AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Still, the clock was ticking, and a basic, boring disc was an entry, where no play list was not.
“Got it,” Evie announced. “Give me a tape.”
Thank fuck. “Thank Elliot profusely, send him the playlist, and let him know he’s a back-up,” I said. “Let’s make a tape.”
Evie’s fixes worked, and between her and Alys, we had the tape deck hooked up to Alys’s laptop in a few minutes, to record.
We wrapped everything up with three hours to spare. It seemed like a lot, but Salt Lake was an hour’s drive, even at full speed.
Still, plenty of time.
Evie squeezed Alys’s hand and waved to Maddox and me as we climbed into the Land Cruiser. “We’re all rooting for you,” Evie said.
There was something extra reassuring about knowing that all my neighbors wanted us to succeed as much as we did. It was a kind of familiarity and comfort…
Nope, that felt like a mopey rabbit hole to fall down.
A few minutes later, we hit the freeway with Maddox behind the wheel. This was it, we were on our way.
Half an hour into the drive, on a dark stretch of highway, the landscape in front of us lit up with an endless row of red taillights.
“Construction?” I already had my phone out.
“Not that we’ve seen,” Alys said.
There was the news, bright as day. “There’s a semi jackknifed up ahead. The entire freeway is closed.”
“Do we wait it out?” Maddox drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
Uncharacteristic for him.
“We don’t know how long until it’s open again. We could be here all night.” I didn’t like that idea at all.
Alys leaned forward between the seats. “Flip it around. We’ll take the other route.”
“That adds at least forty five minutes to the trip,” Maddox argued.
I had to side with Alys on this one. “Sitting here could add a lot more.”
Fortunately, it was late enough at night that when we hit the alternate route, traffic was light, and it was smooth sailing. We took a downtown exit with fifteen minutes to spare.
And we ground to a halt again, with a new glut of cars.
“God damn it,” Alys muttered. “That concert was tonight.”
“The one with…” I didn’t need to finish the thought. We all knew, the pop star with the massive audience who was overfilling stadiums everywhere right now.
We didn’t have a choice but to inch a long, watching minutes tick away faster than meters.
Our destination was only two miles away. We’d park, but there was no room on the streets. One of us could get out and walk, but the foot traffic was so heavy with people milling in giant packs to their cars, even if we were capable of sprinting that distance in the limited amount of time we had.
We didn’t pull into the radio station parking lot until nearly twelve-thirty in the morning.
It didn’t matter that we were late, we had to try anyway. We ran up to the entrance and tried the door.
Locked.
“Fuuuuuuck,” I shouted into the night sky.
