“Okay,” my father said, buckling himself into the passenger seat of our 1993 Dodge Shadow. “You know which one’s the gas, right?”

“Uh. I think so?” I offered, half-joking.

“YOU THINK SO? OH MAN, LAWRA, YOU BETTA NOT KILL ME.”

I promised him I wouldn’t, though I wasn’t entirely sure. I took one clammy hand off the steering wheel to put the car into drive and tentatively pressed down on the gas. The car jolted forward, quicker than I expected as a surge of power flowed through my veins. I steered us down the street from my house, hands on ten and two, crawling at the dangerous speed of about seven miles per hour. When I got to the stop sign at the end of our cul-de-sac, my dad’s arm gripped the door handle tensely.

“AWLRIGHT. READY TO TURN ON DA MAIN ROAD?”

“I think so,” I said, inching the car up further, scanning both sides of the street for traffic.

“TAKE YOUR TIME,” ordered my dad. “CONCENTRATE. YOU GO WHEN YOU’RE READY.”

“Okay,” I said. I took a deep breath, turned the wheel to the right and accelerated.

And just like that, I was driving.

…

After spending quite a few summer evenings chaffeuring my father around my neighborhood, the logical next step was a suburban white teenager’s rite of passage: Driver’s Education. During the fall of my junior year, I spent Saturday mornings sitting in a classroom, watching videos about drunk driving and cars getting obliterated by deer. I’m not sure how this affected my driving but it sure did cause me to leave class almost every single week in tears.

“HOW WAS IT?” asked my dad as we drove home.

“THE DEER KILLED A LADY! IT TOTALED HER CAR AND SHE DIED AND LEFT BEHIND THREE KIDS!” I wailed, wiping my tears with the back of my hand.

“Yeah,” said my dad, easing the car up the steep incline of our driveway. “THOSE DEER ARE FREAKING DANGEROUS. DON’T YOU EVA HIT ONE.”

“Uh. I don’t think I can control that?”

“RIGHT. WELL. TRY NOT TO IF YOU CAN HELP IT.”

“Right. Okay.”

It’s pretty accurate to say that Saturday morning lectures sucked and when I wasn’t crying, I was scribbling notes to my friend Cory who sat behind me, important high school things about classes and colleges and boyz. It was boring, but it was tame and at least the talk of safety features and driving under the influence didn’t make me nervous. Sad, but not nervous.

As much as I wanted to drive, I didn’t realize how incredibly anxious I would become for the actual driving part, piling into a car every Wednesday afternoon with three of my classmates.

It was one thing to drive my dad around the block. It was another to get in the car with three other people plus a driving instructor and not feel like I was completely going to kill us all. It didn’t help that my three driving partners were all acquaintances of mine, all male and all adroit at busting my chops on a regular basis, as was our sarcastic high school way.

TJ was the tallest of the group, with legs and arms that went on for days. We shared an English class together and an odd sense of competition that I think, in retrospect, was his way of flirting. I think he’d had a crush on me since third grade but I wasn’t entirely sure. We spent time in the backseat arguing relentlessly about writing styles and religion and poetry, sometimes joking, sometimes mean-spirited. He was the king of playing Devil’s Advocate, of playing Token Atheist, of mocking the cross around my neck and the stories I wrote.

At the time, I thought he was awfully cruel but now I see he was just insecure, an awkward teenager on the outskirts of the popular cliques. He tried out for the basketball team every year and was rejected, every year, resigned to being the sports writer for the school newspaper. He would show up to all the games with a notepad and a pen, taking his job so incredibly seriously. He drove that way, too—seemingly sure of himself but really only covering up his insecurities. I liked it best when he drove because at least temporarily, I was spared any heated debate in the backseat about church-going and heaven and the basketball team’s star players.

