Monday, September 21st, 2009
I wake up, on the couch in my underwear, the first thing I realize is that I'm normal sized again, all my movie posters looking normal sized to me, instead of the size of buildings like they always did, it's about 5:45am, and I hear the movement of Molly seemingly packing stuff up in my room, getting her clothes ready and toiletries. I see the stack of printed MapQuest directions on the kitchen counter bar behind, the staple in the top left-hand corner shining in the reflection of the light of my lamp.
I see that I left my clothes out that I was planning on wearing today on the coffee table right in front of me, some blue jeans and long white socks socks and a light blue Superman t-shirt, something pretty casual, compared to tomorrow, a whole entire suit that I'm planning to wear to introduce myself.
I get off of the couch and put the shirt and jeans on, as Molly opens the door, I think she's woken up before I did.
"Brandon, did you really just wake up" she says, her voice pierces the former sound of silence as she says this, only hearing the light sound of the buzzing from the lamp and the wind beating on the windows every now and then, downtown is pretty quiet this early in the morning.
"Nah, I've been up these last ten-ish minutes" I say, as put my Superman t-shirt on.
"Alright, but remember, you drive me over to my apartment so we can use my car for gas mileage purposes, and I'll drive all the way to Columbus, and you'll drive the last leg from Columbus to Cincinnati" She says, she's dressed in a light grey Patagonia Pullover, she's barefoot right now, and she's wearing red sweatshirt pants, it's pretty baggy around her.
"Yeah, yeah I remember" I say, as I grab my folded up jeans off of the table and attempt to put those on too.
My cell phone stopped working sometime throughout my travels, the acid burning most of it away, so I'll have to buy another one when I get back, so I'll just rely on Molly for hers. I threw mine out yesterday, I forgot about it for most of my travels. I have no clue what I did with my car keys either, so I assume it just burned away while I was in someone's stomach, so we just have my spare one that Molly has.
After I finish putting on my jeans and socks, I put on a different pair of shoes, a pair of white Filas I haven't worn in a couple of years.
I realize I don't think I have a wallet anymore, since that probably burned away too and I didn't realize it, luckily Molly's deciding to pay for this entire trip, feeling bad about what I've been through these last couple of days.
"Damn, I'm going to have buy back a bunch of shit when I get back" I say out-loud to myself.
"What?" she says, seemingly jingling the keys around in her sweatshirt pocket as she walks back to my room, to get the suitcase with our stuff in it.
"My phone, wallet, and keys are missing slash or probably burned away and I didn't realize it, and I'm thinking the latter" I say, sitting on the couch.
"Shit, sucks to be you then" she says, playfully, the sound of the suitcase rolling against the floor, I let her borrow my suitcase that I've had probably around ten years now, a super spacious one I got that Howard bought for me right before we went to Italy that year.
"You're a real comedian, y'know that" I say, a little annoyed at that response, and she giggles a little bit when I say this.
"I mean, I'll help you get set up, you can tell your landlord your situation and they'll probably understand, minus the whole shrinkage part" she says, walking towards the door.
"Yeah, I'll probably have to tell them when I get back, to avoid getting a eviction notice on my door" I say.
I take a look back at my apartment, it's pretty clean, besides a couple of dishes in the sink. I quickly run back inside, and turn off all the lights, the lamp and the one in the one my room too, and I grab the MapQuest pages off of the kitchen's bar counter, holding it in my right hand.
"Well, I guess we're off to the Midwest, didn't you say your dad was from Chicago?" I say to Molly, the light from the hallway shining into my room, as open my front door. Referencing what she told me when we were waiting in line at the Cheesecake Factory
"Yeah, he is" she says, as she opens the door, as begins to walk out the door, and I do to, and I close it behind me.
As we walk through the hallways and down the stairs, it's still early in the morning so you can still hear people sleeping, or their living room TV on loud enough or close enough to their doors that you can hear that they still have it on, a couple of people walk out out of their doors, seemingly off to their jobs, I make eye contact with them and we give each other a nod, I live among some blue-collar job people, like electricians or construction workers, we make it to the lobby, it's still pretty quiet, the receptionist asks about how long we'll be gone for, and I just say just a couple of days, she gives us a nod and a thumbs up.
