➕ Beauty ➕

Date

I find the reverse gear on the van's centre.

"Woah... he gave you the van after that one visit?!" Gemma gasps, dropping her palms on the car seat, "That's incredible. If I had your superpowers, you would see me as a runaway prison girl, that disguises herself as 'just another pedestrian' with twelve identities, even though the world already put her on the most wanted list!" She looks around the interior, "Man... I have so many memories in here! My dad would kiss me everyday before I had a nap on our trips, and we would always sing out our favourite songs, and he would always allow me to do all these crazy things... and it all changed after my mom and dad started fighting... and things just went downhill from there..." She looks down on the seat. A second passes before she looks back at me. "But... no need to dwindle in the past, anyway it looks like things are coming back up again."

I begin to smile a little, "Gemma, are you ready to go to the concert?"

"Yes yes yes!" She says, shaking a little. "Wait!" She says frozen for a second. "Is it here?"

"Hmm?" I say.

She pulls open the glovebox, what drops open is a set of small blank books. "Yes! They're still here! I was hoping those cops wouldn't be competent enough to confiscate these!" She opens a brown one, "These are photos of our first trip to the other side of the country! It took like six hours and a lot of vomiting, but it was so worth it. My dad put so much trust in me," she pointed to a photo of her back as she faced to the orange sunset, "This photo is one he took of me on as I sat on the edge of this beach cliff... it was so high! But it was so beautiful!" She pointed to a photo beside it, "This is my dad carrying me on his arms... man, the landscape looks so beautiful in here..." in the background was a wall of mountains sitting just above the water. "Yeah... heh, we took selfies before it was cool!"

She put away the book, closing it fully. She took another one out, this time it was a navy blue. "Oh! This was the time we had a walk on a little desert!" She looked closely into the pages, "Woah! I thought there were snakes there! But my dad would tell me 'I swear, if I see any, I'm going to beat them us so bad, they're gonna wish they didn't try anything!' And I laughed so hard when he thought he saw one and just started screaming like a maniac! It turned out it was just a branch that clipped off a little bush, and it made the sound out shaking winds. When we came back to van, and beside it for the first time we noticed a bunch of small holes beside the tires in the sand... we never came back there." She put the book back in the glove box.

"Yes! This is my favourite!" She takes out a black book. "This is the first time he took his friends to our trips. They were really funny, but my dad started to do a lot of weird things around them, and I started to learn a whole lot from them... after coming back home, mom was so furious with him, that... that-... heh, looking back on it, it's pretty funny. And~... actually, I don't think I wanna talk about this anymore, I wanna move on from all that. But aside from that, we went to this fishing pub that had a huge aquarium, and all we did was voice the fish. So one of my dads friends went on and on on how good his beer combinations were, so he was like on a large brown fish, 'Yeh bro, wanna try ma fish beear? Made it maself.' And I said, looking at a small orange one next to it, 'Na man, probs tastes like sh~'" Gemma cut herself off starting to uncontrollably laugh, her palm slamming the top of her forehead. "Oh my gosh! No!" she continued to laugh, "that was so incredibly dumb! They all laughed, and another one of his friends high-fived me saying I just roasted him... oh my gosh, he like blushed and just didn't say ANYTHING for the whole day!" Gemma slapped her knee. She pointed to a photo of her holding an enormous fish by the end of a hook, "We also went trout fishing, and... we totally fell off our boat! That's why I'm soaking wet in this photo. But the trout wasn't actually mine, in actuality it was my dad's, but he wanted me to impress my mom when we show her the pictures!" She took a good sigh of relief. She plopped onto the seat, slipping the seat belts on quickly. A few seconds pass to let her breathe. She checks the time on her phone, "GEE! I can't wait any longer!" She jumps, "C'mon, let's go!"