“HEY GUYS,” KENDRA SAID INTO THE PHONE, “JUST wanted to let you know we’re heading back this morning instead of a few days from now. We just sort of got bored at the house—one can only swim in an infinity pool for so many hours, you know? Anyway, we’ll be back tonight. See you soon!”
She hung up, grateful she could just leave a voicemail rather than have to recite her whole script directly to her parents.
“Nice detail about the infinity pool,” Mitch said. He tapped the steering wheel with his fingers, obviously excited to finally be on the road again.
“Thanks,” Kendra said, smiling. She looked out the passenger side window as the Strip passed by once again, rapidly falling away as the Mustang picked up speed and bent back around the big curve on the interstate, throttling back into the dusty purple expanse of the desert. “Think you’ll ever come back out here?”
“Ugh,” Mitch sighed. “Not anytime soon. You?”
“Part of me feels like we hardly scratched the surface here, that we didn’t really get the experience,” Kendra said. “But the other part of me feels like we got the exact Vegas experience. We were manipulated, robbed blind, and barely made it out alive.”
Mitch sighed. “Yeah, I don’t think we missed out on much. I wonder where Thelma and Louise are by now.”
A few hours later, the landscape along the interstate started looking very familiar—to Kendra, at least. You never forget the place where you first fall in love.
“Dude, this is it,” she said, tapping Mitch on the shoulder. “Exit ten. How does my breath smell?” she asked frantically, blowing a mouthful of hot air into Mitch’s face.
“Mm,” Mitch said, wincing. “Delightful.”
Kendra fixed the straps of her slimming black tank top and push-up bra and finger-combed her hair. “Ugh, I look so basic. But it’s all for him, right?”
“You’re a vision,” Mitch said, pulling off the highway and angling for Lauren’s Roadside BBQ Pit’s parking lot.
When she opened the door to the restaurant, Kendra searched the expanse of the dining room for Laurence like a lion surveys the dusty plain for an antelope. There he was, talking to a large family in a corner booth. Kendra took off across the restaurant, blowing past the hostess stand. The teenager working there frantically asked where she was going, but Kendra refused to turn back.
Kendra dove into the booth next to Laurence’s current table. She not-so-subtly craned her neck above the divider between the booths, rapping her fingers on the greasy tabletop. Mitch sat across from her, with his back to Laurence. “You look like you’re having an aneurysm,” he said. “Cool it.”
But Kendra’s manic head-craning worked, and after taking the final order from the other table, Laurence turned to face Kendra. Time seemed to stop entirely as Kendra waited for her beloved to recognize her. She hung on the twitch of every muscle in Laurence’s face, trying to make a note of every synapse firing in his brain. If he doesn’t recognize me, I swear to God . . .
But then Laurence flashed his movie-star smile and strolled to the table. “Back already, I see.”
Kendra willed herself to be cool, to make a smoother impression than she had the last time. “You bet,” she said. “Couldn’t get enough.”
Mitch fought off an outburst of laughter. Instead, he tried to keep a normal human conversation going. “How have you been, Laurence?”
He waved the question off abashedly. “Oh, you know me,” he said. “Boring, boring, boring. Ribs, steak, steak, ribs . . . ”
“You are so not boring,” Kendra said, as if she and Laurence were the only two people in the room.
“Oh, hey,” Laurence said to Kendra, “that was cool how you wrote your number on your check. I didn’t think anybody did that anymore. Very 1950s.”
Kendra’s heart skipped a beat. “And do you . . . like the 1950s?”
Laurence guffawed. “Well sure! Simpler time, y’know? Nothing complicated like how we are now.”
“Yeah,” Kendra sighed. “I feel you. It was a time when two people could just . . . be together. There was a connection, they just got married and bought a house before they could think twice. I’ve always liked the sound of that.”
Mitch couldn’t resist. “Everyone was also horribly depressed and most wives felt trapped in the home by convention, unable to do what they wanted with their lives. Oh, and most marriages were a sham anyway.”
Kendra shot him a death glare across the table. A thick silence hung in the air, broken only when Laurence chirped, “So! Know what you’d like to eat?”
Kendra willed herself to look away from Mitch and put on a happy face. “How about a salad? You wrecked me last time.” She let that settle for a second, before clarifying. “With that sandwich. You wrecked me with that sandwich.”
Mitch briefly considered getting up from the table and running away. “I’ll have a salad as well,” he said.
“Sure thing,” Laurence said. “We only have one salad though, I have to tell you.”
“What is it?” both Kendra and Mitch asked simultaneously.
“Iceberg lettuce, bacon, steak strips, cherry tomatoes, and our house-made bleu cheese and bacon dressing,” Laurence said, smiling. “And we’re out of tomatoes.”
Kendra beamed. “Sounds perfect.”
Laurence gave them one final smile and walked away. As soon as he was gone, Kendra glared at Mitch. “What are you doing, man?! What was that? About the 1950s?”
“I was just getting on your case,” Mitch said. “Relax. Trying to have a little fun here. I mean, honestly, Kendra. What are you expecting to happen?”
