raina had anticipated to get Wayne to go along with her plan, if you could call "drive aimlessly around town at midnight blasting music" a plan. His car was too old to have a jack that she could plug her phone into, but they'd managed to find a radio station with acceptably modern music and the speakers worked well enough. She had her legs tucked up under her in the cracked faux-leather passenger seat and her hair down to let the wind rushing through the open window whip it back from her face. The music was loud enough that they had to raise their voices a bit to be understandable over it. Her face ached a bit from how much she'd been grinning, because really, when did she ever get to do something like this?

First order of business had been hitting up the late-night drive through at Wendy's for snacks. Raina was currently trying to sell Wayne on the merits of dipping his fries into his Frosty. He'd been skeptical so far, but she thought she was probably wearing him down.

Next order of business: go wherever. See whatever, do whatever. Her parents knew she'd planned to get a ride home with a (acceptably sober) friend at the end of the night instead of having one of them come back out to get her, so she hadn't bothered to tell them she left the party. If Wayne had anyone waiting up for him, he hadn't bothered to mention it.

The streetlights rolled over the car as they turned down another road that led to who-knows-where in some neighborhood Raina didn't think she'd ever visited before; nobody she knew must live here, or if they did, she'd never been to their house for one reason or another. Uncharted territory.

She dipped another fry into her shake and popped it in her mouth, catching Wayne's eye with a grin as she did so. Definitely wearing him down. She was going to get him to try it before the night was over.

((Wayne Cox continued from I Know What My Fortune Is))

Wayne rolled his eyes, but he couldn't pretend like he wasn't smiling, too, just a bit. Her cheer was infectious.

Still, the Frosty thing? No way. He was up for an adventure, not insanity. He'd never tried anything like that before. Refused to, in what was surely a completely impartial way. French fries were salty, sometimes crispy. Shakes were sweet, more solid than liquid, but only just. Dip the former in the latter, and the result he predicted? A mushy mess of salty sweetness.

He wasn't going to give up the fight just yet, no matter how good Raina made it look.

In more serious news, he was also the one who needed to keep his eyes on the road. They were driving through empty streets, through places he'd never bothered to navigate before. It wasn't difficult; the streets were straight enough to fall asleep on, with right angles forming them into grids, as if waiting for future expansion. Kingman was no big city. The older he got, the smaller it felt. He would probably never leave it for good - a thought not to be examined closely, to be muted under the music and the rush of wind past the open windows.

The car rolled to a near stop at a stop sign, pausing long enough for him to grab a french fry (sans shake dip) and then press his foot on the gas again. It didn't seem to matter yet where they were going, whether it was left, right, or straight ahead.

"How long do you think before we hit another dead end?" he called over the din.

Raina shrugged, then added an "I dunno," for Wayne benefit since he was steadfastly keeping his gaze on the road ahead. She liked not being upside down in a ditch as much as the next girl, so she didn't complain.

She thought about making some kind of "om nom nom" sound effect in regards to her fries-and-Frosty combo to tease him, but that was probably childish and he wouldn't hear her over the music anyway. She'd have to yell, and he probably wouldn't get it, and then she'd have to explain the joke and it wouldn't be remotely funny by the time they got through all that.

Instead she said, "I've never been to this neighborhood before, so I don't know how big it is. We'll probably hit a cul-de-sac eventually though and then we can turn around." And after that they'd go... somewhere else. Maybe home. Maybe out to the desert, as far out as one of the ghost towns that dotted the Mojave like freckles on a sunburned face. Maybe they'd go nowhere.

Raina was fine with all of that, for now.

"What about you? This pretty far from your normal hangout, or no?"

"Not really. Might have played a game of basketball around here once, though," Wayne said, easing up more, his eyes straying from the road every so often to glance in Raina's general direction as they talked. She didn't seem like the basketball type. He'd known he wasn't for a while now, on account of his unremarkable height and how little he cared for the sport. It was just something to keep himself occupied, or to use for small talk - one of his only hobbies that he felt passed muster in polite conversation.

They were going twenty, twenty-five now, and unless some car pulled out right in front of them with lights off, he was beginning to think his driving was good enough. He let it fade into a background routine: a light foot on the gas, the occasional scan of empty streets, watching for headlights in the dark.

"What do you like to do, anyway? Your life not enough of an adventure normally?"

He meant to leave it at that as he went for another french fry. Instead, a stray thought caught him in the middle of the motion, and as the french fry dangled in his grasp, the corner of his mouth curved in amusement. He let the feeling linger. "Hey, if we're lucky, maybe this road'll go out the other side of this community instead, widen all the way up until we end up in Vegas."

Raina snorted. "Please, my life would be the most boring thing on the face of the Earth if I didn't find ways to entertain myself." Get up, go to school, do homework, go to bed early, repeat. Eat three square meals in between all that, give or take a few snacks. If she never took it upon herself to look for something interesting in all that, well, what was even the point? "I don't go out a lot, family rules and all. Too bad the party kind of sucked, but we're having our own fun, right?"

