Smallville Fic: Leaving Dodge Behind
This idea popped into my head like a week ago and so I wrote it. It was meant to just be light-hearted humor, although I think I went kind of cracky. I'm not sure where the line is, so I might have crossed it. Oh well.
Title: Leaving Dodge Behind
Summary: Chloe and Lois go on a roadtrip after season 7 ends. Mild spoilers for the rest of S7, not that the show will play out like this. Chloe and Lois centric, with a tiny future Chlark allusion (because I couldn't resist).
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine
+++
When she arrives home from an afternoon spent on the Kent couch watching old Cary Grant films with Clark, she finds the apartment she shares with Lois filled with boxes. She walks into the living room to find half of their possessions packed, Lois busy stuffing books into yet another box.
“It’s a little late for spring cleaning, Lois.”
“This isn’t cleaning,” Lois retorts, never looking away from the box she’s filling. “This is packing.”
“You’re moving?” she asks in disbelief. “But…”
Lois interrupts. “Actually we’re leaving.” She turns away from the box and says, “Well, temporarily. We’re going on a road trip.”
“Okay, stop, pause, and rewind,” Chloe instructs. “Explain this all to me, slowly.”
Flopping down on the couch, Lois props her feet up on to the coffee table that’s half-buried in boxes. “After we get all this stuff packed and stored in the storage locker I rented, we’re getting the hell out of Kansas for the next two months.”
“What about your job? You know, at the Daily Planet?”
“Oh, you mean the paper that fired you?” Lois says, rolling her eyes. “I quit, told Lex he could stuffed my resignation up his ass. Then I told him we’d be out of his apartment by the end of the week.”
“Lois, we need to get jobs, not go on a road trip.”
“No,” Lois says calmly. “What we need is go on a little adventure. We’ll go, see some sights, and then we’ll come back and settle down, maybe in Metropolis but maybe in another city.” Lois grins. “I hear Star City is supposed to be very nice.”
Chloe shakes her head. “Even if I were to agree to this insane trip, where would we get the money? Last time I checked, the reason we shared an apartment in Smallville was because we couldn’t afford anything better.”
Lois waves away her concern with a hand. She says, “Don’t you worry you blonde head about that. I’ve got us funding. We’re set.”
“Lois…”
“Fine, I begged my dad, your dad, and Grams to fund our road trip.”
“How did you convince them?” Chloe asks, genuinely curious. Grams she can see handing out money, her dad too, but General Lane is notorious for being strict with money.
“I told them we needed some time away from Kansas to sort out where our lives we’re headed, now they we’re both unemployed,” Lois says, sounding very proud of herself. “Of course, the real reason is to have some fun, but I figured that wouldn’t fly with them. What I did say worked and so now we’re comfortable and set and Grams told me to phone her if we need an advance on our birthday money.”
Chloe collapses on the couch, shaking her head at her cousin’s audacity. She isn’t surprised, just amused.
“So, what do you say?”
She sighs and says, “I guess we’re getting out of dodge.”
“Ding, dong, we’re free,” Lois says excitedly. She jumps to her feet and pulls Chloe up off the couch. “We need to pack.”
Chloe groans but lets Lois pull her up and put her to work packing books. As she packs, the road trip becomes more and more appealing. It’s certainly better than finding a menial-level job at the mall and it must be more fun than hanging out with Clark all summer as he mopes over his break-up with Lana.
+++
They set out on a Thursday morning. Thursday isn’t the day of the week when anything usually happens. This time, Thursday is the day something happens. It feels good to change things up a bit.
Lois has no set destination and Chloe’s more along for the ride, so they start out heading north, away from Smallville, away from Metropolis, away from Kansas. Lois torments her with Whitesnakes music as the miles pass them by.
That first night on the road Lois brings them to a motel whose décor screams 1950s’ chic. The colors are white, yellow and blue. Pastel colors, in fact, straight out of Easter it seems. There are two double beds covered in blue bedspreads with little ducks. Two white nightstands separate the beds, a white lamp placed on it.
“Wow, it looks like a place the Cleavers would have stayed at, if they ever stayed in a motel room that costs forty bucks per night,” Chloe says.
She eyes the beds skeptically, wondering if it’s really safe to sit on the bedspread. She’s seen CSI; she knows the bedspreads often contain the grossest things possible.
“It’s not that bad,” Lois insists, setting her bag down and flopping down on the bed closest to the bed.
Chloe doesn’t say anything, just shoots her cousin a look of absolute disbelief.
