The story of a few revelations.
It was August when Travis and Connor stuck their heads in her cabin. "One year. Coast-to-coast. You in?"
Katie was drawing vines up a piece of paper, steady-handed and casual, as the leaves made of lead streaks came just as easily as the real ones.
Travis and Connor made the offer, shook on it, signed the deal with a grand flourish. "One year. Coast-to-coast. You in?"
The three of them, they left that afternoon. The thing about being a demigod (and knowing it) is that you never make too many plans, never anchor yourself too much, that when the time came that you left on a quest or got a knife to the chest, there was less to be left unfinished.
They had a car, a sports car that was older than them and pockmarked with rust, eating away at the metal at the edges of the wheel rims and trunk.
Katie sat in the back in a thin sundress, on a blanket they kept back there, shifting her leather-booted feet on the floorboards that were littered with old shirts, empty glass bottles, a couple of weapons. From the back she had the real, true scenic view: a couple of ashy blonde, shaggy haired heads and the open road stretching on and on. She turned around and saw the road behind, dirt kicked up, blacktop shimmering in the distance right above the horizon.
She didn't pack a bag, didn't have a phone. She didn't know how they were going to eat or sleep. It was impulsive, in both the best and worst ways, and the adrenaline pumped through her in a way she wasn't used to, making her feel both light and heavy, free and weighed-down.
"What's the plan?" She piped up, as she began to unlace her boots so she could swing her legs up. She had the whole backseat, anyway.
"There isn't one." Connor was driving and Katie didn't know if he even had a driver's license, but it didn't seem all that important, as she'd done much, much more dangerous stuff for much less than the feeling of being free.
And that was the first revelation: there wasn't a better feeling she'd ever known than the one in the back of her mind, as she rested her head on the center divider and wove her fingers into the scratchy-rough strands of the blanket on the seat.
A day later, there was a place in West Virginia, in a small town called Roderville or Yoderville, maybe. Travis was in the back, sleeping away, so Katie was up front when she spotted the sign and she pointed, not wanting to speak around the mouthful of sweet corn, courtesy of her, and popcorn, courtesy of the twins.
The concert was blues music, which Katie hadn't had much chance to hear before but liked a lot by the end of the night. The venue was a field out in the middle of nowhere, and there'd been a trampled down section of grass that people had started two-stepping and slow-dancing on, as guitars and fiddles and banjos and one, deep and rolling voice poured out songs about things that didn't make a lot of sense. The guy who grabbed Katie's hand and said, 'Let's dance' was nice enough, and if Katie hadn't been so angled towards the stable and permanent, she might've danced a little closer, stroked the back of his neck. But she liked something she knew, and liked knowing she'd be taken and understood, and this guy had never seen the things she had, which didn't make him bad or wrong at all, just lucky. So she danced with him and laughed when she stepped on his feet, grabbing at his shoulders when she tripped for the speed of the dance, and knew that would be that, and it was fine.
They stopped for the night at the top of some hill in Missouri, recognizing that it would be the last time they saw hills for a while. Katie drew the short straw and had to sleep in the front seat, chair back angled back as far as it would go, but still uncomfortably upright. She watched the stars up above out the front windshield, saw them slowly twinkle in and out of existence, and thought about camp, where they probably saw nearly the same thing at a different time, and felt the pressure in her chest at knowing that camp wasn't home anymore and hadn't been for a while, because she was growing up and there comes a time when the grown-ups who, in this case, aren't grown up at all but barely eighteen, must move on.
Katie looked over her shoulder at the two boys she was growing fond of and watched them for a while. They were all tangled up in each other, limbs and the blanket, Connor's face tucked under Travis's arm like he was trying to smother himself in his brother, and they were holding hands and Travis's face looked smoothed out and blank, so unlike the squinting-mischievious way it normally looked, and something in Katie's mind said, 'oh'.
There was the strand of Oklahoma that spread out, dividing Texas and the two states above it, like a feeler or a root, something invasive that was welcome.
