pleasure of warm wet heat when he went inside her, and she began whispering something about how he needed to wake up now. Only he didn’t want to wake up.
Then something shifted in the woods, and the trees began to vanish, one by one. He didn’t care, because he felt so good inside Bronwyn, but soon, they were in an open space, and it was not Bronwyn beneath him at all, but Griff who said, “This isn’t trouble, Josh. Don’t worry. This is good times!”
That’s when he woke up.
7
“Holy shit,” someone said.
Reality banged against him. Light of day. Heat in the car. Leaning against Ziggy now instead of Bronwyn.
The car had come to a stop in what seemed to be a ditch.
Chapter Five
1
“What the hell were you thinking?” Bronwyn shouted from the backseat. She lit up a cigarette.
Josh glanced from her to Griff, who sat behind the steering wheel. It was almost as if cartoon steam came out of his ears. Griff wouldn’t turn around and face the backseat.
Tammy, however, would. “You bitch, just shut your hole. All of us were sleeping. We’re all too damn tired. And somebody stinks. Who stinks?”
Josh glanced at Ziggy, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me, dude.”
Griff pressed his face down, almost to the steering wheel.
“What happened?”
“Mister I-Can-Drive-Now fell asleep at the wheel,” Bronwyn said. She lit a cigarette and sucked back the first smoke and then spat a ghost trail of it out into the already smoky car.
Josh—still half asleep, his back soaked with sweat, feeling cranky and sore from the position he’d formed on the hump of the backseat between Bronwyn and Ziggy—realized something. “Jesus. We’re sideways.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“Didn’t anybody notice?”
“I was snoozing,” Ziggy said.
“I think we all were,” Tammy said in that little-girl voice of hers that didn’t quite go with the big boobs.
“Exactly,” Bronwyn said. “Griff included.”
“Shut your hole!” Tammy shouted. She got on her knees and swiveled around in her seat. Her face looked less like blond hose queen and more like pit bull with wig as she began listing all the ways Bronwyn sucked. “You’re like the bitch queen of the universe with your ‘I’m so sophisticated and together and I know everything and I look down on everybody’. And second, you are after Griff. Just say it. Just because he didn’t care for you anymore, just because he dumped you—”
“Correction,” Bronwyn said. “I dumped him.”
“Look, Miss Perfect Bitch, he dumped you, because you were too clingy and annoying and too much into proving everybody around you wrong. Why is that? Why is everybody else always wrong? And don’t sit there with that smug Jewish look.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know what I mean, that ‘Jewish Princess from Intellectual Hell’ look.”
“That ‘smug, Jewish look,’ ” Bronwyn repeated slowly. “As opposed to your dumbass shiksa feeb whiney anti-Semitic pigface?”
“You’re jealous. You’re jealous because I have him. Because he wants me. Just admit it. Just admit it and get over it.”
“First, admit that you’re a raging anti-Semite whose tits are bigger than her I.Q.”
“Suck my dick,” Tammy said, and then pushed at the car door, opened it, and gingerly got out of the car along the edge of the ditch. More obscenities flowed from her lips as she stomped off a ways down the road.
Bronwyn, to her credit, took it all, enveloping her face in a cloud of smoke; a mask through which she could make sour faces back at Tammy without being noticed.
“I didn’t know Tammy was anti-Semitic,” Josh said to no one.
“Also anti-
semantic,
” Bronwyn said. “She probably doesn’t even know what it means.”
Josh grinned, shaking his head, surveying the damage. “We gotta get the car back on the road.”
Bronwyn, ignoring him, looked out across the sky. “I hate you all. I hate this place. I wish we could just turn around and go home.”
2
“Where the