“Okay, so it’s not great,” Lois concedes, sitting up on the bed, “but it’s only for one night. Tomorrow we’ll be gone and this will just be a memory.”
The next night, Lois picks another prize motel, this one with rooms done in retro disco style. The week progresses and the motels stay bad. After that first week, Chloe takes over motel selection. She finds the ones that are decent but cheap.
Lois doesn’t grumble too much. She just says, “Beginner’s luck.”
+++
Without any real intention to, they wind up in Canada.
Chloe figured, if she ever went to Canada, she’d go to Vancouver, which was at least a Canadian city she had heard of. One of her favorite shows is filmed there. She would have gladly gone to visit Vancouver, but they ended up in the province next to British Columbia, having entered Canada at the Montana-Alberta border crossing. She would have continued westward, but Lois is in the driver seat and Lois wants to continue driving north, so they stay in Alberta after they leave Montana behind.
How they ended up in Montana in the first place is a story for another time.
Anyway, they head north towards Calgary, which is the first major city in Alberta. At least, that’s what the guy at the gas station said, the one who sold them their Alberta roadmap. From Calgary they can go to Edmonton, which is Alberta’s other city, or so the guy said. If there are other cities worth seeing, the guy at the gas station doesn’t mention them.
As they cost along the flat highway, gold-tipped fields on either side of the road, the pain that she’s been feeling since before they crossed the border grows bigger. She has to pee every hour, and it hurts to pee.
They end up in a doctor’s office about a hour outside of Calgary, where they have to pay fifty bucks because the stupid clinic doesn’t accept out-of-country medical plans and because universal health care is just a myth. When she comes out of the office, having been told she has a bladder infection and will need to shell out thirty bucks for medication, Lois has a spot in mind for them to visit. Lois’s destination is the first time they’ve had an actual goal, and even though Chloe isn’t very interested, she goes along because Lois has her heart set on it.
The next day, after a night spent in Calgary, they drive the two hours to see the museum Lois wanted to see. Lois read about the place in an old magazine and couldn’t bear not to visit.
The museum, which is a polite term in Chloe’s mind, they see thirty-six displays of stuffed gophers. That’s what the museum is devoted to. The Gopher Museum has taken run-killed gophers, stuffed them, dressed them in doll’s clothing, and then placed them in little displays of life around this town of 127 people. Lois finds it frighteningly cute; Chloe finds it one-part amusing and one-part horrifying.
After they’ve gone through all thirty-six scenes from around the town, they visit the gift shop. Chloe picks up wooden gopher magnets to give to her father and Clark. Lois picks a gopher stuffed animal clad in an old-fashioned blue floral dress. Lois takes their purchases to the till, where the cashier rings up the total and Lois hands over a bright green colored bill. The cashier then hands Lois a handful of change.
Lois takes the change and studies it. “Um, what are these?” Lois asks, holding up two coins. One is a solid gold color while the other one has a gold center surrounded by silver.
“Oh, American?”
Lois and Chloe exchange looks. The woman just nods knowingly.
The woman holds up the solid gold coin. “This is a loonie. It’s worth one dollar.” She holds up the other coin. “This is a toonie. It’s worth two dollars.” She smiles at them, smiling in that way young people do when they’re talking to an older person about something technological. That amused, ‘I don’t mind suffering for you’ smile.
Lois yanks the coins back and says, “Thanks.”
They leave the Gopher Museum, exiting quickly to escape the lady with the conceding smile. Chloe has learned a lesson. Apparently Canadians are polite, just in a very rude way.
“Loonies and toonies?” Lois says once they’re back in the car. “What, did they watch too many episodes of Loony Tunes?”
Chloe just shrugs in response.
+++
After the Gopher museum, Chloe insists upon returning to the good ole’ America. Alberta reminds her a bit too much of Kansas. It’s all dry heat and flat plains and why would anyone want to live in either place?
For their next goal destination, Chloe picks Boston.
Maybe it was too much Gilmore Girls when she was younger, but she’s always wanted to see the Harvard campus. If she gets her way, they’ll do Yale afterwards, as they drive down the eastern seaboard. They can end up in Miami, which Lois will probably like. Miami has beaches and a party scene, two things Kansas isn’t particularly known for.
Lois is skeptical about traveling to Boston, asking, “Why Boston?”
“I want to see Harvard. Humor me?”
“You’re such a nerd,” Lois says affectionately. She tells Chloe to map quest directions at the next internet café. Chloe does and soon they’re heading away from the Midwest, driving east.
