Work Text:
Deb leans back against the windshield and pushes her sketchbook off her lap. The night sky looks like something she's never seen before. Without the city's light pollution, the stars above shine so much brighter. It's something Deb only recently truly realized.
A chill night breeze blows through her curls and she lets out a sigh. She needs to get a haircut as soon as possible.
Maybe she'll ask Alice tomorrow. It's hard finding a good barber when you're on a road trip.
Deb looks over to the side. Next to her, on the hood of a car, lies her girl; on her side and facing Deb, with her knees pulled up while she's lying straight, facing the sky, the heels of her Doc Martens resting against the license plate.
Alice Woodward, in a short skirt they'd just bought at a thrift shop and Deb's red flannel. She's sleeping soundly atop the old car—the moment is so exhilaratingly beautiful that nothing could've stopped Deb from capturing it in her sketchbook.
It's full of the same girl in pencil, each page depicting her at a different place.
Sunbathing on her towel by the beach, posing in a lake, leaning against a redwood...
Wherever their journey had already taken them deserved its own art piece—something to remember it by—next to the countless photos both Deb and Alice insisted on taking of each other.
"You're the prettiest girl in the world," they both kept saying to each other, giggling to themselves, stoned out of their minds thanks to Ziggs, who had given them "a little somethin’ for the road."
Deb lets her eyes fall shut. She doesn't have a care in the world, save for Alice.
People always told her to enjoy school. That adult life was so much harder, unbearable, but Deb is an adult and she's never been this happy.
Maybe the concept of enjoying one's childhood was never meant to apply to teenage queers, Deb thinks. Gender nonconforming butches don't have it easy in Michigan, neither do evangelical femmes. On the open road, you don't have issues like that. You don't care about people calling you sinners, your girlfriend's father's opinion on your relationship doesn't matter.
All that matters is each other, Deb's sketchbook, Alice's notebook and the endless road in front of them, just waiting to be discovered.