Beyond This Moment

7 Day Three- 1:15 P.M.

"They need therapy."

"Everybody hears goats."

"Don't sing, Charles."

"My tongue slides."

"That one sounds disgusting," Elias scolds me on my license plate interpretation.

I laugh with a small shrug as I lean against the door of the backseat to get comfortable. We're almost to Chicago but we've got maybe twenty more minutes until we stop for lunch and then start exploring the city. Cassie is driving now but Cassie and Gabe are sitting up front, just listening to Elias and I play our license plate game with the cars that we pass. Sometimes they laugh at our answers but they don't play. I don't know why not, it's a really fun game and it passes the time so easily. "I call it as I see it."

"Touché," He nods at me. "Tuna says please."

"Take serious pills," I counter his answer.

"Bring more cheese," Elias goes for the next care that we're passing.

"How do you get those so quickly?" Cassie asks from the front seat. "You don't think about it at all but what you come up with is really funny."

"I think that it's funny because you don't think about it," Elias explains to her with a small shrug. "You just say the first words that come to mind."

"Bring me toast," I say the next one as we pass another car. Cassie's impatient and illegal speeding habits are really handy right now. "He's right. You just have to say the first thing that comes to mind. With two rules. One, you cannot bring up exes. Two, answers must be in English."

Because knowing two languages gives Elias an unfair advantage so after a while, I finally made it a rule that answers could only be in English. At first, I made the rule that it couldn't be Finnish but Elias, being the smartass that he is, also knows some Swedish so that didn't work out as well as I was hoping. So now it's just English.

We try to convince Cassie to give it a try but we stop at the pizza place before she actually finds a license plate to create a name for so we give up on it. To be honest, I'm not completely opposed to keeping the license plate game just between Elias and I anyway.

"We still have to drive a little bit more tonight," Gabe reminds us as we're eating our lovely deep dish pizza right across the street from Millennium Park. "So we should probably leave Chicago by seven. We don't have a long while to drive but I don't want to be too exhausted to drive."

"Gabe," I scold him. "Stop thinking so far ahead. We'll get to where we need to go just enjoy the goddam moment, alright?"

"I just don't want to get behind schedule," He explains even though it's obvious by how anal he's acting that he doesn't want to get behind schedule. His whole existence right now is dedicated to keeping us exactly on schedule. If I take a breath just a moment too late, he's right there to nag me about it. We have to stick to the itinerary.

"Well, I know that this might give you an aneurism but I have a surprise for you guys. For all of us, really," I explain with an excited grin. "And I'm not going to tell you what it is right now but I'm pretty excited about it."

"What is it?" He asks me despite me just telling him that I won't do that.

"Don't worry about it," I say even though I know that he will still worry. That's why I told him that I have a surprise for him now, so that he'll stew for a little while, trying to think about what I could possibly surprise him with. He'll like the surprise though. At least, I think that he will.