They tour the Harvard campus, Lois being sarcastic the entire time. Apparently Lois has decided to adopt Dean Winchester’s persona even though Lois forbade any supernatural crap on their road trip on the first day of driving. The day after their campus tour, Lois drags them to Franklin Park Zoo.
They leave Boston on an early July morning. They head south, along the Atlantic Ocean, Connecticut their next stop and Florida their ultimate end destination. They sleep in Hartford that night, staying at a quaint inn. It’s all very Gilmore Girlish, right down to the mocha frappuccinos they keep drowning as they drive from city to city, stopping at a Starbucks whenever they see one.
+++
Smarter people might have done the cross-country thing in a more logical manner but Lois was the one who planned it and when has Lois ever been logical?
They end up in Canada, again. This time it’s Chloe choice. They were driving back up the eastern seaboard and she realized they could hop over into Canada and travel to Prince Edward Island. Okay, maybe she didn’t just suddenly realize this out of the blue. Maybe she had been staring a map, but the idea had really just popped into her mind.
Or so she’ll claim if anyone ever tries to interrogate her.
“Why?” Lois asks when Chloe broaches the subject, at yet another Starbucks. Lois has a mocha frappuccino while Chloe decided to be different and get a caramel one.
“You read Anne of Green Gables? I lent it to you, remember, when we were ten.”
Lois smiles sheepishly. “I never made it past the first chapter. I got bored. I mean, it was so many words and the words were so small and historical stuff just doesn’t really appeal me.”
“You said you loved it,” Chloe says, glaring at her cousin. Lois had said similar things about Little House on the Prairie and Nancy Drew, come to think about it.
“I lied.”
Chloe leans back in her seat. “Well, can we go anyways? For me?”
“Sure,” Lois says easily. “It’s supposed to be about having fun, even if the person who has the fun is you and not me.”
“You’ll have fun,” Chloe promises, hoping to hell she can keep that promise. She isn’t sure.
Lois nods slowly. “What exactly are we going to do in whatever this island is called?”
“We’re going to go see the house L.M. Montgomery was raised in. She wrote Anne of Green Gables.”
Lois eyes her warily. “That sounds dull.”
Chloe fights to urge to roll her eyes but can’t resist saying, “No worse than a museum full of stuffed gophers.” Because, honestly, stuffed dead gophers are just weird, like Winchester weird if Chloe were to give her honest opinion.
Not that she would, ever, to Lois. Sometimes Lois needed to be protected. A little teasing was okay, just not a lot.
“Hey, that was fun. Imagine all the conversation topics we’ll get out of that.”
This time her eyes do roll. “Sure, Lois, I can just see that coming up naturally in a conversation. It’ll be ‘the weather is sure bad’ to ‘I saw all these dead stuffed gophers dressed in doll clothing’,” Chloe retorts sarcastically.
Lois’s mouth twitches. She ducks her eyes, taking a sip of her drink, and then says, “So, house of a writer long dead is our next stop. You’d better map quest it.”
Chloe smiles and bends down to grab her laptop from her bag. She never goes anywhere without her precious computer, fondly named Betty. Of course, she doesn’t tell people her computer is named Betty, just like she doesn’t tell anyone that her car is named Pumpkin. There are some things in life one doesn’t share. The naming of inanimate objects is one of those things.
They get back on the road, driving north. Lois ends up enjoying the trip, mostly because there’s a ferry ride and Lois has always wanted to ride a ferry. Unfortunately for Lois, there are no cute doctors on the ferry that conveys them to and from Prince Edward Island.
+++
After their second trip to Canada, Lois steers the car in the direction of Nevada.
Their destination is the Grand Canyon. Not a place Chloe has ever really wanted to see but Lois has a hankering and it is Lois’s turn to pick the destination. To the Grand Canyon they go as a result.
They don’t stick around long. Two days and then they’re gone, because it was late July and hot and horribly boring. They saw some rocks and Lois added a stuffed bald eagle to their collection of toys lining the back seat. So far they have a stuffed gopher, a stuffed bear wearing a tiny Harvard shirt, a stuffed lion from the zoo, a stuffed duck from the inn they stayed at in Hartford, and an Anne of Green Gables rag doll.
“Where to next?” Chloe asks as they sail down the highway.
“California.”
“Where to in California?”
Lois turns her heads sideway, eyes concealed by dark sunglasses. A broad smile is on her face. “Disneyland, of course,” Lois says.
“Aren’t we a little old?”
“No one is ever too old for the magic of Disney,” Lois states firmly.
