Allie came and picked me up close to 9 PM. Her car was an absolute mess. Various papers—some from recent college forms and others dating back to fall semester assignments—lay scattered on the floorboards. I wondered if they were the floorboard at this point. I wondered if removing one could signal a chain reaction that ended in a fully dismantled car. Best to not take any chances. Other than the abstract papier-mâché on display, makeup items, coke bottles, snack bags, and straw wrappers littered every nook and cranny. She was working on her eyeshadow when I got in. Rusty palette. Smokey look.

"Obi Bonobe!" she exclaimed without turning. It was a nickname that started way back in elementary school when she lost a stuffed monkey her dad had given her named Bonobo. Being the reckless six-year-old that I was, I told her that I would try my best to take Bonobo’s place, and she started calling me Bonobi. "Obi" got added to the front our freshman year of high school when Robbie got me into Star Wars. Allie only watched prequel content with us, so I got Obi and Robbie became Robi.

She was still looking in the mirror, but I could immediately see her Olsen twin eyes and Brigitte Bardot mouth. She had her platinum blonde hair crimped with an ombré that graduated to a deep shiny gold color. She was wearing a red mini skirt and a black, tight-fitting short sleeve shirt. At the click of my seatbelt, she stowed her eyeshadow brush back in its sheath, yanked the aux from her phone and flicked it to me, gave me a brilliant white smile, then slammed the gas. As we spurred down the street she relayed to me a detailed breakdown of who was going to be at the party. One hand on the wheel, the other applying MAC Ruby Woo.

When she finished her list she counseled, "Look, Boni, you only have seven days left to leave your mark on this stupid high school. No one cares about what happened the last four years, but everyone is going to care about what happens the next ten weeks and you only have a tenth of that.”

Gosh, not this again. “Yeah, I hear ya.” Like an admonished child my head was propped on my hand and my eyes looked out the window, scanning the treeline. I fixated on grounded coconuts as we zoomed by. There and gone. There and gone. There and gone…

The car squealed, coming to a sudden stop. I lurched forward, the cluttered floor moving with me. I looked around frantically to see who or what we almost hit but the street was empty and there wasn’t a stop sign in sight. I turned my head to Allie.

“I don’t think you do,” she enunciated.

“What the hell, Allie?!” I exclaimed.

“I said: I don’t think you do hear me,” she enunciated with a glare.

A car approached from behind, slowed down, and honked. Allie vigorously rolled down her manual window and gave them a rating from 1-5 of how she felt about that. She started the car forward again making sure to go 5 mph under the speed limit until we hit the highway.

On the way she answered my rhetorical question, “It’s your last week, Obi. To some degree I’m envious of you. You won’t have to put up with this hellish social conga line.”

“Envious, sure,” I rolled my eyes.

“Oh, shut up! I’m tired of this gloom-and-doom, angsty, ‘Woe is me, seeing what I’ve seen’ pity party. It’s killing my vibe.”

“Wait, isn’t that from Hamlet? When did you read Hamlet?”

“Stop trying to change the subject…but for your information, like three weeks ago to prepare for the final exam in Miss Cragbottom’s AP Lit class, duh. I wouldn’t really say I read it though, more just watched a couple synopsis videos online the night before.”

“Well, first of all, I also would not count that as reading something. Secondly, don’t tell my mom, that’s one of her favorites. But lastly, we were supposed to read Macbeth, not Hamlet.”

“What?”

“For the lit exam. We were supposed to read Macbeth,” I clarified.

Her eyes went wide, but stayed on the road. “Well shit, that would explain why I failed.”

I started laughing, “I’m sorry but how on earth did you manage to pass the class after failing the exam?”

She gave me a side-eye. “To be honest my chances were never that great, so I spent every other Tuesday evening this past semester cat-sitting her Scottish Folds while she attended her bi-weekly Green Tea and Tiles Mahjong Club. They were devils for cats, but her good graces availed some extra credit which got me the B I needed.”

I know I mentioned before that Allie was smart, but I should clarify that her intellect was compartmentalized. She’s a whiz with people, strategy, economics, politics, and even science, but ask her to write an essay and, well…she wouldn’t. I actually don’t think I ever saw her write a single paper for any of her classes. Seems impossible, right?

Right?

I realized she hadn’t stopped talking. She was picking back up on her earlier tirade that I had tried my best to sidetrack from. “ …and this final summer is when heartache becomes heartbreak, sticklers get stick, sinners repent, and friends become lovers.” She didn’t hesitate at the last, but I got queasy. “School’s out, babydoll. No looking back now.”

I took the unintentional cue and pulled up Alice Cooper’s unconventional perspectives on the multifaceted realm of educational discourse.

“Oh hell yeah, hand me my heart shades,” Allie demanded when it started playing. I dug them out of the middle console and placed them in her outstretched hand. She slipped on the pair of bright red, heart-shaped sunglasses and jumped in with me on the second-half of the chorus.

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“No more pencils!

No more books!

No more teacher's dirty looks!”

We sung the rest of the song, yelling and laughing down the highway. After it ended, Allie stole the aux back and I had to tightly grip the grab handle by the window as she swerved back and forth on the road trying to share her recently liked songs with me.

“You have to listen to this new artist I found!” she told me. “Her name is Lily B. She is so good!"

While much of what Allie listened to wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, that by no means meant I thought she had bad music taste. We just had different preferences. So as soon as she explained that this was a blowing-up country artist, I prepared myself for some casual head nods and faux appreciation.

But it surprised me.

“This is actually really good,” I admitted.

