License Plate Game
There’s nothing quite like a four hour road trip with your new ex-boyfriend. As we drove in silence and sulked, I kept telling myself that this was only a reminder from above that breaking up with Tristan had been a good idea. Yes, everything is a blessing in disguise. I thought maybe if I told myself enough times, it would start feeling true.
Here’s what no one tells you about following your boyfriend to an out-of-state university: after you break up with him, he’ll still be your only ride home for Thanksgiving break. Sure, everybody said it was a bad idea. Sure, everybody said we wouldn’t last the first semester. But no one had warned me about Thanksgiving. That would’ve actually been helpful!
Really, what I should have done, is waited to decide he was an idiot until after I had bought a car. I sighed. Oh well. At least it was almost Black Friday. I wasn’t sure if that applied to cars, but maybe it did. If there was a good enough sale, I could buy a car and only have to live through this four hour nightmare once.
“What are you sighing about?” Tristan said, keeping his eyes on the road.
“Nothing, sorry,” I mumbled.
“What?”
I held back a groan. There had to be a way to make all of this more bearable. I thought for a moment. “Why don’t we play a game?”
“I’ve already played a game with you, and it didn’t go so well.”
“Oh, don’t get all metaphorical. I just want to play some sort of dumb driving game. Like finding things that start with each letter, or I Spy or the license plate game.” Anything to stop the seething silence.
He sighed dramatically. “Fine. License plate game.”
I nodded and turned myself toward the passenger window. “Missouri doesn’t count because we’re there.”
“Well, we’re only an hour from Illinois, so that shouldn’t count either.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
I rolled my eyes. I don’t know what he was fine-ing. He was the one who was getting his way!
I watched helplessly as dozens of Missouri license plates rushed past my window. Come on, come on . . . finally! “I see Indiana! Red Toyota.”
Tristan glanced toward me. “I see it.” He gestured with his head toward the other side of the highway. “I just saw a Colorado go by in the other direction.”
I grinned. “Wanna know something I recently learned about Colorado?”
“No.”
“Come on! It’s fun!”
“What class did you learn it in?”
“Intro to chem.”
“Then I doubt it’s fun.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with chemistry! If anything it’s . . . statistics.”
“You do remember that I’m an English major, right? Statistics isn’t my idea of fun either.”
“Oh, I remember, Mr. Metaphor,” I mumbled.
“Not helping your case.”
“I’m just going to tell you anyway.”
He groaned.
“Colorado is one of sixteen states whose abbreviation is also the abbreviation of a chemical element on the periodic table.” I grinned.
He scoffed. “That was your fun fact?”
“Yep!”
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“I don’t know. Live a more informed life.”
He gave me a look, lips pursed and eyes humorless.
I shrugged. “Oh! There’s one from New York! Wonder what they’re doing in Missouri.”
Tristan mumbled, “Probably not playing the freaking license plate game with their ex-girlfriend like a couple of middle schoolers.”
“I heard that!”
“Good!” A pause. “There’s Iowa.”
Against my better judgment, I smiled. I then groaned dramatically, just in case he’d seen it. Wouldn’t want to give any wrong impressions — I still thought he was an idiot. But maybe this drive would help us build a bridge over the chasm of history and frustration and pain between us. I didn’t really want to cross over it again in any permanent sort of way, but it’d be nice for it to be there. It’d be nice to not hate the one person on campus who was from home, who knew me from before we all became our college selves.
I turned on the radio, keeping the volume low enough that we could still play the game. A bright green semi whizzed past us. I said, “That one was from Nebraska.”
“Nice,” Tristan said.
The silence we settled into as we waited for the next state suddenly felt much less suffocating.
Originally published in The Index, Nov. 2020.