So they go to Disneyland and buy a three-day pass each. They ride the teacups and Space Mountain. After Disneyland, they spend a day at Universal Studios, seeing a Rugrats show. Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Betty Boop, and Roger Rabbit join the collection of toys once they’re through with the two theme parks.
+++
The night before they’re to leave Los Angeles, Chloe says, “What to spend a few more days in California and travel around to the ghost towns.”
“Ghost towns? I said nothing weird or supernatural, remember?”
“They’re not haunted,” Chloe points out. “They’re just abandoned.”
“I knew that,” Lois says, lying badly. She crosses her arms across her chest. “It just sounds boring.”
“It won’t be.”
“You said that about that stupid house in that Canadian town, and it was boring as hell. So were Harvard, Yale, and the Smithsonian.”
“Yeah, well, the nine zoos so far have been pretty boring.”
“That is such a lie,” Lois says. “Zoos are fun. They have animals and cotton candy and ice cream and gift shops.”
“Look, this’ll be fun.”
“You’ve said that before and it was a lie,” Lois says, harping on this fact.
“Well, this’ll be different, I promise,” Chloe says. She can’t give up because she wants to visit Prince Edward Island and she really deserves this, after going to nine zoos and not complaining once.
Okay, maybe there was some light complaining. Not a lot, nothing like Lois.
Chloe pleads and Lois gives in, just as Chloe expected Lois would. Lois is a sucker for a big eyes and a small, child-like voice. It works every time. Chloe’s always been careful not to abuse this ability too much. It wouldn’t be fair, after all.
The next day they set out. A day later Chloe concedes defeat and tells Lois to drive away from California. She had a list of locations of ghost towns, but Lois whined and complained so much that the ghost towns lost their appeal.
The chief complaint Lois made: “There’s no gift shops.”
Chloe laughed the first five times. Then she gave up.
+++
On the road again, they travel aimlessly for the next few days, no destination in mind. Somewhere between Oz and Kansas, Clark phones while Lois is showering.
“You coming back soon?” he asks after they’re exchanged the pleasantries.
“Why? You miss me?”
“Of course,” he says, his voice deep and nothing like the teasing tone she spoke in. “I really miss you,” he adds a second later.
She swallows heavily. “We’ll be back soon.”
“Okay then.”
They talk for the next few minutes, idly chatting and racking up Clark’s long distance bill. Right before he hangs up, she tells him, “I miss you too.”
“Good thing you’ll be back soon then,” Clark says and then the line disconnects.
A minute later, Lois bursts into the main room from the bathroom and declares, “I know we need to go next.”
Chloe forces herself to smile. What she really wants to do is go home. Yet Lois sounds so excited that Chloe can’t deny Lois one more destination.
+++
Atlanta in mid-August is muggy and unbearable. They spend their second day there hoping from one coffee shop to another, endless frappuccinos being consumed. They hit the casinos yesterday, but neither took much of a liking. Chloe just couldn’t get in the mood to gamble and Lois really just wanted to find gift shops and add to the ever-growing toy collection.
In the third coffee shop, Chloe says, “It’s time Lois.”
Lois drops her head to the table and groans.
“Time to go home, Lois,” Chloe repeats, making her voice light and airy.
“I know,” Lois says. She lifts her head from the table. “Can we at least visit one more zoo as we head back? My collection feels incomplete.”
Chloe laughs and says, “We’ll hit two or three, how does that sound?”
Lois sighs. “It sounds like we’re going back home,” Lois says resignedly.
“Well, you know what they say, there’s no place like home.”
“Clearly, those people had never actually been to Kansas.”
Chloe shrugs. “Maybe, but can you honestly say home doesn’t appeal right now?”
“Fine, you win,” Lois says. She rises, grabbing her half-finished drink in one hand and taking Chloe’s arm in the other, forcing Chloe to stand up. “Come on, let’s go find a zoo or a museum or something where I can buy more souvenirs.”
Chloe lets Lois drag her along, not for the first time and undoubtedly not for the last time.
+++
Like the end of that Chris Carter TV show, the really lame one, not The X-Files, they’re driving into the sunset. Their car isn’t a convertible and they know their end destination, but it’s the trip that mattered and they’re enjoying themselves.
“You had fun, right?”
“Time of my life,” Chloe says. She smiles broadly. “I’m glad we did this.”
“Me too,” Lois says. “Now let’s stop with the emotional and rock.”
Chloe laughs. “Whatever you say Lois.”
