Take Me Home | ✔

Chapter Thirty (unedited)

  “people must learn to hate and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” –nelson mandela

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VIENNA

    So here we were, sitting on a concrete slab in a gray waiting cell in a local police station in Arizona, handcuffed to each other and not really sure what to expect next. In the past ten minutes, Elliot bared a pretty distorted image of his girlfriend, Samantha, who didn’t really turn out to be who I expected. When I had heard how she had cheated on Elliot not once but three times, I was instantly seeing red. The selfish part of me wanted to scream, why did you ever stay with her? Why do you still stay with her? You don’t deserve that. But the realistic part of me argued, You’re exactly like him, Vienna. And then a figment of a memory with Austin would pop up right on cue and I’d remember all those nights smelling another girl’s cheap perfume on his flannels and I shook it all away.

“Vienna?”

“Yeah, Elliot?”

“What would your mom do if she found out what you’ve been up to this past week?”

I let out a chuckle. Only partially sarcastic. “Uh, I don’t really know. She’d scream and yell at me, of course. She’s never really hurt me physically – which is mighty good, but, her bark is worse than her bite.”

Elliot grinned hard, “She wouldn’t accept you hitchhiking across the country with a boy?”

“Too late now,” I said. I raised the handcuffs that were currently attaching me and him together, “But I would probably leave out the part where we get arrested.”

“But we’re not murderers or thieves—“

I gave him a look.

“Okay maybe a little theiver-ish—“

“Theiver-ish?” I echoed, laughing.

“—but all I did was pee on the side of the road! Isn’t that fertilizing? I’m giving back to Mother Nature!”

“Uh, I don’t really know. I think so?”

“Exactly,” he flung his arms. “This is an outrage. And we’re losing daylight. Do you know how far we could’ve gone by now?”

The cell had no clock or even any windows, so I had no idea what time it was. It felt like it would be after noon, and since we were partially back in the West Coast, I should’ve gotten back into my regular time-sensing state by now. But I got nothing. For

My shoulders fell, “I don’t know. I really don’t want to think about that.”

Elliot fell silent for a while, eyeing me before saying, “I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I shouldn’t have said that. You know what, forget I even said anything. Don’t think about anything. I’ll get you to your graduation and I’ll be there in time for Samantha and—“

“—Elliot, I don’t care about my graduation,” the words spilled out before I had a chance to shut my mouth. But it was no use, it was true anyway.

He blinked at me in disbelief. “Huh?”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about that stupid diploma. They’ll have to mail it to me, I guess.”