After Fire - Dreamnotfound

Five|The March to the Sea

Dear mom,
Maybe I don't understand respect. I've been thinking about it all last night and all this morning. It's been manifesting my mind like the westward expansion. Manifest destiny, right? Anyway, I will reflect on everything, and I will try to be less of a pain. But I will admit, I need space. I know I'm grounded, but I left. My room is absolutely suffocating. I'll be back in a few days. Don't worry about me, George is coming with me. Maybe then we'll finally "get along".
I'll see you when I get back,
Clay

The silence was violent, especially since it was between two people who never spent more than ten minutes at a time together. Their few encounters this week alone was the most they had spoken to one another in the three and a half months George had been there. And even then, their conversations were far from substantial. They were filled with snarky remarks and hurtful comebacks. Clay couldn't go a single conversation without somehow finding a way to refer to his host brother as "Bitch Boy". In the same way, George always had to seek a way of leverage over the younger boy's insults. And now that neither were in the mood for their normal conversation, they fell silent, and they had been that way since Clay had pressured George into the car and drove them away.

"Where are we going?" George asked as Clay played around with the GPS on his phone. He kept his eye on the red light before them.

"I was thinking a trip up the east coast."

"Why? And why in the middle of the school year? And why with me?" Now that George had spoken up, all the questions he had slipped out, and he forced himself to stop when Clay's green eyes met with his brown ones.

The light turned green, and Clay began driving. His eyes viewed every angle around them vigilantly, and George could still sense the tension in his driving. Clay said, "I need fifty hours, George. Fifty hours! What better way to complete my hours than with a road trip, right?"

"None of it will count, though. This is illegal. If we get caught, we're dead."

Clay rolled his eyes. "That's where you come in. You know the rules of the road, and I-well-I forget them. You have to make sure I don't do anything that'll get us pulled over. And look, how will they know? As long as you actually teach me how to drive correctly, it doesn't matter."

"An easier alternative would be to just not go on a stupid middle-of-the-school-year road trip without a license and just ask your mom. She said you can."

Clay scoffed. "I'm grounded, did you forget? She won't help me anyway, and I don't need her to. We'll only miss a week of school. We'll go up the east coast, and drive right back home."

"Your mom is going to kill you when we get back."

"Trust me, she won't." He sounded confident, so George left it alone.

The city around them slowly disappeared, leaving them surrounded by nothing but greens and trees. Looking at the bright side, George found that a roadtrip could be a decent experience. A foreign exchange student was supposed to learn about American culture, and so far all he knew was that all high schoolers did was play follow the leader and bully the exchange students. It was also flatter than he had expected. When George had looked up pictures of the United States, he had seen mountains and valleys as well as evergreen trees and pretty ponds. However, standing on the soil itself was entirely different. It was humid and hot. It rained so often it was difficult to find time to go out and explore. And when George looked out over the horizon, he found it to be flat, leaving the horizon to span to infinity.

Perhaps that was why he agreed to go. Back home, he always went exploring. He knew every crevice of his home town like the back of his hand. Every night, he and his group of friends would look for new, undiscovered places, and they ended up discovering small mini-woods and hidden tunnels as well as rundown stores that they'd have sleepovers in. And he was antsy. Bored of a life where every day was the same. He could recount everything he did today and what he was guaranteed to do tomorrow. After all, the list would be the same. He'd wake up, push Clay's buttons, go to school, help Drista practice, and come home, do his homework, and then sleep and repeat.