The problem with driving a car is that many people have a license, but not many people know how to actually drive. Curiously enough, most people would agree with you on that. They would also maintain that they fall squarely into the second category, while everyone else on the road is an idiot who should never have passed their driving test.

Neo, for one, thought of himself as an excellent driver. In fact, he thought he was so good that traffic signs no longer applied to him, serving only as a sort of general guideline when he wasn't quite sure how many miles per hour over the speed limit he should go. Miraculously enough, he had never gotten so much as a dent in any car he'd ever driven; he had the control of a race car driver and the luck of an utterly incompetent man who applied to a job without a résumé and got it over the various qualified women who had also applied. Which was not to say he had always managed to avoid speeding tickets; but in recent years he had developed a sort of sixth sense when it came to speed traps, and now even that didn't pose a problem anymore.

Which was why, at the moment, he was leaving Chicago behind at a speed normally reserved for space shuttles and swearing colorfully at the more rule-abiding drivers who didn't move out of his way fast enough. The only thing going faster than his car were the windshield wipers, which were struggling hard to keep up with the rain and seriously considering a nice, peaceful job on a countryside truck right now. The view through the windshield was still blurry at best, but hey, Neo hadn't learned to drive in a Nordic country to be deterred by a bit of bad weather.

"Hey, Neo," Zeke spoke up from the passenger seat.

Neo swerved around a family van that had made the mistake of trying to move in his lane, then pulled past a baffled businessman in a BMW who dropped his company phone in shock and had to go for the rest of the drive without making any calls. He didn't bother to respond to Zeke; he was riding the high of reliving the one glorious time he had overslept and needed to make the four-hour drive to Helsinki Airport in two and a half hours to catch his plane. He had actually managed it too, although he was still paying off the tickets for the traffic violations.

"Neo," Zeke tried again, louder this time.

Neo ignored him. Physically he might be in a dubious rental car on a rainy highway, but mentally he was a Formula 1 driver on the track. And race car drivers didn't have time to chat while driving.

"Neo," Zeke insisted, bouncing his knees. "Neooo. Neo. Neo. Neo."

Neo made a face, almost colliding with a camper van in the split second he bothered to glance over at Zeke. "What?" he said irritably.

"You're going really fast." Zeke pointed at the screen of the GPS, which was having the worst time of its life calculating and re-calculating the estimated time of arrival. "You sure you know we're going in the right direction?"

Neo didn't blink. "What does the GPS say?"

"It, uh…" Zeke leaned forward to squint at the screen. "It's looking kinda confused."

Neo swerved around a truck that was going at less than half the speed of their car. "What does it say?"

"Re-calculating route," Zeke read out loud. "Please wait."

For the first time since entering the highway, Neo slowed down.

"For how long has it said that?" he said, taking his eyes off the road—empty for now—to glance down at the screen. The GPS did, in fact, look very confused. It had given up on trying to figure out the estimated time of arrival or even their exact location, showing only a loading screen.

"Uh…" Zeke leaned back in his seat, pursing his lips. "Twenty minutes?"

Neo stared.

"And you didn't tell me?" Neo burst out, pulling over into the right lane and slamming on the brakes. "What if we missed our exit without this thing?"

Several cars passed them to the left, honking loudly, their drivers looking like they were yelling at them through the windows. "When do we have to take an exit again?" Zeke replied.

"I don't know!" Neo rattled the steering wheel. "I was counting on this to know! What if we missed it?"

Zeke shrugged. "We turn back?" he replied, like it was the easiest thing in the world. "What's the name of our exit?"

"I don't know!" Neo shouted again. "I don't remember that shit! That's why you have technology! Now how do we get this bitch to work again?"

Zeke stared at the screen for a solid moment, then he shrugged again, watching the raindrops slide down the windshield. "We wait," he said. "What's the problem?"

Without bothering to argue, Neo slumped over and hit his head against the steering wheel. He really couldn't handle this sober, but he also couldn't handle his usual driving style drunk (yet—he was working on it), and the bottom line was that he hated it here.

"We don't have time!" he burst out, flinging an arm in Zeke's general direction without taking his head off the wheel. "The clock is ticking! Tick tock! You know? We need to be in L.A. by Friday—"

"My raindrop is faster than your raindrop."

Neo sat back up.

"What," he said flatly.

Either oblivious to his look of utter incomprehension or ignoring it on purpose, Zeke pointed to a pair of raindrops on the windshield. "My raindrop," he said. "Your raindrop. Mine's faster."

Something in Neo's brain switched off. The last of his brain cells handed in a complaint about the working conditions and quit on the spot.

