They carried on East via I-90 all through Indiana and into Ohio, all the while Lulu tried to convert him into a fan of her music. The entirety of her downloaded library consisted of only half a dozen albums and a few singles. By the time they reached the Ohio border, it was starting to get repetitive.
During the drive, it seemed like every other county they drove through was arguing about what kind of weather they wanted to deal with. Heavy, snow-carrying winds were swapped at the drop of a hat with pouring hail. Crossing over one town line brought with it a sudden shift into rain, and half an hour after that they were back to snow.
The closer they came to Cleveland, the less Lulu sang along to her music, and the more she took in her surroundings.
“You’re gonna want to take the exit up ahead,” she told him. “Onto I-80.”
Drake didn’t shift into the exit lane. “You looking at a map?”
“Trust me. 80’ll take us to New York.”
Still, he kept to his lane, driving at a steady seventy-two miles per hour. “I think we’ll be fine on 90. This has taken us dead East all day. I don’t want to take a wrong turn and end up down in Delaware.”
“It’s coming up,” she said. The foreboding held in the air. She then added, “We shoulda picked up a map at the gas station.”
“No one sells maps anymore.”
A sign passed overhead, indicating that the split onto I-80 was coming up in half a mile.
“90’s gonna take us right through Cleveland. You really wanna risk the city traffic in this weather?”
He asked in response, “If we’re already driving all night?”
The quarter-mile sign flew overhead. Lulu felt about ready to grab the wheel. She could survive through the night, and would offer to drive as she’d already been doing for the last few hours. But she knew she wouldn’t hear the end of it once Drake realized how wrong he was, even if they were treated to a scenic drive of Lake Erie concluding at Niagara Falls.
Come to think of it, how bad would it be to just keep on driving?
The thought of making a never-ending detour came and went from her mind as the lanes began to split.
Lulu’s hand fell to the center console, just an inch away from his. “You wanna get back to Miami or not?”
“Fine.” Drake flicked up his turn signal and moved into the right lane. “It’s a shame. I always really wanted to see Cleveland.”
“Seriously?” she laughed. “There’s nothing to see. It’s Cleveland. No one likes Cleveland. Not even the people from here.”
“So that’s why you moved to Miami. No modeling gigs around here.”
She looked at him approvingly. “You got that from my navigation? Or were there other clues?”
Drake felt immediately relieved by the validation of her response. He knew he was right to be hesitant, but it also gave him a little more insight into her.
“Lucky guess,” he said.
“Very lucky,” she replied with a coy grin. “Cause now you get a prize.”
Lulu reached under the hem of the sweater and untucked her tanktop from her shorts, pulling it up.
“Hey now, I’m driving. Let’s not get too crazy.”
“Relax,” she said, pausing. “You’re still not a subscriber. Last night’s peep show is all you’re gonna get.” She pulled up her tops a little more, revealing a series of inked lines the size of her fist on her side.
Drake glanced over at the tattoo and asked, “What’s that supposed to be?”
“I don’t really do tattoos cause then it’s easier for people to connect me to the FanGirlz page when the modeling really takes off. But I got this done a few years ago. It’s my old neighborhood.” She pointed to one of the lines in the center, then traced around. “This was the street I grew up on. And all of our friends were from the houses on these roads. Follow this road down, and that’s where the hill was I told you about. That’s actually where I had my first kiss, too. This guy I had a crush on in middle school kissed me at a last day of school picnic behind the rock wall on the playground.”
Lulu dropped the sweater and readjusted herself in the seat, watching the next road sign pass, knowing where I-80 would inevitably take them.
“And the tattoo gets cropped out of the stuff you post?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I’m just careful about the angles. Sometimes the bra or top I wear covers it. If I’m wearing something see-through, I’ll just put some cover-up on it.”
“Smart.”
“What about you? Got any tattoos?”
“Can’t really get behind any. Nothing against them. Just-”
“Don’t want to commit?”
“Sure, we can say that. I feel like after a year, I’m not gonna want to stare at the same thing on my arm every day.”
Lulu thought about his answer, let a tenth-of-a-mile marker pass, then asked, “Why’d you move to Miami?”
“Same as you,” he answered quickly. “Went there to work.”
“What do you do for work there that you couldn’t do in New York?”
“I don’t know if that’s the right question. I could do graphic design in New York, or anywhere, I guess. I just needed a different scene. Why couldn’t you do your stuff in Cleveland?”
“Modeling isn’t the same as graphic design. You gotta know people to get into the right scene. It’s so much more about who you know, and who you hang out with. It’d be a miracle if I got a contract based on just my online stuff.”
“Okay, so you just up and left for Miami hoping to run into the right people at parties?” Drake chuckled at the thought. “Please tell me you didn’t go full Hollywood here.”