We make it to the parking lot, Molly didn't do that great of a parking job, taking up a little bit of space of the spot next to her, seemingly not angling the car correctly.
"Have you ever driven a SUV before you met me?" I say, as Molly walks towards the driver's side of my SUV.
"Uh, the biggest vehicle I've ever driven was my Dad's old 1989 Ford F-150 when I was learning how to drive, after that, all small cars from that point" she says, unlocking the doors.
I open up the passenger's side door and get in, and it feels so fucking weird seeing the world at a normal height again, my own car feeling like it was a ginormous tank yesterday, but today, just a regular car to me.
Molly opens up the driver's side door and sits in, she cranks the engine up, I put the MapQuest papers on the dashboard on my side.
We wait about ten minutes, in silence to give the car some time to warm up, I start to think about is this really necessary or not to do anymore, with cars nowadays, before I get a word out, she begins to take off.
She drives to her apartment, since we're taking her car anyways for the trip anyways. It's still pretty cold outside, and it's about 6:37 or so outside, and you can tell the sun is starting to rise and there's a little bit more action going on on the streets, people on their morning drive to work or out getting coffee or the like. Molly parks on the street, so she drives around the block until she finds her car, a dark green 2003 Dodge Stratus, there's a space behind it and she parks there, she turns off the engine and gets out, and I do the same, the cold fall air hits me, a couple of leaves fly into my face too.
"How long have you had this car for?" I say to her, as I walk towards the front passengers side of the car.
"I mean, I got it from a friend's dad's used car dealership that he had out in Staten Island, he said something about it the previous owner being a stock broker that lived out in Long Island and only used it as a commuter car to and from Long Island to Wall Street, this was about almost two years ago, I moved out to Buffalo around Christmas 2007" she says, tossing my car keys to me to keep.
"Oh, nice" I say, as she unlocks the doors, I quickly walk back to my SUV and get the directions off of the dashboard.
I take out the luggage out of my SUV and put it in the trunk of her car, she cranks her car up as I do this.
I make sure that my Envoy is locked before I get into Molly's car.
Once I finish locking the doors, the sound of Molly's car idling starting mess with my ears a bit.
I walk towards the passenger's side door and get in. It feels so weird being this low to the ground in a car, since I've been pretty much driving up-high for the most part these last five years I've had this car, her car smells pretty good, she's got one of those Little Trees air fresheners around her rear-view mirror, Black Ice scented.
"So, are you ready?" She says, looking at me with a smile.
"Yeah, lets go" I say, as she pulls off into traffic.
She navigates the city streets, not needing the instructions for this part, to find the on-ramp for I-90, and when she does we start to pass by city landmarks, like Coca-Cola Field and the Buffalo River and the Marina there and all of it's attractions, it's pretty quiet in the car, besides the sound of Molly's and my own stomach growling loud enough every couple of minutes out of hunger, neither of us haven't eaten anything since we woke up this morning. The radio's off too. It's quiet between us for the first hour, once we get closer to the Pennsylvania border I start to make some conversation.
"So, where was your dad from in Chicago" I say, breaking the ice, we're still riding down I-90, There's a couple of Semi-trucks in front of us and some other cars with New York license plates, it's a pretty somewhat empty highway, the summer seasons has been over for a bit, so there's not too much travel going on at this time.
"Naperville, he was from Naperville, it's a Chicago Suburb. I haven't been there since the summer after graduating high school though" She says.
"Interesting, did you like Chicago, or not really" I say.
"I mean, it's alright, it's a big city. My dad met my mom on a Business trip to Charlotte in the eighties, and then I was conceived, and one thing lead to another and then dad married mom soon after and relocated out to Charlotte" She says, I notice she's not taking her gaze off of the road, the trees and fields surrounding us passing by almost like a blur.
"Hmm" I say.
"Didn't you mention that your Ex-boyfriend went to Europe one time" I say, trying to see if I can get more conversation out of her.