And they cruise down the highway, the sky a mixture of pinks and purples, dusk quickly approaching but not here just yet. Soon their lives will start up again. For now though it’s just them, the open road, and a collection of toys along for the ride.
+++
The End
Title: Leaving Dodge Behind
Summary: Chloe and Lois go on a roadtrip after season 7 ends. Mild spoilers for the rest of S7, not that the show will play out like this. Chloe and Lois centric, with a tiny future Chlark allusion (because I couldn't resist).
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine
+++
When she arrives home from an afternoon spent on the Kent couch watching old Cary Grant films with Clark, she finds the apartment she shares with Lois filled with boxes. She walks into the living room to find half of their possessions packed, Lois busy stuffing books into yet another box.
“It’s a little late for spring cleaning, Lois.”
“This isn’t cleaning,” Lois retorts, never looking away from the box she’s filling. “This is packing.”
“You’re moving?” she asks in disbelief. “But…”
Lois interrupts. “Actually we’re leaving.” She turns away from the box and says, “Well, temporarily. We’re going on a road trip.”
“Okay, stop, pause, and rewind,” Chloe instructs. “Explain this all to me, slowly.”
Flopping down on the couch, Lois props her feet up on to the coffee table that’s half-buried in boxes. “After we get all this stuff packed and stored in the storage locker I rented, we’re getting the hell out of Kansas for the next two months.”
“What about your job? You know, at the Daily Planet?”
“Oh, you mean the paper that fired you?” Lois says, rolling her eyes. “I quit, told Lex he could stuffed my resignation up his ass. Then I told him we’d be out of his apartment by the end of the week.”
“Lois, we need to get jobs, not go on a road trip.”
“No,” Lois says calmly. “What we need is go on a little adventure. We’ll go, see some sights, and then we’ll come back and settle down, maybe in Metropolis but maybe in another city.” Lois grins. “I hear Star City is supposed to be very nice.”
Chloe shakes her head. “Even if I were to agree to this insane trip, where would we get the money? Last time I checked, the reason we shared an apartment in Smallville was because we couldn’t afford anything better.”
Lois waves away her concern with a hand. She says, “Don’t you worry you blonde head about that. I’ve got us funding. We’re set.”
“Lois…”
“Fine, I begged my dad, your dad, and Grams to fund our road trip.”
“How did you convince them?” Chloe asks, genuinely curious. Grams she can see handing out money, her dad too, but General Lane is notorious for being strict with money.
“I told them we needed some time away from Kansas to sort out where our lives we’re headed, now they we’re both unemployed,” Lois says, sounding very proud of herself. “Of course, the real reason is to have some fun, but I figured that wouldn’t fly with them. What I did say worked and so now we’re comfortable and set and Grams told me to phone her if we need an advance on our birthday money.”
Chloe collapses on the couch, shaking her head at her cousin’s audacity. She isn’t surprised, just amused.
“So, what do you say?”
She sighs and says, “I guess we’re getting out of dodge.”
“Ding, dong, we’re free,” Lois says excitedly. She jumps to her feet and pulls Chloe up off the couch. “We need to pack.”
Chloe groans but lets Lois pull her up and put her to work packing books. As she packs, the road trip becomes more and more appealing. It’s certainly better than finding a menial-level job at the mall and it must be more fun than hanging out with Clark all summer as he mopes over his break-up with Lana.
+++
They set out on a Thursday morning. Thursday isn’t the day of the week when anything usually happens. This time, Thursday is the day something happens. It feels good to change things up a bit.
Lois has no set destination and Chloe’s more along for the ride, so they start out heading north, away from Smallville, away from Metropolis, away from Kansas. Lois torments her with Whitesnakes music as the miles pass them by.
That first night on the road Lois brings them to a motel whose décor screams 1950s’ chic. The colors are white, yellow and blue. Pastel colors, in fact, straight out of Easter it seems. There are two double beds covered in blue bedspreads with little ducks. Two white nightstands separate the beds, a white lamp placed on it.
“Wow, it looks like a place the Cleavers would have stayed at, if they ever stayed in a motel room that costs forty bucks per night,” Chloe says.
She eyes the beds skeptically, wondering if it’s really safe to sit on the bedspread. She’s seen CSI; she knows the bedspreads often contain the grossest things possible.
“It’s not that bad,” Lois insists, setting her bag down and flopping down on the bed closest to the bed.
Chloe doesn’t say anything, just shoots her cousin a look of absolute disbelief.
“Okay, so it’s not great,” Lois concedes, sitting up on the bed, “but it’s only for one night. Tomorrow we’ll be gone and this will just be a memory.”
