Two

Eight forty-five the next morning, and Darren was staring critically at the open trunk of my beat-up yellow VW Bug, which was almost full with our numerous belongings, crammed in so that there was no possible air space left. The car, which was on indefinite loan from my older brother Lee, who was currently at university in Minneapolis, stood at an angle at the edge of our driveway, straining to encase all our collective belongings. "Are you sure this is gonna work, Jerry?" he asked me, the last of his bags held in his left hand, so heavy that he appeared substantially lopsided. "We're not gonna be sparking the highway all the way to Kearney?"

I raised an eyebrow, a picture of Darren's battered and scraped Ford Taurus in my mind. His car actually made mine look pretty good, which deserved an award in itself. "Hey, at least we know we're actually gonna get to Kearney in this thing," I reminded him. "Your car couldn't even make it to the state line."

He grinned. "Don't say that. Once that thing gives up I'm gonna have to buy a grown up car."

"Yeah, just imagine." I threw in the last two bags and, with some difficulty, slammed the trunk shut so forcefully that the car jumped forward two inches. Darren looked suitably amused and horrified all at the same time. "I'm thinking... station wagon." I added as we moved round to the front of the Bug. "In sensible racing green, obviously."

"Yeah, well. I had considered it. You know how much I wanna be just like my dad," he shot back good-naturedly, opening the passenger door and sliding inside.

I made to do the same, having already said enough goodbyes inside the house to last me a lifetime, but just as I was opening the driver's door my mother shot out of the front door, as I'd known deep down she would, and gave me a hug which nearly knocked me right over. "Have a good journey, honey," she instructed me. "Call when you get there. And have a good time. I know you're gonna be fine." She clung on as though prolonged hugging would be enough to make me change my mind and stay home. As much as she wanted me to go to college, she was still voicing her thoughts, verbally or otherwise, that seventeen was no age to be leaving home. I'd never let on that sometimes I felt the same.

"Don't worry," I told, extracting myself in such a way as to not offend her and make her even more tearful than she already was. "I'll call as soon as I can, okay?" I gave her one last hug, which she returned gratefully before moving round the car to give Darren the same treatment. His expression touching bewilderment, he nevertheless returned my mother's overpowering embrace with a smile and genuine goodbye. My dad, meanwhile, had confined himself to the doorstep, something I was very grateful for, having said his goodbyes indoors. I think he'd grasped the fact that I didn't want a huge goodbye scene on the front driveway where everyone would be aware of it.

As I slammed the driver's door shut and turned the ignition, my mother joined my dad and they stood together, waving dutifully like the parents in a Hollywood movie watching their child disappear into the big bad world. Except, of course, that in Hollywood, it was rarely as big and bad as anyone expected, and there was always a love story to round everything off nicely. But this wasn't Hollywood, cosy world or otherwise- it was me, Darren, a city we'd never experienced and a love story that was non-existent in Daz's mind and vaguely glimmered in mine from time to time- something I'd learnt to repress over time.

That morning, I'd been apprehensive about leaving, sad, even. Which was quite ironic, seeing as Dunsten Hills, despite being home, had never been my favourite place on earth. But it did represent the biggest chunk of my life to date, and that was something I was reluctant to leave behind.

But as I manoeuvred the car out of our incredibly tiny town and towards the highway, I couldn't help feeling slightly excited at the adventure we were embarking on. I'd always moaned that Dunsten Hills had a backwards effect on our independence. Now I was out of there, I could see if I'd been right, or if that had just been an excuse to cover my own feelings of insecurity.

"So, what are you gonna miss most?" Daz asked as we approached the clogged highway, having spent the first twenty minutes of our journey in comparative silence, discussing mundane, general things with single sentences and muttered replies as we struggled to make sense of the map my dad had lent us, which didn't seem to correspond in the least to our route on the road.

I thought for a moment. "You know what I'm gonna miss most?" I said finally, as he turned the radio down so we could speak without having to shout over the semi-familiar rock song being played.

"What's that?" Darren was in the process of trying to refold the map he'd spread out on his knees as we'd set off, and wasn't having much luck at that. There was a thick black pen line stretching from our dotted home in central Minnesota to our starred destination in south central Nebraska, 488 miles away. Fainter, red lines marked out the routes our friends were taking. I couldn't tell if Darren had noticed or not. The black and red lines stretched across the breadth of the minimised version of the United States, creating a jagged triangular prism.

"That painting of the Canadian mountains we have in our living room," I told him, switching lanes as I spoke. Turning to me, a grin slowly spread across his face as he realised I wasn't taking him seriously at all.

"Come on, Jez." He gave me a friendly nudge with his elbow. "I was going for a total movie-fied bonding moment there."

I grinned back at him. "Like my mom says, if the two of us were any closer, we'd be physically joined at the hip. I don't think we need the cheesy movie moments on top of that." I didn't add that my mother's idea of how close we were was often severely warped due to her incessant belief that we'd somehow one day end up married, living on a ranch in Wyoming somewhere with kids, cows and a sheepdog called Shep. Or something. My protests that I'd never even been to Wyoming, and didn't plan to, hadn't done much to dampen her hopes.

"Fine." He threw me a mock-hurt expression before recovering almost instantaneously, his expression brightening again. "Aw, come on, Jez, apart from the painting, what are you gonna lay awake at night and miss like hell?"

I raised my eyebrows at him, but when he continued with his mock- pleading expressions I shrugged and gave in to his need for a movie- style share and care moment. "I dunno... just the normal stuff. Brit and Jess, Adam and Toby, and the band, and wasting time in the Matchbox, cheering the Rams..." When I thought about it properly, I realised it wasn't so much my friends I would miss- I could speak to them whenever I wanted. It was the things we did together that I'd miss the most- like going to the ball game and cheering Toby and Adam on, and the rest of them coming to watch mine and Daz's band play, and hanging out at the Matchbox, or the lake, or on the quad between classes. Stuff we'd never get back to doing, simply because that part of our lives was gone.

"Yeah." Daz nodded, suddenly subdued. What followed seemed like an aeon of silence, even though in reality it was only the time span of half a song on the radio, before Darren spoke up again. "Still, college is gonna be a blast," he certified with a grin which despite it's confidence belied a measure of uncertainty that matched the thoughts in my head exactly- an uncertainty so faintly traceable that a lot of people would have trouble finding it. Maybe it was because I felt it too, or simply because we'd been friends for so long, that I could tell straight off his bright smile and positive comments didn't reflect the true nature of his feelings at that moment. The two of us, it seemed, were just as apprehensive about our new start as we had been the day before, however much we tried to pretend otherwise.

**A/N: Chapter title refers to a song by The Music, entitled "Take The Long Road And Walk It", for anyone interested.**