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"Can you stop being mad now?"
"Depends on whether lunch is on you today," I said, smirking.
"Only if you come to the store with me to get my books first," she said, smiling back. I agreed.
The Roman thing was definitely something I wish I had never had to do and something I didn't want to deal with now, but I hadn't seen him since that night. Besides the box at my door, I hadn't heard from him, either. There was enough distance between us still for me to not be mad anymore. As long as she wasn't encouraging him behind my back, I couldn't hold it against her.
A couple hours later, I was scanning a shelf of books with scary-sounding titles. Tiffany was in school for Economics, and I knew nothing about what that meant.
"Can you see it?" she asked. We were looking for The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy by Richard Posner, an additional recommended book on her list; not part of her required reading, but she wanted to get it anyway.
"You could probably check the library for it before spending money," I suggested.
"Got it," she said, pulling the book off the shelf. I wandered through the shelves a little more as she paid for her books. One with a photograph of a red and black bird on the cover caught my eye. I picked it up.
"Birds of the American Southwest," Tiffany read over my shoulder as she came up to me. "When did you pick up birdwatching?"
"Have you ever wanted to go?" I asked her.
"Where? Birdwatching?"
"No. Arizona, New Mexico?"
"Not really," she quipped. "Maybe a little further south to Cabo and then we're talking. Are you getting that?"
"Might come in handy on my road trip."
"You are not doing a road trip to New Mexico on your own. I won't let you."
"If you won't go with me, who the hell am I supposed to take?"
"You're supposed to take a plane and stay at a hotel like a normal person," she said. I smiled, knowing she was just kidding.
"I want to get from coast to coast."
"In that piece of trash car? You won't even get from here to Minneapolis," she joked.
Tiff was a homebody. She had a passport, but wasn't as keen on filling it up as I was. I had been to Mexico and Puerto Rico, but I wanted to see the country before I traveled anywhere else international. The only reason I had seen Mount Rushmore was a field trip during elementary school. If I was going to be a tourist, where was a better place to start than here? The idea for the road trip had started last year because of the canceled trip to Glacier National Park that Roman and I had been talking about taking.
"You're right. I should probably just hitch," I laughed.
"You really want to end up dead in a psychopath’s trunk, don't you?"
"Maybe one big trip and I'll get it out of my system," I said, putting the book back. I doubted myself as I said it, but I was willing to try it and see whether I could prove myself wrong. What I really wanted to do was relocate, somewhere with a coast; the closer to a beach I was, the better. Maybe I'd end up back here eventually, but not before I had been around for a few years...or many years, we'd see.
"I'd join you if you’d schedule the trip for after my graduation."
"Maybe I can take Sean," I laughed.
"Don't. He sounds like the kind of guy who you'd get into a fight with and he'd leave you on the side of the road," she said. Sean and I had never really fought, we were still too casual for that, but that didn't even really sound that out of character for him. I didn't bother trying to defend him.
"Sounds like solo it is, then."
"Why don't you take..." She stopped herself before she finished her suggestion, but she didn't have to say it for me to know the rest of it. Why don't you take Roman, she wanted to say. We both knew why. I didn't know why she was acting like she didn't. She was supposed to be on my side.
"That everything?" I asked instead, changing the subject. She frowned like she was going to keep going.
"Yeah. Unless you need anything else," she said. Thank God, she wasn't about to push it. I said I was good, too, and we left the store. I didn't have siblings, but Roman and Tiffany had always been close. I adored their relationship, maybe it was a family thing, she had to stick up for him because they were related or something.