She dipped another fry and chewed thoughtfully, smiling slightly at Wayne's quip about Vegas. "That'd be fine by me, I've never been. We'll have to pick up some fake IDs and see if we can hit the jackpot at any casinos, then we could have some real fun." Whatever "real fun" might actually be, she wasn't sure, but she was secure in the certainty that it would involve spending a lot of money irresponsibly. Maybe they'd go to a strip club and see what all the fuss was about. Maybe they'd go to a male strip club.

Raina couldn't help but giggle at herself, at that completely unrealistic and immature line of thought. This was what having fun and adventure was, though, right? Having good food and silly thoughts, not being entirely sure of where you were at or where you were going. "You ever been to Vegas?"

"Once," Wayne said, sticking his almost forgotten fry into his mouth. "With family, so... you know. My sister dragged me around all day, and it was hot, and by the time I got back I just flopped on the bed and blocked out the memories." He chuckled. "Lower end of Vegas experiences, I hope."

It wasn't the entire truth. How he remembered the city was different from what he'd imagined it as, and it wasn't the sort of thing he thought belonged in this lighthearted conversation. Well, it could - he could have put some sort of spin on it - but... Vegas felt fake to him. Sleazy. Neon lights, false fronts, and cigarette smoke, cards depicting silhouettes of women with questionable proportions pressed deep into the pavement by the feet of the crowds, men with grubby hands hawking bottled water at exorbitant prices in the desert heat.

Just flash and glitz and nothing else. If he'd wanted to run away from reality, he'd have just stayed home and played Counter-Strike. If Las Vegas wanted to manipulate his wallet, he wanted to at least have gotten something from the entire experience.

Still, he'd been far too young to try anything, really. There had to be another side, something that felt more real or more fake or just plain better - maybe he just hadn't been there long enough, or in the right places, or with the right people.

Raina had a nice laugh, he thought.

An hour there, spend some time, an hour back - Eve would kill him for the gas, but he could almost believe it was worth a shot. And if they changed their minds on the way, they'd still get to have a desert drive. Nothing but open road.

"I might just accidentally hit the 93 in a bit, then." They hit the cul-de-sac; he turned the car around, and let a smile slip fully onto his face. "I probably can't be blamed for losing my way home with you distracting me."

"I guess we'll accidentally go to Vegas, then," Raina said, twirling another fry before dipping it. "Getting lost is half the fun anyway, right?" As long as they didn't end up with a flat tire somewhere down the line, they could drive around all night, and she didn't particularly care where they ended up.

"And you know, like... everyone seems to have a story, right? About when they were teenagers and did some crazy thing, and how their parents were so mad and grounded them but it was all worth it? I need a story like that, before I have to go and be an adult." Which wasn't to say that she didn't want to grow up or wanted to be sixteen and in Cochise High School in Kingman forever, but... well, sometimes she did feel like she was missing out. Hardly any parties, almost nobody at school who would really engage with her on the level she wanted. Loathe as Raina was to admit it, she could sometimes see the appeal in being someone like Maria Cucinotta and having no care in the world besides where the booze would come from next.

The difference was that Raina looked ahead. She knew what was waiting for her when she graduated and where she was going in life. Bigger and better things; in five years, the high school parties, or lack of them, wouldn't matter at all.

But tonight, she was doing something exciting for once.

"Onward then, fearless leader. We're boldly going where no Cochise student has gone before." She grinned and gave Wayne a mock salute.

He was a leader now, was he?

He wasn't much of a leader. He wasn't much of anything when he cared to think about it, but he didn't have to think right now. This wasn't a time for thinking, no more than it was a time for picking holes in what he did, what people said, how they judged him, how he deserved to be judged.

The open road had a certain appeal to it. He could take a moment and free himself from all his chains for a night.

They'd drive and maybe they'd get to Vegas and maybe they wouldn't but hell, he'd let himself have fun. Even if he wasn't the best person to be here, even if there was always a first choice, someone else's best friend, and he was a replacement and a fraud, he could still make the most of it. He barely knew Raina; now he knew her better. They probably wouldn't ever hang out after this; right now, he could still live in the moment. It was an optimistic way of thinking of things.

It was good enough. Wayne returned the mock salute, steadying the wheel with his other hand.

"Speaking of crazy things, hang on to your seat belt," he said, grinning back. "I'm about to go fifty in a forty-five zone."

And after a moment of thought, he dipped a fry in his shake and popped it into his mouth. She could have that victory.

((Wayne Cox continued in V6))

Raina laughed. "Wow, don't get carried away now." She gripped her seat belt with her free hand anyway as Wayne eased the speedometer up.

In the end, they technically made it to Vegas. About an hour there, chatting, laughing, turning the radio up too loud, until the city lights rose up over the horizon. They didn't go past the city limits.

Better not to ruin the magic.

Almost an hour back, eyelids getting heavy, more laughing because everything seemed funnier when you were a certain kind of tired. He dropped her off in front of her house, and she made some vague statement about paying him back for gas, which he waved off.

Before she got out of the car, Raina turned to Wayne. "Hey, close your eyes." She leaned in before he could really comply, took some kind of pleasure in the surprise on his face, and-

-popped one of her now-cold fries in his mouth.

"See you later, Wayne!" She slid out of the car and dashed inside without checking his reaction.

She slept way, way late the next day, but she slept well.

((Raina Rose continued elsewhere))