"Yeah, he did. I remember like, I think a couple of weeks after graduation, or maybe it was close to a month, I don't remember it all too well, even though this was like five years ago, he flew out to England to go visit one of his friends out there that he was talking to on Myspace, and he was gone for about two weeks. I remember when he came back, he acted a little bit more humble, for some odd reason, the second day he was back Jon took me and him to the mall, and you could somewhat tell something was off about him, not in a weird way though, more like in a "I've changing my behavior for the better" type way. It was just something about the way he handled himself after that Europe trip that had him seemingly changed in a way, I remember on 4th of July when he came to hang out with my family near the river like I offered him to the day before, he wasn't as per-say, playful either, he was somewhat quiet too, around them. I feel like this whole stint of behavior lasted until he went to L.A. that fall for college, and then he started to act like himself again" She says.
"How much did you too keep in touch anyways, when you guys both went off for college, I remember you mentioned something about you two visiting each other during finals or something like that" I say, I notice we're getting pretty close to the border.
"Yeah, we'd visit each other. Another way we'd keep up with each other is TV, like, on Myspace we'd talk to each other, and both of us were into The Sopranos" She says.
"Yeah, I remember this one teacher said I looked like AJ Soprano jokingly, this was like in 11th grade, my History Teacher I think" I say.
"I mean, you do look like him a little bit" she says.
"But yeah how that started is that Matt was staying the night one Sunday, and Dad had just got HBO in the House installed the week before, and mentioned something about his coworkers at work talking about the latest episode of The Sopranos in the lunch-room, and they made the show sound pretty interesting when talking to him about it, so he caught a new episode one night and invited me and Matt to come watch it with him, and I remember what sealed the deal with Matt is that at the end of that episode, Tony was beating this guy with a belt for sleeping with this woman, which I think was his former mistress and he just cracked up, now I don't remember names of side characters, but that's what I think he said what got him hooked on the show, Matt and my dad" she says, as she finishes this off we pass by the "Welcome to Pennsylvania sign".
"I've never really seen the show, I remember every now and then mom and Howard would watch it downstairs on the weekends, mom said they reminder her of this Italian couple she and my dad were friends with back when they were in their twenties and living in Prescott" I say.
"Interesting. But I remember when we headed off to college they stopped for a little bit, and then the new seasons and it's episodes would come out and we'd talk to each-other about them the next morning on Myspace, I remember he'd say he went to a friend's parent's house in Pasadena to watch them as they were coming out and they'd have dinner with them and all that, since they had HBO, and I went to a friend's parent's house out in Newark, ironically where they filmed most of the show I think in it's surrounding areas, I never caught any filming though, and we'd talk about the episodes and who we thought would get whacked next and how the story was going to go from that point, and then the last season stopped in the middle and we waited another year for the rest of it to come out, but the ending shocked the hell out of both of us though" She says.
"Now I do remember that, it was right around that whole Jack Cooper thing, I remember some of my coworkers were talking about about it" I say, remembering that June of 2007.
"Yeah, it was all over the news, that cut to black of an ending" she says.
It's quiet between us for about the next 15 minutes.
The rest of the ride is pretty much quiet with some conversation, I tell her how my parents met, the KISS concert that mom always told me and Cindy about and how that was the most love in their relationship before dad proposed and everything, I tell her about the drive I did from Seattle to Buffalo, seeing the landscapes change as I drive, and seeing all the regional fast food places and convenience stores, like Holiday and Kwik Trip and Culver's and White Castle, places like that.
We eventually make it to Cincinatti, passing by and driving through Cleveland and the rest of PA around 1 o'clock or so, we stopped in Columbus for bathroom break and to get something to eat, at a Steak N Shake, I trade out driving with Molly, and I finish the last leg of the trip.
We spend the rest of the day at the hotel, just lounging around, and getting ready for meeting Jack Cooper tomorrow.
Giantess World
Author's Chapter Notes:
More insight into our characters before I wrap up the story in the next chapter.
Chapter End Notes:
Next chapter should be out next week, family stuff going on and I had to time to write one more