Date Me Like You Mean It

I see a road sign that proclaims Marfa to be 50 miles ahead.

“If you hit Marfa, you’ve gone too far!” Stephanie told me yesterday during a brief phone call.

Our GPS is on the fritz. Out here, just like with the radio, my phone gets a terrible signal. Stephanie warned me about that, but I didn’t think it’d be an issue because she gave me backup directions.

I worry we’ll never find the house. We’re going to get lost and wander the desert aimlessly until we collapse from dehydration and exhaustion. Vultures will circle overhead, squawking with glee. They’ll eat our faces first, I think. I’ve heard they like faces.

Just then, a vulture swoops across the skyline, and panic grips my spine.

Oh-kay. Time for a distraction.

“Let’s play a game to pass the time. How about I Spy? I’ll go first.” I start before Aiden can protest. “I spy with my little eye…” I scan the skyline, looking for an item of interest. Anything. “Something brown.”

“The dirt,” he says, tapping his window. “Or the dirt over there. No wait, the dirt that way.”

Okay, he has a point.

“It was that hill back there. Are you sure we’re going the right way?”

“No, I have no idea where we’re going. Stephanie’s directions were horrible.”

I glance back down at the email I printed out yesterday. There’re phrases like Follow the horizon line, Look for the crater, and Let the wind guide you. I guess I should have paid more attention to it instead of just assuming we’d be fine.

“She said we’d know it when we saw it,” I pipe up, trying to be helpful.

This is turning out horribly.

I really wanted this week to be smooth sailing, especially because I somehow convinced Aiden to tag along.

In the end, it wasn’t an easy task getting him here. At first, he wasn’t budging. The morning after I told him the truth about all my nice gestures, I woke up early and whipped up some pancakes and bacon. With tiny chocolate chips, I spelled out PLEASE on the top of his short stack. Later that afternoon, I sent a huge fruit bouquet to his work. Still, he wasn’t caving.

That night I offered him a foot rub. He declined. I tried to think of something even more inventive. What is it guys really want? Oh, duh. My eyes scanned to his groin. Right. Well, there’s always that.

“Aiden,” I said, turning to face him. “I could…”

He narrowed his eyes at me, curious to know where I was headed.

I pointed suggestively at his pants. “You know.”

He shot off the couch, his hands tugging through his hair.

“Jesus, Maddie. Fine. I’ll go! I’ll go on your damn trip.”

“And pretend to be my boyfriend?”

“Whatever.”

Bada bing, bada boom. No blow job necessary.

I thought there’d be more issues with him getting time off from work, but since he’s never used a sick day, his boss basically pushed him out the door. So here we are, pioneers out on the open road. Only a thin scrap of car metal between us and vultures pecking our skulls clean.

Now, I offer him another handful of Gardetto’s (America’s road trip fuel), but he declines.

“I need real food.”

I blanch and look around me. We ate through our small store of beef jerky when we were still in Austin. The apples went next.

I make a point to not look at our water supply. Had I known we’d need to conserve it, I wouldn’t have picked such salty snack foods. My mouth feels parched. Am I already feeling the effects of dehydration?

There!

Up ahead!

“AIDEN! TURN!”

On an unmarked road about a quarter mile up ahead, we see a huge iron arch with dozens of wind chimes hanging down. Let the wind guide you!

We turn onto the road and pass through the entrance. From there, we crawl down a gravel road, passing more cacti but not much else. My confidence wanes as minutes pass. My fingers are gripping my knees, digging into meaty flesh as I silently pray I haven’t led us astray.

“Is that a crater?” Aiden asks, pointing out his window.

Sure enough, there’s a shallow bowl-shaped hole a few yards off the road.

Stephanie isn’t dumb! Her directions worked!

I grab Aiden’s shoulder and shake him silly. “We did it! We found it! We aren’t going to die!”

He laughs. “We were never going to die.”

Right. Good. At least one of us maintained a brave face.

We keep driving down the road, following the line of mountains in the distance, then after another sharp bend, I see the compound coming into view. Stephanie wasn’t exaggerating about it being nice. Only one story high, the sprawling complex of modern modular buildings sits oriented with the landscape. Made of dark brown metal and stucco and huge picture windows that span entire walls, it looks like the sort of habitat they’d build on Mars.

Three matching black Range Rovers are arranged in a neat line at the end of the row of buildings. Stephanie mentioned she’d be caravanning down from Dallas with her friends and offered to have a car pick up Aiden and me as well, but I figured it was best if we had our own means of transportation. Y’know…just in case things get really weird and we need to bail.