JUpiter’s Highway Molly Barrett
She couldn’t help thinkin’ that there was a little more to life somewhere else, after all, it was a great big world. She shifted into fifth gear and moved over into the left lane, skipping her blinker, because really, who was going to be out here at 3 a.m. anyway? Sure enough, her mother’s voice sounded in her ears, “Blinker EVERY TIME, sweetie. Please. Really. Are you trying to get us killed?” Fuck you, fine. Next time. She unfolded the coffee stained map that was in a rumpled pile on the passenger seat. When her boyfriend asked, that bemused smirk on his lips, if she wouldn’t rather just borrow the GPS to go out on her “dumbass adventure”, she had decided the pros of knowing exactly where the hell she was did not outweigh the cons of his machine telling her exactly how the hell to get there. So she had grabbed her keys and his duffel bag and bought the map at the first gas station on her way out of town. It was better than following the moon, anyway. Being as she had no idea where she was headed, a coffee stained map seemed like the lesser of two evils. After all, it was a great big world, with lots of places to run to… She cranked the radio. Tom Petty. Sometimes it even surprised her at how the radio sometimes managed to match her moods. Or maybe the middle aged DJ who was getting paid a little more than minimum wage working the graveyard shift figured everyone out on the road at 3 a.m. listening to the local station was either A). A drunk who wanted a song to sing along with, lungs close to bursting as they navigated that familiar gravel road home. Their head would be shaking as they remembered those same back roads from high school, where they had the pretty girl on their arm, where now only their ten-year-old dog rode shotgun, or B). A girl estranged from her abusive boyfriend setting out in the middle of the night to try to get away, already accepting her fate of spending the night in a motel ten miles out of town and running back when she ran out of money on her debit card. Well, fuck that. She could like hearing “American Girl” on the radio and still prove them wrong. She was an American girl, goddamnit. And she was getting the hell out of there. She pushed harder on the gas, moving in to sixth gear as
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