Kenny was always friendly to me, a very large boy with baggy jeans and over-sized t-shirts, lumbering down the hallways with a big backpack. I knew he smoked pot and cigarettes and was in remedial classes. As such, our schedules and social lives didn’t overlap much but, like the rest of my high school, I had known him since kindergarten and we still shared hello’s when we passed.

He was the best driver out of all of us, a parallel parking expert. He was continually chiming in on the fights between TJ and me, often rallying to my side in support. He shouted encouragements from the backseat when I drove, when I was too cautious, when I blurted out how much I sucked at driving. I thanked him profusely when I was finished, squeezing into the backseat next to him while someone else took a turn. His round face would break into a smile and he’d offer me a sip of his Snapple.

I knew Michael the best out of the three though we had rarely spent anytime together until we piled into the driver’s ed car. He was my best friend Karen’s brother and had therefore always been there–as an altar server at church while we sang in the choir, talking to her at our shared locker across from the music room, goofing off in the cafeteria.

He was small for his age, a year older than us but in the same grade after being left back in elementary school.  He wasn’t as academic as Karen, wasn’t as social, wasn’t as musically gifted. But he was funny in his own rebellious way, smoking cigarettes behind the school, dating girls from neighboring school districts, bugging Karen for lunch money. A middle class teenager trying to be as badass and ghetto as can be in the middle of white Long Island suburbia.

I severely disliked it when it was Michael’s turn to drive, not because he was a particularly bad driver. In fact, he was pretty good if a little aggressive sometimes. No, actually, I didn’t like it when Michael drove because that meant that I had to sit bitch, sandwiched between TJ and Kenny in the backseat. Kenny took up one and a half seats to begin with due to his girth and TJ’s legs and arms took up the rest which left me approximately 7/8 of a seat.

And this is how I spent the autumn of my junior year of high school. Once a week, for an afternoon, I would squeeze myself into a car and drive around with TJ, Kenny, Michael and a driving instructor I can’t quite remember. He wore a leather jacket and had a mustache and seemed pretty chill about the fact that he was at the mercy of four teenagers. I don’t really remember anything about him except the fact that he would be fired the following semester for hitting on a girl named Kimberly who had super curly hair and wore large gold ghetto hoop earrings.

At its worst, Driver’s Ed was a tumultuous experience. I was occasionally yelling at TJ in the backseat, while Kenny’s stomach pressed against my outer thigh. Or I was in the driver’s seat, taking each turn tentatively, concentrating all my anxiety on the road ahead, palms tightly gripping the steering wheel, attempting to banish all thoughts of deer from my mind.

At its best, though, Driver’s Ed was something I began to look forward to. I loved leaning lazily against the window as Kenny gently maneuvered the car through the back roads by the Long Island Sound, the leaves around us, flaming oranges and crisp apple reds. The radio was on low, humming a nondescript pop song and the chatter in the car would rise and fall, as we gained energy and lost it, eventually settling into late afternoon silence, sitting and staring out the window as houses sped past, pumpkins on the stoop,  ghosts in the windows.

I became more relaxed in the driver’s seat, the boys encouraging me to be confident, to take control. I can hear Michael’s voice in my ear, telling me how much smoother I was on the gas pedal, how much I was improving. TJ echoing his words in a rare moment of kindness, his blue eyes grinning. And Kenny, with his Snapple bottle, chain on his jeans, waving to me in the hall the next day.

It was the kind of small town high school experience that I have preserved forever in a mental snapshot. We had no cares beyond easing a car over the fallen leaves of the North Shore. We had homework and crushes and part time jobs but life was free and easy, comprised of trips to the bagel store during lunch period, rehearsals for the school musical, standing on the side lines of the basketball court.

We each took a turn behind the wheel on those Wednesday afternoons, our twenty minute chance to feel the power and freedom of our youth. We could go wherever we wanted to go, a fleeting moment where we possessed the coolness and maturity of adulthood without the stress and responsibility. We were teenagers and we barely looked further than the stretch of pavement ahead of us, rarely glimpsed past October or November, truly believing in the present and in the future, that we were invincible and would most certainly live forever.

