Mimi's Demons

Chapter 52: The Jeep's Too Nice

Despite having called Duke a pussy multiple times for it, Mimi was still quite impressed by the little trailer she saw the morning of their departure. She had been expecting some monster that old people often lived in, because being old suddenly meant they needed to travel and live in a trailer/RV for some reason. It was small, big enough to comfortably sleep two people, with a little kitchenette, a tiny bathroom with an even tinier tub that had made Mimi squeal a little inside out of cuteness, and a round, silver body that made Mimi think of older movies where people still rode around in those fake-wood sided cars, bell-bottom pants, and mustaches. The most impressive part of the trailer had to be its wheels: huge, ribbed things that sneered at pavement. It was like Mimi's rough and tumble soul had been turned into tires. She may have petted them in awe.

The jeep connected to the trailer, though, wasn't nearly as humble. It looked like something that should have been in Jurassic park so it could show all the other jeeps how to do things right by driving over any dinosaur in its way. It's tires also required a bit of petting, but it was black, ridged, and on the inside...

"It has a TV?" Mimi cried.

Duke had looked close to laughing. "It's a touchscreen console. Haven't you ever seen one of these before? It's not new."

Mini gave him an incredulous look. But now that she looked more closely, it did seem to replace a lot of the usual buttons for the radio and temperature control and stuff. Still, after playing around with it while Duke finished up some last minute packing of who knew what in the back seat, she found it did indeed have a collection of movies one could watch.

"This can't be safe for driving," she said when Duke hopped up into the driver's seat. 'Hopped' because the jeep was just a foot away from being a monster truck, in Mimi's view.

"I can resist watching while I drive," he said, amusement still tingeing his voice, which Mimi did not appreciate. Just because she hadn't been raised with panties made of gold doesn't mean she was, what was the word, out of touch? Sheltered? Ugh. Maybe she should get one of those word calendars, if for nothing else than so people would stop freaking patronizing her. Eleven was a perfectly respectable age.

"Where do you even put in CDs?" she asked.

"You don't. You connect it to your phone via Bluetooth and play music like that, or put in a flashdrive." He pointed to some square hole she'd often seen on computers.

Holy crap, it was a TV AND a computer?

"What the heck is Bluetooth?" she asked.

He straight up laughed this time, which earned him a hard glare from her.

"This really isn't that fancy," he said. "It's standard for new cars these days."

Ah, that was it. All the cars her parents had ever owned had been used and older. The fanciest they'd ever gotten was a CD system that wouldn't skip whenever the car hit a bump. And her grandpa had driven an old CJ7 Jeep that had been rock-climbing since even before her mother had been born, so forget CD player, that thing hadn't even had a cassette player or working seatbelts half the time, because half the time the seatbelts were lost in the crevices of the seats, being only enough to cover your lap. Forget shoulder straps. When Duke had told her he had a jeep she had gotten excited, imagining her grandpa's old blue jeep that always smelled of old gasoline and spilled pop.

But this...this was a freaking limousine, this wasn't a jeep.

"Pansy," she muttered under her breath as she narrowed her eyes on all the fancy trappings of the Jeep's innards. She just couldn't see it touching a dirt road without crying. Honestly, it didn't look like it had touched dirt in its life.