“I don’t know,” Kendra sighed. “In my heart of hearts, I want Laurence to come back offering me his dead mom’s wedding ring, but I know that’s pretty unlikely.”
“Just slightly,” Mitch said.
Kendra put her head facedown on the table. “I know. But even if I could just get a wink, or a lingering touch on my hand, or something. This place isn’t too far from home, you know. I can come back once a week!”
Mitch smiled. “I’m rooting for you, honestly. I’d love to regain some hope in the other men in this world. Both of us have been rejected, led on, and robbed at knifepoint. In the last two weeks.”
An hour later, Kendra and Mitch walked out of the restaurant and back towards the parking lot. Kendra clutched a sacred piece of paper in her hand like a running back hurtling towards the end zone. She remained completely quiet until she climbed in the driver’s side door of the Mustang. It was only then when she thrust her hands straight up victoriously, smacking the ceiling of the car.
“God, can you believe it?!” she exclaimed. Mitch giggled uncontrollably. “Look at those ten beautiful digits!” she shouted, pointing at the receipt where Laurence had scrawled his phone number.
“Those are some good digits,” Mitch said.
“They’re perfect. Perfect numbers. Literally perfect.” Kendra kissed the receipt chastely, like she was at the altar with it.
“You have to wait at least a day until you text him,” Mitch said. “Seriously. Any sooner and you’re a stalker.”
“Really?” Kendra said, pouting like a wounded puppy dog. “What about half a day? And I’ll just be like, ‘What’s cookin’?’ or something like that. It’s a restaurant pun too! He’ll love it. Right?”
“Okay, first of all, you can never say ‘what’s cookin’,’” Mitch said. “And secondly, no, you have to wait at least a day. Promise me.”
Kendra groaned, but she was far from unhappy. “When he and I write the history of our beautiful unlikely love story,” Kendra said, “it’ll all start with one little text. One little innocent text. The cutest text anyone’s ever sent to anyone: ‘what’s cookin’.’ You’ll see, Mitch. I’m gonna write a book.”
With that, Kendra turned the key in the ignition and put down the top of the Mustang. It was time to ride home in style.
The sun was just setting behind the mountains in the west as the Mustang pulled into Kendra’s driveway. Kendra put the car in park, and she and Mitch sat there as a certain song finished its course on the stereo: “Mmm-bop, dip-a-dop, da-ooh . . . ”
“We made it,” Kendra sighed, leaning back in the driver’s seat. “I can’t believe it.”
Mitch rubbed his road-weary eyes. “If you hadn’t thought so quickly and called Lamar, we might still be out there. Without a car, and without parents. Because they would have definitely disowned us forever.”
Kendra didn’t respond. She realized she had one more thing to bring up with Mitch. “Oh, hey, I have to tell you something,” she said.
Mitch picked up on her dark tone. “What is it?” he asked worriedly.
“Remember when you found me sleeping at that gas station? I had this crazy dream while I was out there. But it was more than a dream. It felt like a vision or something.”
Mitch raised an eyebrow and smirked, thinking this was the setup for a classic Kendra joke. “Oh, yeah?”
“No, seriously,” she said. “I don’t know if it was the heat, or the stress, or what, but . . . you know Jack the Jackal, the cartoon?”
“Yeah?”
“He like . . . appeared. In front of me. And he talked to me.” Kendra squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t bear seeing Mitch’s expression while he tried to decide if his friend had completely lost her mind. “I know,” she said, “it’s totally weird.”
“What’d he say?” Mitch asked.
“A bunch of cryptic stuff,” Kendra said. “He kept saying that I missed watching cartoons and I was kidding myself if I said I wasn’t that person anymore. Stuff like that.”
“But you love Jack the Jackal!” Mitch said. “You have the doll!”
“That’s what I said! But he kept saying that wasn’t it, that I missed everything about that old routine. Getting up early, eating sugary cereal, all that stuff.” Kendra sat back and rubbed her temples. “It was too weird and crazy to tell you about, at the time. But the more I think about it, I think it was my subconscious trying to tell me something. We set out on this trip because we wanted to act like adults. We wanted to cut loose and do our own thing, because for the first time, nobody could stop us.”
“Right.”
“And we did,” Kendra said. “We definitely cut loose. And it was crazy . . . but not in a great way. I’m not sure we’re Las Vegas people, Mitch.”
Mitch rubbed his chin contemplatively. “Yeah,” he said. “At least not the kind of Las Vegas people we were trying to be.”
“I do kind of miss cartoons,” Kendra admitted.
“And I miss all my old Audrey Hepburn movies,” said Mitch. “Who says we can’t still be those people?”
“Well, a lot of people say that,” Kendra said, “but they’re wrong. High school sucked, and this stupid song will definitely haunt me forever.”
“Ugh,” Mitch said, “me too.”
“But now we get to go to the U in September, and we get a clean slate. We get to be ourselves again.” Kendra smiled. She turned off the ignition, cutting off the Hanson brothers for the final time. “Want to watch some cartoons?”