Chapter 1
THEN
12/05/2021
9:56 AM
"Imagine reading a book on a road-trip like this" Xaiden, my brother yells at me as I browse through the pages of John green's The fault in our stars. Its the 7th time i'm reading it, and I never get bored of it. "Its better than whatever you are listening to right now anyways" I yell back, as and turns right in the roundabout. He decreases the volume of the radio(Probably realizing how bad his music taste is) , as our van moves to Kelso dunes. Xaiden wanted to stop for a picture. UGHH.
"Say Cheese!" he says as he forces me to smile for the picture. "The network here is Soo bad" he frowns as he takes some "aesthetic-selfies" to send his girlfriend, Tricia.
"Tricia asked me to send minimum 5 selfies a day..shes gonna get mad if I tell her there's poor network here" he says,smiling to himself.
We then run, lie down and basically cover ourselves with sand as we push eachother to the strong wind and the whistling sound coming from the moving sand.
Xaiden and me play in the sand for an eternity until we were sweat soaked and somehow ended with more sand in our head than the sand in the dunes .
We climb back to the van, laughing and quenched our thirst.
Eight years of blood and sweat at UNLV, and Xaiden was finally taking his victory lap to LA. I adored him for it—no one deserved this more—but there was a frantic edge to how much fun he was having. It was like he was trying to swallow the whole world at once. I was just sitting there in the passenger seat, wishing he’d keep his eyes on the road for a second.
"Are you hungry Xan?" Xaiden asks me, his eyes searching for any sign of discomfort.
"Yes. I'm done with the last pack of Oreos also" I say, closing my book.
He nods as he looks for any signs of restaurants in the almost ghosted town of Baker.
We finally find a small, almost cottage style cafe near the gas station and Xaiden parks the car, eyeing the surroundings.
"It looks very homely, expect a serial killer or a psychopath to be lurking inside the restaurant" he says, coming out. We cross the road and sit inside the cafe, an old, fat woman greets us She's really sweet. And she's the owner. "She definitely looks like a psychopath to me " Xaiden whispers to me as she leaves.
We order burgers and Icecream milkshakes and she offered us her special apple pie as a gift for Xaiden's graduation.
Xaiden goes to take his wallet from the car as I'm still in the restaurant, finishing up the rest of my milkshake.
He gets a call. But he could never answer it.
"XAIDEN!"
"XAIDEN!!!"