The next night, Lois picks another prize motel, this one with rooms done in retro disco style. The week progresses and the motels stay bad. After that first week, Chloe takes over motel selection. She finds the ones that are decent but cheap.
Lois doesn’t grumble too much. She just says, “Beginner’s luck.”
+++
Without any real intention to, they wind up in Canada.
Chloe figured, if she ever went to Canada, she’d go to Vancouver, which was at least a Canadian city she had heard of. One of her favorite shows is filmed there. She would have gladly gone to visit Vancouver, but they ended up in the province next to British Columbia, having entered Canada at the Montana-Alberta border crossing. She would have continued westward, but Lois is in the driver seat and Lois wants to continue driving north, so they stay in Alberta after they leave Montana behind.
How they ended up in Montana in the first place is a story for another time.
Anyway, they head north towards Calgary, which is the first major city in Alberta. At least, that’s what the guy at the gas station said, the one who sold them their Alberta roadmap. From Calgary they can go to Edmonton, which is Alberta’s other city, or so the guy said. If there are other cities worth seeing, the guy at the gas station doesn’t mention them.
As they cost along the flat highway, gold-tipped fields on either side of the road, the pain that she’s been feeling since before they crossed the border grows bigger. She has to pee every hour, and it hurts to pee.
They end up in a doctor’s office about a hour outside of Calgary, where they have to pay fifty bucks because the stupid clinic doesn’t accept out-of-country medical plans and because universal health care is just a myth. When she comes out of the office, having been told she has a bladder infection and will need to shell out thirty bucks for medication, Lois has a spot in mind for them to visit. Lois’s destination is the first time they’ve had an actual goal, and even though Chloe isn’t very interested, she goes along because Lois has her heart set on it.
The next day, after a night spent in Calgary, they drive the two hours to see the museum Lois wanted to see. Lois read about the place in an old magazine and couldn’t bear not to visit.
The museum, which is a polite term in Chloe’s mind, they see thirty-six displays of stuffed gophers. That’s what the museum is devoted to. The Gopher Museum has taken run-killed gophers, stuffed them, dressed them in doll’s clothing, and then placed them in little displays of life around this town of 127 people. Lois finds it frighteningly cute; Chloe finds it one-part amusing and one-part horrifying.
After they’ve gone through all thirty-six scenes from around the town, they visit the gift shop. Chloe picks up wooden gopher magnets to give to her father and Clark. Lois picks a gopher stuffed animal clad in an old-fashioned blue floral dress. Lois takes their purchases to the till, where the cashier rings up the total and Lois hands over a bright green colored bill. The cashier then hands Lois a handful of change.
Lois takes the change and studies it. “Um, what are these?” Lois asks, holding up two coins. One is a solid gold color while the other one has a gold center surrounded by silver.
“Oh, American?”
Lois and Chloe exchange looks. The woman just nods knowingly.
The woman holds up the solid gold coin. “This is a loonie. It’s worth one dollar.” She holds up the other coin. “This is a toonie. It’s worth two dollars.” She smiles at them, smiling in that way young people do when they’re talking to an older person about something technological. That amused, ‘I don’t mind suffering for you’ smile.
Lois yanks the coins back and says, “Thanks.”
They leave the Gopher Museum, exiting quickly to escape the lady with the conceding smile. Chloe has learned a lesson. Apparently Canadians are polite, just in a very rude way.
“Loonies and toonies?” Lois says once they’re back in the car. “What, did they watch too many episodes of Loony Tunes?”
Chloe just shrugs in response.
+++
After the Gopher museum, Chloe insists upon returning to the good ole’ America. Alberta reminds her a bit too much of Kansas. It’s all dry heat and flat plains and why would anyone want to live in either place?
For their next goal destination, Chloe picks Boston.
Maybe it was too much Gilmore Girls when she was younger, but she’s always wanted to see the Harvard campus. If she gets her way, they’ll do Yale afterwards, as they drive down the eastern seaboard. They can end up in Miami, which Lois will probably like. Miami has beaches and a party scene, two things Kansas isn’t particularly known for.
Lois is skeptical about traveling to Boston, asking, “Why Boston?”
“I want to see Harvard. Humor me?”
“You’re such a nerd,” Lois says affectionately. She tells Chloe to map quest directions at the next internet café. Chloe does and soon they’re heading away from the Midwest, driving east.
They tour the Harvard campus, Lois being sarcastic the entire time. Apparently Lois has decided to adopt Dean Winchester’s persona even though Lois forbade any supernatural crap on their road trip on the first day of driving. The day after their campus tour, Lois drags them to Franklin Park Zoo.