"No, it's not," he said, staring intensely at the raindrop Zeke had assigned to him. "It's moving faster, it just goes a longer way because yours is a lazy ass who relies on other people's hard work to keep him going."

"Well, yours is just being extra," Zeke retorted. "Ooh, look at me, I'm working extra hard so the rest of you feel bad about yourselves! It's almost like there's no point in doing all those stupid zigzag lines—"

"It's called art," Neo cut him off, "and you can't do it if you only do the bare minimum!"

"As long as you get there, who cares!"

"It's the journey, not the destination!"

On the windshield, the two raindrops met and merged into a single larger raindrop that made quick work of the rest of the way down.

There was an awkward silence.

"Well, shit," Neo said at last. "And who wins now?"

Zeke made a face. "It's a draw," he replied. "We have to do another race and settle the score!"

Neo's face lit up with the grim glee of a competition. "Ready to lose, Carraway?"

"Speak for yourself, Roadhouse," Zeke retorted. "It's on—"

The last of Neo's brain cells realized it had forgotten its coat at work and came back.

"Wait!" he shouted. "What the hell are we doing? We should be moving!"

Zeke pointed at the GPS, which had evidently given up and frozen itself in a permanent blue screen of death. "Without this?"

A drink wasn't enough to deal with this, Neo realized. He might need something stronger.

"I'll just…use my phone," he muttered, pulling it out of his pocket. "Here…"

Zeke gave him a long look. "While driving?"

Grimacing, Neo went through all five stages of grief in the span of a second, then he groaned and handed the phone over.

"You have My Chem as your background?" Zeke remarked, studying the screen with entirely too curious eyes. "I didn't expect that. I thought you'd have yourself or something."

Neo scoffed. "What?" he replied. "I like My Chemical Romance better."

"And you have a message from some girl here," Zeke added. "She seems…ew. Really into you."

Neo waved a dismissive hand. "Delete all messages."

"Can I reply to them for you instead?"

"No! Zeke, for fuck's sake—give me my phone back!"

Neo reached over and lunged, but Zeke had already moved out of his reach, cheerfully going through his messages. "Can I give them my number?" he said. "You get so many girls and I never get any, it's not fair anyway!"

"That's because you're an idiot," Neo replied without thinking. "You could get girls if you weren't so stupid."

The moment the words left his mouth, Neo could already tell he had made a mistake. His face heated up, and he forced himself to stare at the road ahead, waiting for Zeke to figure out where the hell they had driven to. In his defense, he wasn't wrong. Zeke was…really not a bad-looking guy, he thought, objectively speaking. Subjectively, too. He wasn't as tall as Neo, but he was still a very good height, not to mention athletic and well-built; his wavy blue hair somehow managed to look soft despite the constant bleaching, and his jawline…Neo wouldn't go down that road now. And he wasn't sure if Zeke's cute, friendly face made the whole thing better or worse.

No, there was no denying it. Zeke Carraway was a very attractive guy; unfortunately he was also the biggest annoyance known to humankind, the animal kingdom, some plants, and any and all aliens that might come their way. And for Neo, whether or not the cuteness could outweigh the annoyance was always anyone's guess.

As for Zeke himself, he lowered the phone, giving Neo a long look that felt almost too serious to be coming from him. "Careful," he said. "That was almost a nice thing you said there."

"Nice how? I called you an idiot," Neo retorted. "Now find the way already, we don't have all day."

For once Zeke didn't say anything; he simply opened the navigation app and waited for it to locate them. "I know where we are," he said at length. "The next exit's ours."

"Good," said Neo and floored it.

Beside him, Zeke was quiet, playing around on Neo's phone. In fact, he was suspiciously quiet.

"What," Neo said after a while, "are you doing?"

"Texting people," Zeke replied cheerfully. "This one girl sounds really sweet, if you don't want her, can I just give her my number?"

Neo tensed behind the wheel. "Hell no!"

"Why not? I can just pretend I'm you and trying to set us up." Zeke grinned. "Just say you're not interested, but you have a hot bandmate who—"

Neo made a lunge for the phone. "Give me that!"

Zeke dodged him. "No," he said.

"Give me the phone!"

"No!"

"Phone!"

"No—Neo, our exit!"

With a loud string of curses Neo swerved the car around, pulling into the exit lane at the very last second. The phone had fallen to the floor and disappeared somewhere under the seat. At least one bit of good news, he thought. At least, until they needed the GPS function again.

Oh well.

Without his phone he'd be miserable at best, but now at least Zeke wouldn't have it either.

Neo sighed.

The trip had only just started, and he already couldn't wait for it to end.