Dead End

Late night, heavy rains, thunderstorms, and a ridiculously long drive to reach home with a drunken man on the driver's seat, who could doze off anytime. 

Meet 17-year-old Aubrey, tackling the above like a frontline warrior with stories as her shield and words as her weapons.

Sounds too poetic, doesn't it? Well, she had to keep Nicolas from sleeping before he crashed the car and gave her a free pass to heaven which he seems to be ready to use at any given point of time. To make him stay alert somehow, Aubrey has been constantly bringing up topics that are engaging for him. 

She talked about how she was born on Jupiter while her mother was in Africa and how she had once become invisible when she was eight and how she accidentally brought life to a toy as a preteen and lastly, how she always wished she could successfully make slime. 

After the random ranting, all Nicolas bothered asking about was, which country Jupiter was located in. 

Aubrey didn't care where the conversation was going that is, assuming it had some direction at all. All she wanted was to keep Nicolas awake. 

Nicolas slurred something that couldn't pass for words but Aubrey understood what he meant. He had lost his way. Aubrey on the other hand knew exactly where they had to go given the hazy effect the rains added to the night.

Aubrey knew the route, but the challenge here was that it was too far away to keep Nicolas awake. 

But she had a motive. She was determined. 

She dictated the way to Nicolas assuring him they weren't far from the destination. To keep him alert, she came up with her masterpiece...the one which she knew was enough to keep him up all night. 

"This one, is from after 'Humanity's'  death on its funeral..." she said.

"There once lived a girl, good at heart but too naive to survive in today's world. She was poor and craved some shelter. On one rainy night, a boy promised to change her life. He promised to help her out in every way that he could. She followed him to his house only to see a group of gangsters gambling and drinking in a room lit with dark red light. The dark light was yet not half as dark as their intentions. The girl immediately knew something unfortunate was about to happen but before she-"

 "Wait, which turn do we take next?" Nicolas interrupted. 

"Left"

"you sure?"

"yes"

"Okay, continue...what happened afterwards?"

Aubrey resumed her story, " next day's newspaper said "A young girl killed violently", what else"

Nicolas surely looked more alert now. And Aubrey clearly had a lot to say before Nicolas asked sceptically if they were really supposed to go for the left turn they took a while ago.

"Trust me" was all Aubrey said. 

Nicolas then asked Aubrey to narrate a good story out of boredom. Aubrey went silent and told him that he'd need to wait for it. After about an hour later, when she was sure, she started, 

"That girl, in the story, then waited for days...and years later one day when that boy was driving, she asked him for a lift and cleverly guided him towards the end of a cliff- closer to his last breath"

What a beautiful disaster Aubrey's story was. 

Irony has it, Nicolas would probably never come to know it was more than just a story...