“I didn’t. Don’t worry, I’m not dumb. I had, and have, a plan. I met Marsha when I was in High School. I used to do a lot of pageants and cheerleading, and her daughter and I met at a competition in Columbus. Faye and I became close friends, and when they moved down to Miami in our junior year to start Faye’s career, Marsha invited me along! But then Faye and I fell out, but I was already down there, and Marsha and I kept close.”
“Hold on, you got into this in high school?”
“Oh my god,” she groaned as if she’d been through this topic. She spoke in a monotone, almost like reading off a script. “Yes, but it wasn’t like that. I didn’t start the page until I was legal and it was my own choice. Marsha never made me make the account, and she’s always been supportive of me turning it into a sustainable modeling career.”
“And your parents let you go with her?”
“Of course my parents didn’t let me go. They wanted me to stay in Ohio. But what was all the work in the pageants for if I wasn’t going to do anything with it after High School? What else was I gonna do? Take out student loans for a bullshit gen-ed associate, or a liberal arts Bachelor’s degree just to end up at Starbucks? No thanks. I might not be living the dream right now, but at least I’m still working toward something I care about.”
“Okay, hold on. How old even are you?”
Lulu threw her head back in frustration. “I know, I look young.”
“No, I mean, yeah. You do. I figured you were like twenty-eight or twenty-nine. But on the plane you said-”
“I’m twenty-five,” she said. “I took off with Marsha ten years ago.”
Drake could almost laugh. “No shit your parents didn’t want you going. What, did you think it was summer camp you were going down to Miami for?”
“I knew what I was doing. But when you’ve got a dream you gotta do whatever it takes, just going a day at a time.”
At this point, Drake was barely steering. The cruise control and lane assist were on. He was only glancing around from time to time, making sure no one was going to crash into him, with his fingers resting on the base of the wheel.
“Yeah, but-”
“Well, what about you? You never answered my questions. New York to Miami for a job you can do anywhere. Why?”
Drake groaned, not wanting to change topics, but knew she was going to keep pushing him. “Look, sometimes you just need a change of scenery. You get complacent in one place, and everything gets so…so monotone.”
Lulu stared, waiting for a response.
He let his answer hang there for a time, feeling it was a suitable enough response. Then Lulu pushed him some more.
“That’s it? That’s not a reason.”
Drake adjusted his hands on the wheel to feel more in control of the vehicle. “Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not. That’s a cop out! Come on, I just laid it out for you. It’s your turn now.”
“Fine. Look, I was doing fine in New York. I had steady work, but everything was just getting so one-note. I was doing the same job over and over, and I just felt like I was losing my interest in it. And then my brother, jeez. The instant commissions started slowing, he’d try to rope me into his business. Every single time.”
“What’s so wrong with that?”
“What’s so wrong with working nine-to-five in a cubicle doing the most menial graphic work? After a week I’d be wondering if the window was faster than the elevator.”
“Wow…” she breathed. “You really don’t like commitment, do you?”
“No, I’ve got nothing against commitment. I’m actually a big fan. I just don’t want to commit to anything that’s not worth my time. It’s the commercial side of my work that I can’t stand. I get it, someone’s gotta do the bullshit jobs. People need their fliers made, and websites designed, and billboards, advertisements, all that boring stuff. But some people gotta make the real stuff. Some people have something to say and are willing to put the long hours in for a seriously special artistic vision.”
The tides of the verbal battle had totally shifted in favor of Lulu, and she pressed Drake hard. “And you believe you deserve better than the other guys? Kinda arrogant, isn’t it?”
Drake almost protested, but stopped himself short. “Maybe it is. But if it pays off? I may sound arrogant, but no one’s stopping the other guys from shooting their shot, too. I’m just the guy that’s actually taking the risk. And if some asshat company is gonna give me the boot so they can do the job for cheap with A.I., then fuck ‘em. I’m not gonna surrender my dignity for money-first idiots who couldn’t understand the human experience even with a gun to their head because they’ve never given themselves a single opportunity in their life to try to form a connection with anything other than their fucking investors and shareholders.”
She listened to him rant and took in every word.
His grip had become tight on the wheel, thinking about his last job and how fast it’d gone out the door. The posters were still in his apartment in Miami, collecting dust, as they would likely continue to do for who knew how long, until eventually tossed in the recycling to be made into new poster paper and covered with an A.I. graphic that was conceptualized and rendered in half a minute.
“Sounds like we’re gonna start getting along a little better,” she finally said.
“Whatever you say, Lulu.” He reached for the dashboard and turned up the volume on her music. Once more, it was a song by that alt-pop singer Casey-something he thought he could already sing all the words to. “Next time we stop for gas, you’re downloading some new stuff. Put some My Chemical Romance on there.”