you were my best four years

Chapter One

Fifteen minutes.

"Are you nervous?" Teresa asks him, her feet propped up on the dashboard. She's biting her lips and fiddling with the stations in the car radio.

"I don't think I've ever heard of that word before. Use it in a sentence?"

"Stop being such a smart ass, Tom." She rolls her eyes but her voice has no real fire behind it. "I'm nervous."

"You're always nervous. Your own birthday makes you nervous."

"That's not true. You're just being horrible."

"It's close to true." Thomas persists. "At least, half true."

He stops at a red light and looks at her, her crystal blue eyes already full of worry. He sighs and tears his away for a minute. "If it makes you happy, I'm more nervous than you are."

Teresa scoffs as the light turns green and he merges onto the highway. "Sure you are. My stomach's currently eating itself while you're all calm and collected. College, Tom! We're going to fucking college."

"No shit."

"I'm serious -"

"Was it supposed to be taken as a joke?"

"I'm going to kill you."

"If your stomach's currently eating itself, I don't see how you can."

He's only calm and collected on the outside because this is Teresa, his best friend of over fifteen years. The same girl he used to take baths with when they were little after they made mud pies and went digging for worms. The same girl he took to prom because neither of them had dates and who's a better date than the person who's already seen you naked?

It's only because she's sitting next to him that he's able to continue their playful banter and not surge into a mental breakdown.

"My parents are scrapping together pennies to start paying off student loans," she sighs.

"That doomsday is four years away so let's leave it there."

"I'm going to need like, fifty jobs. And even then I'll still be in debt by the time I'm sixty."

"Now you're just overreacting."

"Like I wasn't before?"

Thomas chuckles before merging right to get off the highway.

Six minutes.

He's quiet for a moment before he says, "I'm nervous that I don't know what I'm doing with my life and that this is all going to be a mistake four years down the road when they're handing me some stupid piece of paper and I change my mind about what I want to be."

"So just like senior year?"

"Exactly like senior year." He confirms and concentrates hard on the blue car in front of him, as if it will serve as his anchor for the moment. "I mean, who really needs an economics degree these days?"

"You have a point. We should have been chemistry majors."

"At least we could blow stuff up when we were upset and have a reason for doing so. And we'd get paid a ton of money."

"Wow, we really fucked ourselves over, didn't we?"

"Sure did. Now we're only going downhill from here, my friend."

"Let's just get the applications for McDonalds and stop kidding ourselves."

He stops at a red light and looks at her. As soon as their eyes connect, they burst into a roaring laughter, the kind that makes your stomach hurt.