Allie exclaimed, “I know! I knew you’d like it. You really need to let go of that undeserved bitterness towards country music.”

I rolled my eyes, “That’s not fair. I don’t dislike country as a genre. I just only listen to songs that I consider bops, and it just so happens that not many country songs meet that criteria.”

She laughed, “You’re such a snob.” As we drove some windy roads through the forest, the sun was intermittently hitting her face through the trees, lighting up her gray-blue eyes. I was genuinely enjoying Lily B’s bops. Even though I denied it, Allie was completely right that I had a fairly heavy prejudice against country music. I’m sure it had something to do with my Betty-Barley-related PTSD. I decided to look Lily B up on my phone. She had long, flowing auburn hair with golden-orange highlights. Her eyes were a bright green, like emeralds; certainly, some sort of professional editing trick. No one’s eyes were that bright. The sun-kissed fair skin of her arms (delicately holding a guitar) was speckled with freckles and contrasted against her vintage white, off-the-shoulder, lace blouse. It was paired with high-waisted, distressed denim jeans held up by a belt buckle in the shape of a golden, coiled snake. She stood barefoot on a desert landscape.

Well damn. I should’ve gotten into country music much sooner.

After the next song, Allie turned down the volume and proceeded to tell me all about how someone named Mary-something and some alpha dude with a beta name apparently broke up the day before Mary-something’s grad party. The girl uninvited him, then started hooking up with some football player destined for a partial associate’s degree and minimum wage. “I never liked them much as a couple, but I mean, come on, Marshawn instead of Collin? I guess his family has money, and you know what people say: money and love and all that.”

“I don’t think anyone says that,” I teased.

That launched a whole other conversation about how much money it would take for us to marry someone we hated. She buckled at $100 million. “I mean, at that point I could partition the dining room table with a wall of cash and not even have to look at him! I’d reinvest half the money into early-stage biotech firms, probably ones focusing on gene-editing technologies. It’s high-risk, high-reward, but I’d also be helping progress the species. Most of the other half I’d probably put in Disney stock and US bonds. They’re the two entities that I think are most likely to see the world burn before giving up a dime. What about you, Obi?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m too much of a romantic to ever accept money for love. Affection is a gift reserved for something special, someone special.”

She was quiet. I winced at the pain of the awkwardness of my answer. Emotional damage. Why on earth was I dropping such a blatant hint? Did I really even want to? Of course not, I just can’t help myself sometimes.

“One billion dollars,” she deadpanned, breaking the silence.

I pretended to consider it. “Sure, Allie. One billion dollars for my love.” Then before another almost equally awkward moment of silence I spoke up again, “Though, Mom might convince me to redistribute the wealth depending how her new book goes.” Allie’s eyebrows raised at that comment and she wrung every detail of Mom’s communist-author phase out of me. I was happy for the subject change.

“Oh, I am going to absolutely rail her for this,” she announced.

“Just give me a heads up so that I’m far, far away,” I chuckled.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, my default setting was reserved. But Allie could always draw an energy from me that otherwise lay dormant. It wasn’t love for her. It wasn’t anything passionate or sexual. In fact, the feeling had nothing to do with her at all. Her unabashed grip on life made me yearn for something within myself that felt…not absent, but wanting. Something that got misplaced in my gene makeup as a child and still hadn’t found its way back. Music, good music, had a similar effect on me. Good stories too. It was a hunger, an urge, a pull, a call. Call it what you want, but at the end of the day while it still had nothing to do with Allie, she certainly knew how to pluck the chords.

Perhaps it’s present in everyone, but remains more stagnant in some than in others.

Perhaps.

We chatted more about life. We chatted about things that happened and things to come. We solved several global issues. At one point, Allie made me laugh so hard I started choking on the seltzer I was drinking and any that wasn’t immediately sprayed out onto her dashboard exited my nose onto my shirt. We unsuccessfully wiped most of it on the dashboard with her AP Physics term paper titled “Superconductivity at Room Temperature: Practical Limitations.” Thankfully the car didn’t fall apart when I grabbed it off the floorboard and it smeared enough of the water that some started to evaporate from the beating sun. Another Lily B song ended and was followed by a light and bright male timbre coming through on the speakers. Allie immediately finger-punched her phone to skip it. Her face that was previously glowing and joyful suddenly darkened.

“Now, what did Justice Beaver ever do to you?” I remarked. “I happen to like that song.”

She wasn’t amused though and fumed, “That idiot Brian Fink sent it to me. And I hate to speak ill of someone, but he is just so…dense.”

“Whoa, watch your language, please,” I taunted. “Think of the children. No need to start cursing like a sailor. Now, is there something I should know? Why is Brian Fink sending you songs?”

Oof, did that come off a bit possessive?

She sighed, “We got to talking at Jessica Smith’s grad party last weekend and he asked for my number. I gave it to him, and we were actually having some pretty fun conversations, flirting back and forth, but then I found out from Jessica Smith’s younger sister Kourtney that apparently he was also talking to one of her friends. It’s not like we’re dating or anything, but it just gave me the ick. He can do whatever he wants, but it definitely ruined the whole thing for me.”

Well, this is news. I was contemplating how to reply, but before I could, we pulled up in front of Robbie’s house. Allie’s face brightened all over again. I wasn’t getting any more information on the subject right then, so it was best to let it go. The front door swung open and out came Robbie.

Looking back, I wish that car ride would’ve lasted forever.

Little did I know, our time was already slipping away.

There was no more turning back the clock.

Everything that happened next was inevitable.