Chapter 33
Playing Catch Up

So I was unable to write for about a week because my computer was in the back of my car as I drove across the country. So the road trip wasn’t too bad except for the part where I preferred it when the Antagonizer rode in my car to when my best friend did, my mother was being a pain, and my best friend said that she just didn’t know what to do with me anymore; also there were ravenous wild animals, the death of a bird, a near fatal car accident, and a nasty tasting cookie.
I should probably add detail to all of these things for your benefit. So let’s do this like a formal paper and follow the preceding thesis statement. I will go through the list in order so you can skim for your favorites or just read the whole thing like you ought to. Just a warning though, none of this will be in chronological order.
First off, I have not been very fair to BFF; the poor girl had every reason to say that she didn’t know what to do with me. I guess part of me didn’t want her there because she is a part of Virginia. Her presence there reminded and ensured me that I was going home, a place that I don’t really want to be. Plus she yaps. At 6 am in the morning I am not interested in talking, there is pretty much no subject that you could bring up that would induce me to talk to you that early in the morning. So for three mornings straight I couldn’t stand her. My favorite part about her being my passenger was when she fell asleep. There is also the part where she speaks to me and about pretty much anything as though it were a small child. “Oh cows! Moo little cows.” Which would be funny if I didn’t think she were serious. It’s almost as though these past four and half years I have been developing in my conversation skills, whereas she seems to have reverted to elementary school jargon. Plus she calls me by a nickname that only my family can call me and also she calls my mom and dad “mom and dad”. Not cool, I hate when my friends call my parents that, I know they are cool, but I also know that they are mine, and you have your own parents, go love them. She also has a tendency to baby people, she calls it nurturing, and I call it smothering. I am fully capable of taking care of myself, what the hell does she think I was doing out at school? Even when I had a broken foot I still got things for myself, I still did my part of cleaning the apartment and even attempted to take out the garbage down three flights of stairs while on crutches. (Attempted, because a very nice, handsome young man took it for me, he took more pity on me then my roommates did). I think this proves that I am pretty capable of managing on my own. Plus she tries too hard to impress me or something; I don’t know what it is. Maybe she has always been this way and I just never noticed, but I kept feeling like she was trying to hard too convince me that she was cool. There were even moments when I thought of renaming her “Little Antagonizer”. There was a part of the first day that BFF and Antagonizer switched places. Antagonizer became my passenger while BFF drove her car behind us. I had no problem having a conversation with Antagonizer, in fact I much preferred her there in the car over BFF. I think that part of this is due to the fact that Antagonizer is a part of the life I didn’t want to leave, but that life dissipated anyway regardless of whether or not I stayed there. Even with all the bad things that have happened between us it was nice to have her there. I knew there was a problem when I had been talking the entire time with the Antagonizer and then switched passengers to BFF again and stopped talking. I just can’t figure out why I was being such a bitch. I think I will blame it on this book, or maybe on counseling for the change that has occurred in me.
So since graduation a week ago my mother has been a pain in the butt. Not only did she continually harp on me about getting a job (A week before I could even really do anything about it) but she has been attempting to make decisions for me. Two months ago I would have preferred this, not having to make decisions. However, now I am trying to realize my age and my responsibility, which is hard when she keeps treating me like a child. Granted I am still a child, I’m completely hopeless as far as making grown up decisions, but she coddles and enables me. So anyway, back to why she was really a pill. She called to tell me that I should stay in Michigan one more day and go see my grandpa and take him out to lunch. There were two problems with this plan. BFF really wanted to get back home the next day and wouldn’t relent on it and I didn’t have any money to take Grandpa to lunch. Oh and the third problem, I only have room for two in my car so to take Grandpa to lunch I’d have to abandon BFF at my aunt and uncle’s house with no one there, yeah, she’d love that. So I tried to explain to my mom about all of this (except the third reason). She asked just how much money I had and I told her I didn’t know and then she told me to go count it. I explained that there were ravenous animals outside and I didn’t want to go get my wallet from my car (ravenous animals’ story coming soon). Then she started to say something about taking the extra day and I said that BFF wanted to get home, so my mom was like, “I thought she had the whole week off.” And I told her that while she did, BFF wanted to get home to do something before returning to work on Monday. Then she asked me what the point of BFF coming out was and I told her to drive me home. That is the truth; this added to the fact that it was BFF who was in such a hurry to come home. My mom and I hung up the phone, barely saying goodbye and certainly not saying ‘I love you’. So I already didn’t want to go home and now I really didn’t want to.
So I went upstairs quickly after hanging up because I was on the verge of tears, not sad tears, but angry tears. BFF followed me upstairs and I explained quickly the rest of the conversation with my mom and she came at me to give me a hug because I had begun to get misty eyed. I threw out my hand and told her to not touch me because then I would cry. She backed off a little and in a pissed off mood said, “I just don’t know what to do with you anymore.” We talked about it later and she kept saying things like she wasn’t sure if I had changed or if we had to get used to each other again. She had to get used to my moods and blah, blah, blah. She also said something like when you are upset she believes you should let it all out, and I told her that I believe that when you are upset you keep it to yourself unless you are at your own home where you can go off and be alone, but you don’t get emotional at someone else’s house.
