Lost in Stereo

Jade's Point of View

After a few more hours, we decided to stop at Wal-Mart. We’d discovered that for one thing, no one had bothered to pack any movies, and for another, whoever had been in charge of grocery shopping had failed to do their job since all we had was Ramen and jelly. Also, we needed to get Skye a new iPod.

Upon arrival, we decided to divide and conquer, so Skye and I went off to get her iPod and do the food shopping, since, let’s be honest, there was no way we could trust the boys to do that. We got a cart and headed over to electronics, where the guys were picking out movies.

“Seriously? ‘The 40-Year Old Virgin’?” Skye raised her eyebrows.

“Come on, it’s funny!” Rian protested. “It’s also Jack’s life story.”

Everyone started laughing, except Jack who exclaimed, “Goddamnit, guys!” before also dissolving into laughter. Skye and I looked in their basket, trying to weed through the other movies. So far, mostly all they had were raunchy comedy movies.

When asked about this, Zack said, “Well, what else are we supposed to get?”

Skye went over to join them in picking out movies. I threw my hands up. “So I guess I’m doing the grocery shopping on my own, then?”

“Take Alex with you,” Skye replied automatically. Alex perked up at the sound of his name, and when it registered what she had said, his shoulders slumped.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I hesitated, Alex nodding in agreement.

“Just go, man,” Rian pushed him. “You always bitch about not having the right food on the bus. This way we won’t have to put up with your complaining.”

Alex sighed after a moment, knowing there was no way he was getting out of this, much to our mutual dismay. “Fine.” He started walking ahead of me. “Let’s go.”

We started in the frozen food section, but we didn’t get far before we started arguing. Alex was trying to put dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets in the cart, and I was trying to explain to him that we wouldn’t be able to eat them.

“You don’t have an oven,” I said. “You need to cook them in the oven.”

“It says on the bag that you can make them in the microwave,” he insisted.

“They’ll taste like shit,” I told him. “They only taste good in the oven.”

“That’s not true,” Alex argued. “Remember the one time you made them and they came out all burned? Now those tasted like shit.”

“That was because Jack was supposed to tell me when the timer went off and he forgot,” I justified. “And as I remember, they were not that bad.”

Alex groaned. “If I put these back, will it please make you shut up?”

I rolled my eyes. “God, you’re making this so much more difficult than it needs to be.”

“I’m not, you are.” Alex shook his head. “All you had to do was let me put them in the cart, and it’d be fine.”

“Alex, why would I let you put a bag of food in the cart that both you and I know is gonna go to waste and not say anything?” I sighed.

“Because you used to be nice,” Alex said.

“And you used to not be an ass,” I shot back. We stood there for a moment, anger flowing between the two of us. Finally he gave up and put the bag of dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets back. We carried, on getting a few microwaveable meals with surprisingly little argument about what to buy. When we got to the produce, we started to disagree over what kind of milk to get but finally just decided to buy both to avoid another mini-scene. This was the norm for the rest of the trip when it came to cereal, cheese, bread, snack items, everything.

When we finally got back to the rest of the guys and Skye, we must have looked like we wanted to kill ourselves because Jack commented, “Wow, was it really the bad?”

“Flyzik can do the grocery shopping,” Alex said. “I don’t even care if he buys the wrong stuff all the time, it’s still better than this.”

“We could hear you guys arguing from across the store,” Zack said.

“We weren’t arguing, we were discussing heatedly,” I told him.

“No, we were fighting,” Alex responded.

“No, we were-” I started, but was cut off.

“Are you guys seriously fighting about whether you were having a fight?” Skye asked.

I sort of had to laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Goddamn,” Skye shook her head. “Come on, let’s go. I wanna start playing with my iPod.”

We all headed up to the checkout counter, the cashier looking horrified at the amount of stuff she would have to ring up. About halfway through, Alex announced loudly, “Sorry guys, Jade wouldn’t let me get the dinosaur chicken nuggets.”

“Really?” Rian said brightly. “Good. Those taste like shit in the microwave.”

I couldn’t help but smirk at Alex’s expression. “See?”

He threw his hands in the air. “I give up.”