Katie looked at the atlas, hard, and down at the dirt that squished up between her toes, boots left in the trunk of the car. Her bare legs were gritty with the dirt that blew in the wind, sticking to her legs and swiping her hair out of it's ponytail to catch on her mouth and her eyelashes. Travis was leaning on the car, smoking a cigarette, even though he didn't smoke and coughed every drag. He inhaled the poisonous air anyway because he said there was something poetic in a song about smoking in Oklahoma, and Connor rolled his eyes at his brother and fished the hair away from Katie's mouth and smiled at her, and she felt a lot like the dirt under her feet: feeling out for new territory, invading, but welcome.
It was two against one, so they headed to Las Vegas, to the place of cheating and sex and drinking. They didn't go to any casinos or bars, just went for the sake of walking down the street and seeing the lights that burned the backs of Katie's eyes, so when she closed her eyes, laying back on the bed in the hotel room they rented with money gotten from a poker game in a small town in Utah, the images of the signs appeared in her head, made up of whirligigs and swirls of color. The colors vanished when Travis tossed himself bodily onto the bed next to her, nearly throwing her off, so she retaliated with a pillow, hard, smacked into his head. His eyes widened and she's thought, 'Oh shit', then the room turned into the biggest pillow fight of all time, between the three of them. Connor went and broke the unspoken rules in a very Connor-ish fashion, tossing an ice cube down Travis's jeans when he was distracted, and the only fitting punishment was to hold him down and tickle him, so that's what Travis and Katie did. Only when he yelled and begged, laughing until tears came into his eyes did Katie let up, and they flopped down, exhausted, and Katie was very glad Travis had been out-voted.
They made it almost, almost, to the coast when the sun went down and it was understood, without a word between them, that they wouldn't keep driving to the coast, not that night. It was surprisingly easy—and possibly illegal, they weren't really sure—to find an empty floor of a parking garage, one where no one drove by and three teenagers wouldn't be noticed. The normal habit of drawing straws commenced and when Connor lost with a 'damn it' and got up front Katie elbowed Travis over and patted the seat next to her. Connor shook his head with a wry smile so Katie shrugged, like, 'your choice', and pulled herself up into a very surprised and very pleased-looking Travis's lap, pressing soft kisses to the corner of his mouth until he opened it and she licked her way inside. After a moment of gentle, lazy kissed that gradually became less tender and more needy, and Travis ruched up the side of her sundress with hands that touched her like she was a rare treasure, something not even he would try to steal, Katie said 'hold on' in his ear and turned to Connor, sitting, gaping, and said 'please?', tapping the seat again and Travis held out a hand to help his brother over the seat back.
When she ran her hands through Connor's thick hair, tugging him up to her, and felt Travis pressing wet, open mouthed kisses to the back of her neck, she thought of the blues song from West Virginia and thought, 'This is what that was about', and meant it.
The ocean on that side of the U.S. was warmer, more pacified, less tangy and salty and glass-edged that the Atlantic of home. Katie dug her toes into the wet sand that sucked her down with every break of the tide, trying to draw her deeper and further west, even as she knew it would eventually become east again.
'Coast-to-coast." She broke the silence.
"Yep." Travis was flopped down in the sand, getting the tiny bits all up in his collar and the creases of his jeans. She could see it sticking to his skin, in his hair.
"What now?" Connor was sitting in the water, soaked from the chest down, the foam washing up bits of waxy, oily seaweed into his lap.
"We go back." Travis shrugged, like he was indifferent to the idea, even as he stated it.
"You know," Katie shaped the words carefully, feeling her lips around them, "I'd love to see Texas."
Connor fell back, splashing up water all over her legs, making Travis wrinkle his nose like splashing at the beach was an unusual occurrence. "The Great Lakes would be cool, too."
"Road trip?" Katie prompted.
"Later." Travis tossed an arm over his eyes to block out the sun, and Katie saw the hickey on his neck that she'd put there. "We'll do all that later. First, beach, and then redwoods, while we're here."