An Awfully Big Adventure

Hour Six: Strongest Suit

6. Write a chapter where one of your characters dresses up as a Disney Princess.

Chip has since taken the wheel, and it becomes clear that there will be very little sleep for the rest of the night. If all goes well, they will arrive in Anaheim with few hours to catch up on sleep before the theme park opens.

Wendy has shifted over the back seat, and is able to watch the budding bromance between the two teen boys. Social media is a bad thing, because she can’t help but start shipping anybody and everything. And of course she ships herself with Dale-- the desire sounds so wrong thinking about it-- but nothing manages to hit harder in the feels than bromances. Bromances make the world go round.

Wendy can’t help but stick her hand in a bag of pretzels, munching while watching them with sick delight. They’re currently bickering over something sports related, and while Wendy doesn’t have the faintest idea on who’s the better basketball player, LeBron James or Kevin Durant, it is still amusing to watch. But once random factoids about rebounds and points and the occasional triple double arise, the conversation goes over her head.

She rummages around in her backpack, which though doesn’t hold as much as the boys assume, is still horribly unorganized. The bulge of unfolded clothes and random array of objects leaves the backpack ballooned to a rather large size and makes finding anything extremely difficult.

In order to find the object she is looking for, she ends up throwing out other items haphazardly on to the seat. But eventually, she pulls out a leatherbound notebook and is about to begin putting back all the other stuff she’s taken out when she realizes that she’s still in need of a pencil. Which of course, is not going to be fun to find in the vortex that has spontaneously spawned inside her backpack.

She does remember packing one, and chances are that the pack was never well cleaned out anyways. There is probably a stub of graphite in one of the pockets. A flurry of unzipping and rezipping and patting down empty pouches commences. And though she ends up finding an old package of gum, a yo-yo, and a pipe cleaner, it takes considerably longer to find the object she was searching for. Right before she goes mad, because she swears she put it in the front most pocket, she gains a moment of insight as she realizes the pencil is not in her backpack at all, but her purse.

Facepalming, she reaches for her purse, slightly afraid that the same foraging will occur, because her bag is not exactly orderly, either. However, much less stuff is crammed in it, and digging out the darn mechanical is only difficult because it is so dark in the car. She must only rely on her sense of touch to find the cylindrical object, which seems to be as evasive as Waldo in his unfortunately red and white striped world.

Finally, Wendy is all set. Her phone is positioned in the cup holder to her left and the flashlight is turned on, so that the page before her is illuminated. Just as she’s pressing pencil to paper, Dale turns around. “Are you writing something?” he asks, thinking it would be odd for her to be journaling amidst the bumpy car ride. However, the irritation on her face at being interrupted from piques his interest.

“No,” she states, her curt reply further intriguing him.

“Sure looks like you are,” Dale says, as the writing utensil once more inches toward the paper.

Wendy sighs, holding up the pad, “See this? Unruled. Drawing paper, not writing paper. Now, you go talk about sports and babes or whatever it is that guys talk about.”

This produces a chuckle from Chip in the driver’s seat, “Right so, Taylor Swi-”

Wendy rolls her eyes, “I was kidding you know. I’d really rather not hear about whose pants you want to get into.”