They leave Boston on an early July morning. They head south, along the Atlantic Ocean, Connecticut their next stop and Florida their ultimate end destination. They sleep in Hartford that night, staying at a quaint inn. It’s all very Gilmore Girlish, right down to the mocha frappuccinos they keep drowning as they drive from city to city, stopping at a Starbucks whenever they see one.
+++
Smarter people might have done the cross-country thing in a more logical manner but Lois was the one who planned it and when has Lois ever been logical?
They end up in Canada, again. This time it’s Chloe choice. They were driving back up the eastern seaboard and she realized they could hop over into Canada and travel to Prince Edward Island. Okay, maybe she didn’t just suddenly realize this out of the blue. Maybe she had been staring a map, but the idea had really just popped into her mind.
Or so she’ll claim if anyone ever tries to interrogate her.
“Why?” Lois asks when Chloe broaches the subject, at yet another Starbucks. Lois has a mocha frappuccino while Chloe decided to be different and get a caramel one.
“You read Anne of Green Gables? I lent it to you, remember, when we were ten.”
Lois smiles sheepishly. “I never made it past the first chapter. I got bored. I mean, it was so many words and the words were so small and historical stuff just doesn’t really appeal me.”
“You said you loved it,” Chloe says, glaring at her cousin. Lois had said similar things about Little House on the Prairie and Nancy Drew, come to think about it.
“I lied.”
Chloe leans back in her seat. “Well, can we go anyways? For me?”
“Sure,” Lois says easily. “It’s supposed to be about having fun, even if the person who has the fun is you and not me.”
“You’ll have fun,” Chloe promises, hoping to hell she can keep that promise. She isn’t sure.
Lois nods slowly. “What exactly are we going to do in whatever this island is called?”
“We’re going to go see the house L.M. Montgomery was raised in. She wrote Anne of Green Gables.”
Lois eyes her warily. “That sounds dull.”
Chloe fights to urge to roll her eyes but can’t resist saying, “No worse than a museum full of stuffed gophers.” Because, honestly, stuffed dead gophers are just weird, like Winchester weird if Chloe were to give her honest opinion.
Not that she would, ever, to Lois. Sometimes Lois needed to be protected. A little teasing was okay, just not a lot.
“Hey, that was fun. Imagine all the conversation topics we’ll get out of that.”
This time her eyes do roll. “Sure, Lois, I can just see that coming up naturally in a conversation. It’ll be ‘the weather is sure bad’ to ‘I saw all these dead stuffed gophers dressed in doll clothing’,” Chloe retorts sarcastically.
Lois’s mouth twitches. She ducks her eyes, taking a sip of her drink, and then says, “So, house of a writer long dead is our next stop. You’d better map quest it.”
Chloe smiles and bends down to grab her laptop from her bag. She never goes anywhere without her precious computer, fondly named Betty. Of course, she doesn’t tell people her computer is named Betty, just like she doesn’t tell anyone that her car is named Pumpkin. There are some things in life one doesn’t share. The naming of inanimate objects is one of those things.
They get back on the road, driving north. Lois ends up enjoying the trip, mostly because there’s a ferry ride and Lois has always wanted to ride a ferry. Unfortunately for Lois, there are no cute doctors on the ferry that conveys them to and from Prince Edward Island.
+++
After their second trip to Canada, Lois steers the car in the direction of Nevada.
Their destination is the Grand Canyon. Not a place Chloe has ever really wanted to see but Lois has a hankering and it is Lois’s turn to pick the destination. To the Grand Canyon they go as a result.
They don’t stick around long. Two days and then they’re gone, because it was late July and hot and horribly boring. They saw some rocks and Lois added a stuffed bald eagle to their collection of toys lining the back seat. So far they have a stuffed gopher, a stuffed bear wearing a tiny Harvard shirt, a stuffed lion from the zoo, a stuffed duck from the inn they stayed at in Hartford, and an Anne of Green Gables rag doll.
“Where to next?” Chloe asks as they sail down the highway.
“California.”
“Where to in California?”
Lois turns her heads sideway, eyes concealed by dark sunglasses. A broad smile is on her face. “Disneyland, of course,” Lois says.
“Aren’t we a little old?”
“No one is ever too old for the magic of Disney,” Lois states firmly.
So they go to Disneyland and buy a three-day pass each. They ride the teacups and Space Mountain. After Disneyland, they spend a day at Universal Studios, seeing a Rugrats show. Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Betty Boop, and Roger Rabbit join the collection of toys once they’re through with the two theme parks.
