MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME

MAKING UP FOR

LOST TIME

BY MAGGIE JAY

Road trip.

What did that make you think of? A spontaneous spring break? A trip to see grandma? Every road trip has a different story to tell. That’s why I love them so much. They’re personal–it’s all about who you’re with and why you’re with them. Road trips are either where you share your most painful memory at 3am in the rural counties of the upper midwest, or where you have a screaming match with your best friend over who’s turn it is to drive. Relationships either thrive or die in your Honda. There’s no in between.

Here’s what road trips make me think of: half a dozen unsolved cold cases, eighteen-year-old Zac Efron, and six years’ worth of lost time. And here’s the story behind the most interesting thirty hours of my adult life.

I was walking along a beach in Agoura Hills, California when I got a call from one of my oldest and closest childhood friends, Joy. She was moving back to Minneapolis, and she wanted my help driving her stuff there. From Santa Barbara. I hardly hesitated. “So, when are we leaving?” She could hear my smile through the phone.

It wasn’t just my love of road trips or my heinous fear of flying that made this such an easy decision. Joy is the closest thing I have to a sister. We met on the first day of kindergarten, and she’s been family

KAUPANGER, ITALY

ever since. We saw each other every day of our lives for ten years. And then things changed, as they always do.

When we were fourteen, Joy moved to New York City. It was hard to lose her. And it didn’t get easier. When we were seventeen, she moved to England, and then to Austria, and finally she settled down in Santa Barbara. Or so I thought.

I was used to Joy’s adventurous determination. She never stays in one place for too long, and I admire her for her adaptability and resilience. She inspires me. But it hasn’t made our friendship the easiest thing in the world. We did our best to stay close,

communicating every big milestone through long text messages, clipped voicemails, and fuzzy FaceTime calls. But in the moments between the milestones — the everyday, mundane occurrences — Joy and I grew up and grew apart. By the time I got her phone call, we had six years of missed moments and lost time.

This phone call changed that reality. Joy was finally coming home.

I had to arm wrestle my way through the complicated logistics of deciding to drive home. But three days, a trip to San Francisco and a train ride later, I was standing in the dimly lit common room of Westmont College, pitifully attempting to play spike ball with the much more athletic Joy and her friends.

We slept on a dorm room floor for about three hours that night and woke up at 5 a.m. to hit the road. We merged onto the highway as a soft golden light washed over the Pacific waves to our right.

Our planned route had us heading south towards Los Angeles, rounding northeast through Las Vegas, cutting up the entire state of Utah, the bottom half of Wyoming, a small slice of Nebraska, a large chunk of South Dakota, and finally, the incredibly boring southwest quarter of Minnesota into the cozy suburbs of Minneapolis. Thirty hours. Our plan was to switch drivers every four and keep going until we absolutely couldn’t any longer.

The first twelve hours on the road were a breeze — kind of. We wound through canyon after canyon, foothill over foothill, and city through city. Los Angeles was crowded. Las Vegas was iconic. And the miles of deserted mountainous terrain in between

were overshadowed by our true crime podcast obsession. By 14 hours in, we were a few dozen miles out of Salt Lake City. We were tired, hungry, and frankly, terrified. Those eight hours of serial killer mystery podcasts were not it. I I turned on the High School Musical: Senior Year soundtrack for a much needed distraction. “You know, East High is actually in Salt Lake City, not New Mexico,” I said. We sat with that for a minute. “Should we…?” “How far would that be..?” “Wait it’s just twenty miles” “An extra, like, 15 minutes” “Oh my god–“ “Should we?” “Starting route to East High School, 1300 E, Salt Lake City…” It took us about fifteen seconds to agree on this important site-seeing detour. Joy and I had grown up on a steady diet of Disney channel original movies, High School Musical being the landslide favorite. High School Musical was an important memory. A souvenir of friendship revived fifteen years later. When we arrived at last, we circled the school a few times, looking for the entrance. Finally, we took a hard right and stopped the car just outside of the iconic East High Entrance. “All in This Together” was blaring from our speakers. I ran out of the car and started doing a perfectly timed but poorly coordinated dance sequence in front of the main doors. It didn’t matter that a few dozen kids were looking at us weirdly through the windows, or that we were two selfrespecting twenty year olds dancing in front of a high school. It didn’t even matter that we were twenty miles outside of our route. All that mattered was memories of Zac Efron backpacks and convincing our classmates that Joy was Vanessa Hudgens’ third cousin. Bittersweet memories that took us both back. Back to times before we had gotten so old; before we lived in different cities, in different states, on separate continents. Back when we saw each other more than twice a year. A reminder of how things were before all of the moving and changing.So we danced like fools in a suburb of a city that we had never been to in front of judgmental teenagers. And it felt, for a moment, like we had gotten back some of that lost time. “I RAN OUT OF

THE CAR AND STARTED DOING A PERFECTLY TIMED BUT POORLY COORDINATED DANCE SEQUENCE”