Girls | Sophie Kemp | Granta
I was half dead in the Jacksonville airport. I was exhausted and they had a group of middle schoolers up in the bleachers singing Christmas carols. I was keeping my head down. I had my sunglasses on, and I wasn’t trying to cause trouble. Honest to God, I was mostly thinking about the parking garage. I was thinking about the fact that I had not operated a motor vehicle in about seven years and I had the fear deep in me about getting the car out of that parking garage. I was alone driving from the East Coast of Florida to Joshua Tree, in California. That was a normal thing to do after a breakup. My boyfriend had just dumped me. I wasn’t surprised. We kept having the same fight. But after I’d landed, successfully made it out of the airport parking garage, and driven about sixty miles, I pulled into a gas station in Lake City and started pacing in the light rain. The breakup was inconvenient because we had planned to take the trip together. It would have been romantic. Camping in a minor n