…

A year and a half later, a month before graduation, on May 18th of my senior year, Michael was following a friend on an errand, speeding down a strip of the William Floyd Parkway. His friend needed to drop his car off somewhere and so they were each driving separately. In a recounting of the story, Michael’s friend would simply say that one moment, Michael’s car was right there behind him in the rearview mirror and then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

No one is entirely sure what happened that night. No one has been able to explain why Michael’s car was there and then, suddenly, wasn’t. He could’ve leaned down to change the radio station and lost control, he could’ve swerved to avoid a deer. The answer is up for grabs. All we knew was that he was driving fast on the road, his hands on the wheel, his bass thumping loudly. And then inexplicably, his car drifted off the highway and into a tree, where the frame was crushed and the glass was shattered and Michael died.

…

I spent many summer evenings after graduation driving around in the car I inherited, the beat up white ’93 Dodge Shadow that had taken my dad on so many loops around the block. As any young teenager with a brand new driver’s license, I made up excuses just to get behind the wheel, trips that urgently needed to be taken, to the drug store or to the supermarket or a friend’s house, anywhere at all. I liked the feeling of the car surrounding me, of guiding it where I needed to go, of blasting the country station because no one else was around to tell me to shut it off.

Not a night went by that summer that I didn’t think of Michael. Of my best friend Karen, leaving class to sob in the hallway. Of her mother and father at the wake, looking drawn and oh my God, so old. Their son, dead and gone before the age of twenty. I thought of Michael and Karen’s other brothers, standing next to the flowers in the funeral home, in suits, two of them older, stoic and tall. The younger one, the age of my little brother, eleven, his pudgy cheeks smeared with tears, his eyes red behind his round spectacles. The line of high school students and teachers that wrapped around the room, all waiting to pay their respects and express their deepest condolences.

I thought of standing next to my best friend Ashley on the altar, as we sang at his funeral. The church was packed with people; I remember thinking that school must’ve been so empty that day. We clutched each other’s hands with all our might, willing ourselves not to cry, forcing our voices to sing and not crack, attempting to be strong for Karen. For everyone.

As if guided by a force outside ourselves, we made it through every hymn without crying. That is, until the very last one.  We made the mistake of looking up and watching as Karen walked with her family down the aisle, following Michael’s coffin, teachers and students hanging onto each other. And after one verse of “I Know That My Redeemer Lives”, Ashley and I gave up singing. The choir kept going, the organ kept playing and we fell into each other’s arms, surrendering to our grief, weeping uncontrollably, our tears soaking our cheeks and shoulders and black dresses.

I thought of all of this as my gas pressed down on the pedal on those eternal summer nights, my arm lazily hanging out the window. I thought of Michael and how he should also be getting ready for college classes, just as I was. Thought of his bright smile next to me in the driver’s ed car, of the high-pitched cackle he would let out when Kenny made a dumb joke about my fifteen point turns.

He died almost eight years ago exactly and sometimes, this time of year, I flashback to one of the last times I saw him—I was driving in my car up Route 83 and a loud heavy bass was vibrating next to me. What kind of asshole turns their rap music up that high!? I wondered. I looked over and there was Michael, leaning back in the driver’s seat of his crappy ass car, as ghetto as can be.

I laughed and honked and waved. His face lit up when he saw me and with a mischievous look on his face, he pressed his foot down on the gas and sped off far ahead of me, perhaps daring me to race. But I was far too cautious to follow. Perhaps if I was Kenny or even TJ, I would’ve taken him up on his dare and attempted to speed beside him in the afternoon sunlight. Instead, I just smiled and kept the car at a reasonable 55, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. I hummed along to an old country song, watching the exhaust from his car float up into the sky as he drove faster and faster, disappearing over the horizon, all too soon, completely out of sight.