So what you have really been waiting for, you probably even skipped to this section. The ravenous animals of Michigan! So about a week ago I called my aunt to see if I could stay with her when I was in Michigan. She said that would be great and she also told me that they had lost one of their dogs, Reggie. (No need to protect a dead dog’s identification). I tell her that I am sorry to hear that and she says that it was time anyway. She didn’t seem upset about it which is what I like since I don’t know how to deal with that stuff anyway. So she tells me that he was killed by some wild animal since they found his body ripped apart, not eaten, just ripped. It turns out that three or four other dogs in that area have also been attacked, but not eaten. They say that if it were wolves these animals would have been eaten. Then my uncle tells us later that their neighbor found deer parts strewn all over his yard. So dogs and deer are the victims of these animals. My uncle has his shop in their backyard and at night he doesn’t like to go from the shop to the house so he runs. My aunt was making fun of him because he is so scared, but she also told me that there remaining dog, Phoebe, doesn’t like to be alone outside at night. So when we left my uncle’s shop at about 10 at night we ran to the car to get our stuff and looked around for the animal. My uncle asked if we were scared (while he himself stood by the doorway not coming outside) and I told him that if this animal was going to get a human it would be my luck to be the first the headlines would read, “College Graduate gets torn apart by wild beast when passing through Michigan.” Tragic. So we get our luggage out of the car and my uncle has returned safely inside to his shop with the door now closed. At least now we had weapons to defend ourselves should the animals attack. We would both swing around wildly and hope to slay the tormenting beasts. As we approached the door that had no outside lighting there was a small movement by the door and I was ready to being swinging when I realized that it was just Phoebe, a small dog barely higher than my ankles. Poor thing was huddled near the door and probably didn’t go to the bathroom like she was supposed to. We let her back in and told my aunt how she had scared me and how I was ready to attack her. We joked that it was really Phoebe who was the attacker, she was an ankle bitter and would paralyze her prey by biting off her victim’s ankles and then she would take care of the rest of you. I love my aunt.
Ah, the death of a bird. So when we were still caravanning with Antagonizer. We had walkie-talkies to help us communicate with each other and at one point we get the Antagonizer’s voice coming over the walkie-talkie saying something about hitting a bird. At the time BFF was driving and I asked back over the walkie-talkie, “We hit a bird?” So Miss “missing a layer of skin” BFF started to freak out, which I predicted that she would do when I thought earlier what would happen if she hit an animal, I just didn’t think it would actually happen. Then Antagonizer kept saying something about how she hit the bird and I thought she was saying that we hit it and then it came back to her and she hit it too, so I grabbed the walkie-talkie and said, “So, we flipped you the bird?” At least I got a laugh out of it. Finally she got it through to us that she had hit the bird by herself. We never did. Finally the world returned to as normal as it could get. Miscommunication is how rumors get started.
So the last day of the trip we were by ourselves, no more caravanning. BFF was driving the last part of the trip and she almost killed us! Not only had I been praying the entire time that she was driving that we wouldn’t die because she felt the need to go 70 MPH around windy curves that I didn’t think my car could actually stabilize through and that were posted as 55mph curves, but she also is a horrible driver. I suppose I never realized it before, but I also suppose it was never my car’s life hanging in the balance. She weaves in and out of traffic like a maniac; like one of those drivers that I either fall way behind of so that I am not part of their next accident, or that I speed up to pass so I never have to see them again. But it is always more likely that if you slow down they will go on in their insanity and be forgotten to you until you pass them pulled over on the side of the road. I half wished she would have been pulled over, she certainly deserved it. So back to this near fatal accident. She was zipping in and out of traffic and coming up on an exit that we had to take and she started to pull into a lane when a car laid on it’s horn and she swerved out of the lane as the car passed and then went back into the lane she had been attempting to get into in the first place. She kept defending herself to me, how that car was not there when she looked and how it must have just come up out of no where. Personally I could have blamed it on the fact that we can barely see out the back window so the car could have easily been in her blind spot, but that was not an option for her. She continued to rant that she was a good driver and I kept thinking to myself, “Whatever helps you sleep at night,” while I am praying to God that this girl doesn’t kill or wreck my car. So I try to be nice, because I am worried that my silence is making her think that I am judging her, which I am, but not really that badly. So since she is so quiet I ask if she is alright, if she is shaky (which I personally would be if I had almost wrecked someone else’s car at such high speeds that it would have probably killed or severely injured the passenger (in this case, me). She says that she is not shaky, but pissed off. Which personally, makes me uneasy. She should be shaky, she came close to ruining my car amongst other things she almost destroyed, but rather she was pissed? Plus, when you are mad you tend to drive worse which is something she couldn’t afford to do. Finally we made it to her house and she gave me directions from her house to mine and I left. Glad to have my car and to go home to take care of it.
Happy to be home and alive I took up some of my stuff to my bedroom. Just so you know, my house still smells the same. Have you ever noticed the smell of your house? Maybe you should attempt to figure out the difference between the smell or your house and the smell of a friend’s house. Houses have very distinct smells…detour. So I have this large pink cookie that can only be purchased out west and I bought it before we left Utah. I kept putting off eating it, mostly because I wanted to savor it. I wanted to eat it somewhere where I could just sit and focus on eating it. So it stayed until the end of the car trip. When I got up to my room I unwrapped it and attempted to peal it away from the plastic wrapper (since it had gotten squished on the drive). I took a bite and it tasted horrible, I attempted another bite, and then a third since I didn’t want to waste my last taste of the west but it was futile. The cookie was lost, it had degenerated. I threw it away and laid down on my bed until my mom called me down for dinner.
There you have it, the highlights of the road trip. 1,200 miles more or less of disappointment and death.