+++
The night before they’re to leave Los Angeles, Chloe says, “What to spend a few more days in California and travel around to the ghost towns.”
“Ghost towns? I said nothing weird or supernatural, remember?”
“They’re not haunted,” Chloe points out. “They’re just abandoned.”
“I knew that,” Lois says, lying badly. She crosses her arms across her chest. “It just sounds boring.”
“It won’t be.”
“You said that about that stupid house in that Canadian town, and it was boring as hell. So were Harvard, Yale, and the Smithsonian.”
“Yeah, well, the nine zoos so far have been pretty boring.”
“That is such a lie,” Lois says. “Zoos are fun. They have animals and cotton candy and ice cream and gift shops.”
“Look, this’ll be fun.”
“You’ve said that before and it was a lie,” Lois says, harping on this fact.
“Well, this’ll be different, I promise,” Chloe says. She can’t give up because she wants to visit Prince Edward Island and she really deserves this, after going to nine zoos and not complaining once.
Okay, maybe there was some light complaining. Not a lot, nothing like Lois.
Chloe pleads and Lois gives in, just as Chloe expected Lois would. Lois is a sucker for a big eyes and a small, child-like voice. It works every time. Chloe’s always been careful not to abuse this ability too much. It wouldn’t be fair, after all.
The next day they set out. A day later Chloe concedes defeat and tells Lois to drive away from California. She had a list of locations of ghost towns, but Lois whined and complained so much that the ghost towns lost their appeal.
The chief complaint Lois made: “There’s no gift shops.”
Chloe laughed the first five times. Then she gave up.
+++
On the road again, they travel aimlessly for the next few days, no destination in mind. Somewhere between Oz and Kansas, Clark phones while Lois is showering.
“You coming back soon?” he asks after they’re exchanged the pleasantries.
“Why? You miss me?”
“Of course,” he says, his voice deep and nothing like the teasing tone she spoke in. “I really miss you,” he adds a second later.
She swallows heavily. “We’ll be back soon.”
“Okay then.”
They talk for the next few minutes, idly chatting and racking up Clark’s long distance bill. Right before he hangs up, she tells him, “I miss you too.”
“Good thing you’ll be back soon then,” Clark says and then the line disconnects.
A minute later, Lois bursts into the main room from the bathroom and declares, “I know we need to go next.”
Chloe forces herself to smile. What she really wants to do is go home. Yet Lois sounds so excited that Chloe can’t deny Lois one more destination.
+++
Atlanta in mid-August is muggy and unbearable. They spend their second day there hoping from one coffee shop to another, endless frappuccinos being consumed. They hit the casinos yesterday, but neither took much of a liking. Chloe just couldn’t get in the mood to gamble and Lois really just wanted to find gift shops and add to the ever-growing toy collection.
In the third coffee shop, Chloe says, “It’s time Lois.”
Lois drops her head to the table and groans.
“Time to go home, Lois,” Chloe repeats, making her voice light and airy.
“I know,” Lois says. She lifts her head from the table. “Can we at least visit one more zoo as we head back? My collection feels incomplete.”
Chloe laughs and says, “We’ll hit two or three, how does that sound?”
Lois sighs. “It sounds like we’re going back home,” Lois says resignedly.
“Well, you know what they say, there’s no place like home.”
“Clearly, those people had never actually been to Kansas.”
Chloe shrugs. “Maybe, but can you honestly say home doesn’t appeal right now?”
“Fine, you win,” Lois says. She rises, grabbing her half-finished drink in one hand and taking Chloe’s arm in the other, forcing Chloe to stand up. “Come on, let’s go find a zoo or a museum or something where I can buy more souvenirs.”
Chloe lets Lois drag her along, not for the first time and undoubtedly not for the last time.
+++
Like the end of that Chris Carter TV show, the really lame one, not The X-Files, they’re driving into the sunset. Their car isn’t a convertible and they know their end destination, but it’s the trip that mattered and they’re enjoying themselves.
“You had fun, right?”
“Time of my life,” Chloe says. She smiles broadly. “I’m glad we did this.”
“Me too,” Lois says. “Now let’s stop with the emotional and rock.”
Chloe laughs. “Whatever you say Lois.”
And they cruise down the highway, the sky a mixture of pinks and purples, dusk quickly approaching but not here just yet. Soon their lives will start up again. For now though it’s just them, the open road, and a collection of toys along for the ride.
+++
The End