Weekend
FRIDAY
The light drizzle continued to pour out of the sky, much like it had been doing for the past five hours. Matt was asleep. He was also wet. Columbia was a dreary landscape. Orientation and ****registration was in full swing, but the bright, cheery mood that was presented by the yellow sun on the banners was betrayed by the foul weather. There were not very many people wandering around the campus, a fact that Matt had found out first hand. He had become bored much quicker than he had thought that he would. Sleep was the only alternative that he knew of.
The parking garage was silent, a reflection of the campus that it was next to. It wasn't absolute silence, but a subdued one that did not fit well with the area it was located. Footsteps and a car engine were heard every now and then, but not in the quantity that was expected or desired. Matt awoke quickly, in a way that if someone had been watching him, they would not have been able to tell the differiance between asleep and awake. He tried to go back to sleep but was unable. He was uncomfortable.
His cell phone rang some time later. Matt picked it up quickly. He glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was Tim. He opened the phone. "Yeah?" he said quickly.
"Hey," came Tim's voice from the other side of the phone. "I'm sorry that I took so long. I had troubles scheduling ****s."
"So you're ready to go?"
"Yeah."
"I'll drive the car down to the outside and wait for you. Right?"
"Sure."
After brief troubles with starting the car, Matt swerved it quickly out of the parking garage and outside. He searched quickly for Tim, found him, and drove to him. Matt got out of the car and switched into the passenger seat. Tim entered the car, throwing a bag that was full of various book packets and such into Matt's lap.
"Bam!" He said loudly as he sat down in the seat.
"Bam!" he said again as he brought his seat belt down and buckled it.
"Bam!" he said finally as he jerked the gearshift into reverse and backed quikly out of the parking spot and onto the road. Though his words held a lot of energy behind them his actions held little; at least not nearly as much as his words.
Matt hefted the bag, which had a large illustration of a tiger on the front. He found that it was quite heavy. "Jesus christ, what's in this thing?" he asked.
"SWAG!" Tim replied. The 'a' was slightly prolonged, making it sound like swaag.
Matt's mouth split into a grin. "Seriously?" he asked incredously.
" I could decorate my condo with all of the SWAG I got!" Tim said. This merited a hearty laugh from Matt.
Matt rumagged through the bag. "Tim, this SWAG sucks." he said.
"It's SWAG," Tim said. "It all sucks."
"Well you know, some SWAG is better than other SWAG."
"Wrong. All SWAG is crap."
"Well I really think you're wrong." Tim didn't respond to this. Matt threw the bag into the backseat, then emerged a few seconds later with a different bag. "Want some candy?" he asked tim as he pulled two boxes of candy out of the bag.
"When did you buy candy?" Tim asked.
"While I was at Walgreens buying water. I think the question you should be asking is 'Why' I bought candy."
"Why?"
"They were on sale three for three dollars. It would have been stupid not to buy it."
"I'm not sure about that logic."
The car pulled onto Interstate 70. Matt was glad to be out of the city. The drizzle was lessening. Matt thought that it was stuck to the city like a bad scar. The sky was a bleak gray. Matt found this, along with the rain, to be foreboding messeges about the journey. He expressed this to Tim who replied quickly with, "Well, Bethany's a depressing town, so it makes sense."
The weather held no sway over them however, and now that they were on the highway, they were both giddy with excitement. The road ducked and curved across the landscape, which was becoming increasingly sparse. Matt's mind turned to Bethany, the goal and final destination, despite the fact that they were returning home the next day. "Alright!" Matt exclaimed. "Finally. Back on the road. I was getting bored in Columbia."
"Why? Columbia is a cool town."
"Maybe when it's not raining and there's stuff going on."
"I thought you were gonna walk around campus."
"I did, but I can't walk around for four hours, especially not in the rain."
"I'm sorry it took so long," Tim said apologetically.
"No, I'm not complaining, I knew what I was getting into. " Matt paused and looked out the window. "How did the ****stuff go? What did you do?"
"Ehhh," Tim said. "Signed up for ****s. I guess I'm a philosophy major."
"Is that what you decided to go with?"
"Ehhh," Tim said again, shrugging his shoulders. "I guess. Whatever."
"You can always change it later."
"Yeah. I know. I'm not too worried about it. So," Tim began. "we were walking around the campus and there's this big tiger statue that you should probably ride as soon as possible."
"Yeah, I saw it while I was walking around and I stopped and seriously thought about riding it, but there were some people around and I really didn't want to get in trouble, so I didn't."
"Too bad," Tim said cynically. "Now you'll never be able to ride it ever."
"Yeah," Matt sighed. "I know." He stopped talking and then said angrily,"Damn. I knew I should have ridden it."
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The two became increasingly enregetic as they became closer and closer to Bethany. The gray sky pulled away to reveal a shining yellow sun, akin to the ones on the posters at the college, and the cool temperature went away, leaving a warm summer heat in it's midst. They had left the interstate some time ago and were now driving down a long, two lane highway. The roadside was flatter than ever. They occaisionaly passed small towns with populations that were so low, they both concluded that incest must be happening. The towns sent shivers down their spines. They were the things of your worst nightmares, where Deliverance was an everyday, and normal occurance. They would not have stopped in those towns for anything.
The road was what they loved, and with the newfound warmth it became even more enjoyable. At Tim's request Matt put Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? into the CD player and they both jammed as loud as they could. They arrived in Trenton confused. There was a parade going on, blocking their only way through the city. Tim called Kyle, and found that he was at work at the movie rental store there. They drove to the store hoping to find some refuge until the parade ended.
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