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Jo-Beth read off the points of interest we’d located. “‘Notes: Mysterious alien light show in the hills. Go after midnight and before two. Bring beer and snacks.’”
“Okay, we’re totally doing that,” I rejoined. “I wanna see some spooky shit.”
“Are you gonna make me hold your hand like you do in scary movies?”
I blushed. “Uh-huh.”
Jo-Beth cackled, knowing me all too well. “You’re such a chicken, but we already knew that, so back to the list. There are only two on here. Second one is, ‘Abandoned building on edge of town, alleged by locals to have been a former brothel.’”
My brows shot up. “No way. In this little Podunk Hollow place?” I swept my arm across the windshield, through which we could see whole packs of tumbleweeds. The town probably had more tumbleweeds than people.
“That’s what it says here,” Jo-Beth replied, tapping the furrowed page. “Maybe it was for, like, gold diggers. Like, the real kind, the ones who dug gold.”
“Sounds sexy.”
“More like haunted.”
“Sexy and haunted can coexist,” I argued.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Phoebe,” she joked, playfully slapping me on the wrist.
My friend was right. Of course, she was just messing around, but in truth, I did need to focus on something else.
Because despite my better angels, I’m a little bit boy crazy. There’s plenty of other crazy about me, but the ‘boy’ one sticks out. I wasn’t always like this. In fact, as a kid, I couldn’t have given two shits about how my male cohorts spent their time on the playground. I was content to read fantasy novels in the corner and munch on Ritz crackers. Is it okay to be twenty-one and still miss recess?
This — this being crackers, corners, and celibacy — all changed when I went to college. I know, you’re waiting for me to say that some frat dude with a snapback and a kegger broke my heart and I sobbed for three days and then emerged a hardened, hornier version of myself. And sure, there have been a few frat dudes here and there. But in reality, the clincher was all those damn classes on Freud.
I’m a psych major, and for whatever reason, we’re required to talk about Freud pretty much every day for our first year of college. Yes, I’m aware he basically founded the field I’m going into, but then again, all his “clinical findings” have been widely disproven by the modern experts. I’m just saying, maybe we could stand to talk less about a dead white guy who got shit wrong.
But back to my point. We started getting so into talk of sexuality and urges and desires and it was like somebody turned on my vagina’s faucet and never quite closed it. Understanding my body in a logical way helped me experience it in a physical, tangible way. Plus, listening to thirty-something male teachers in tweed jackets lecture you on penis envy is just hot. I don’t make the rules. In the intervening years, I went through so many stages of lust and acquisition, had the best — and worst — sex and generally self-actualized.
Never mind that none of said sexual encounters had manifested into full-blown relationships. I reasoned that, as a psych major, I knew better than to believe in anything so impractical as love. Those were chemicals and societal expectations working under pressure to transform to fluid humans into a solid relationship. The phase shift was painful and pointless, and both people ended up the worse for it.
Ahem. Anyways, that’s how Jo-Beth and I had ended up friends early on — through boy-craziness. Or, in her case, girl-craziness. In her spare time, when she wasn’t busy learning how to save the planet, she used her coding skills — where’d she get those skills? I’ve never learned — to help create a dating app for college campuses for the LGBT+ communities.
Jo-Beth leaned her head against the passenger window and sighed, her breath clouding the glass.
“I wish I didn’t have to work,” she muttered, for the umpteenth time.
My hand found her shoulder and I gave it a little squeeze. “Sorry, bud.”
“Being a physics major sucks.”
“Hey, you had to go and be all super-duper smart and shit. That’s on you.”
She smiled, and Jo-Beth was back to her usual sunny self. We’d both been grinding hard during the school year — hence the much-needed road trip — but as a physics major, Jo-Beth was putting in more hours than I was convinced existed in a day. She even had to work during our trip in preparation for the upcoming fall quarter, making her feel equal parts angry at her course load and guilty for abandoning me during much of the time we weren’t driving.
I don’t mean to psychoanalyze my friend. It’s just a force of habit, a habit I’m trying to break.
