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Maybe I Should Never Get My License

A short story

By Molly MacPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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The first time my younger cousin talked to me since Christmas was to tell me she had passed her driving test fresh after her sixteenth birthday; I automatically read “Looks like I beat you!” as “Hey Wendy, you suck.”

I’m the designated passenger, the default shotgun, the guaranteed company for pre-party errands. Once I’m picked up, my independence is forfeited, and the driver presents our list: chips, cups, Smirnoff for Emmanuel, Soju for Mel, assorted wine coolers for everyone else. I know every grocery store in the area like the back of my hand.

Weekly parties became a tradition after Emmanuel found better roommates. He’s one of the oldest of us — twenty-one in October — and the only one that doesn’t live with his parents. Naturally, his shared two-story became the communal crash pad.

I met Ralph at the first party of the summer. He was the tallest in the room, and blatantly the most uncomfortable; Emmanuel had invited him from work, but he had left to pick up the pizza, and the newcomer was stranded with a cup in his hand.

“He looks lost,” Mel said, both of us leaning against the kitchen counter. He stood in the corner of the living room, half watching the competitive match of Mario Kart and half looking around, his head gently nodding along to the music. He wore a UC Santa Barbara sweatshirt and those six-inch inseam shorts I’d expect to see in a frat house or a yacht club; in other words, he stuck out like a sore thumb.

“You’re gonna make him more uncomfortable if you keep staring like that,” I told her, sipping on the fruity concoction she had made moments ago and adding another song to the queue.

“My plan was to wait until he noticed so that I could invite him over, but I think he’s avoiding this general area altogether.”

“Yeah, because you’re being a creep,” I told her, glancing over at him. He shifted his feet and looked at his phone. “You’ll scare him off, Mel. Blink.”

She reluctantly looked away. “He’s completely oblivious.”

“Or he thinks you’re weird.”

“Whatever,” Mel huffed, “I don’t feel bad for him anymore. He’s on his own.”

“So staring at him for a full minute was your only attempt at making friends?”

Mel made a face at me. “You go talk to him, then.”

He dutifully kept his eyes glued to his phone screen, only glancing at me when I stood next to him. I looked at the round of Mario Kart; he looked back at his phone, then back at me, then back at his phone. A Pink Floyd song came on and we both nodded along.

“You like Pink Floyd?” I finally asked him, trying to ignore Mel’s eyes on us from the kitchen.

“Huh? Oh, yeah,” he said. “You guys got some good music going.”

“Do you have any requests?”

His eyebrows lifted as I offered him my phone. “This is your playlist?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, sick,” he said, taking my phone and pocketing his own. He scrolled for a moment, then smiled, saying, “You named your playlist ‘Oh God, I’m on AUX and if I don’t play upbeat music someone will yell at me?’”

“I thought it was funny.”

“No yeah, it is,” he laughed, scrolling more to look at my music. “No way, you have Fleetwood Mac on here?”

“They’re essential!”

“I love this,” he said, grinning. He leaned his shoulder against the wall, angling towards me. Cheers erupted from one side of the room and boos from the other, marking the end of the current Mario Kart match. Another would have started if Emmanuel hadn’t walked through the door with a stack of pizza boxes in hand.

“So, I see you met our very own John Stamos,” Emmanuel said, having delegated the boxes to the hungry. The newcomer chuckled out of embarrassment. “He just started working with me and Lonnie on Monday.”

“Oh, did you just move here?” I asked him, nodding to his shirt.

He glanced down at the logo, saying, “No, I’m headed there next semester on scholarship.”

$20,000 scholarship,” Emmanuel emphasized.

Looking back, that should have been the end. That sentence alone should have halted any further development; I shouldn’t have let myself think of him as more than a friend. But he liked Fleetwood Mac, and he asked me to tie up his hair with my scrunchie for his turn at Mario Kart, and he offered to drive me home, and he showed me his collection of CDs in the glovebox.

“Holy crap, I only live, like, two minutes away,” he told me once he recognized my neighborhood. The scrunchie was still in his hair, the dark strands creating a pineapple-like updo on the top of his head.

Holy crap, I’m already home, he texted me, having asked for my number — my name, too — just before he dropped me off.

Holy crap, I texted back, I haven’t even taken my shoes off yet!

And thus began our unspoken agreement: no matter what event we were at, he would always be the one to take me home.

The awkwardness never really left, though. Sometimes we were professionals at small talk: his expectations for college life in California, my expectations for college at home, commuting on buses at seven in the morning. The places he’s traveled, the places I want to go. Sometimes, though, neither of us could think of anything to say, so he would turn up the music and we would listen to the lyrics. What would life have been like without the ritualistic fifteen minutes from our friend’s house to mine as we both tried to think of something that was worth talking about? No, worth attempting to talk about? Or maybe he wasn’t thinking about it all, maybe he hadn’t even noticed. Maybe I was dying inside every time I got in the passenger seat of the BMW his mom bought for him and he was just thinking about whatever it was that people think about when they’re incapable of speaking to the person next to them. Maybe he was content with the silence.

I had been in that BMW so many times, I remember every detail. Wondering every single time I got in and out why a six-foot-three guy would want a car so effing low to the ground. The Cage the Elephant CD in the center console, a basketball in the backseat. The small black notebook on the floor. His misspelled name on the Bluetooth screen. (Dalph. He didn’t think it was worth changing.)

Life would be a lot less interesting if conversations came easily, if I didn’t constantly think about what he was thinking and what I was thinking and how to translate both of that into something that filled the silence. At least he has a good taste in music.

“I feel like you hold a lot back when you drink,” he told me once, long after the fifteen-minute rides home turned into parked-car conversations. We were sitting in his car at the gas station sometime near sunrise, waiting for Emmanuel. I was mildly buzzed and he was painfully sober.

“No, not really,” I told him. “I just don’t want to make a fool out of myself.”

He kept looking back and forth between me and the window, as if it would kill him to make eye contact for more than two seconds.

“You should just be yourself.”

“I am,” I said as earnestly as I could, but I felt like he didn’t believe me, or at least it just wasn’t what he wanted to hear. A two-second side glance, then back to the window. “I guess I just don’t want to ruin anything.”

That got his attention. He looked right at me, his eyes a little wide. But his voice was still monotone as he asked, “What do you mean?”

It was the natural question to ask, but it put us at an impasse. We didn’t talk about this sort of thing. Good movies, sure. Or politics. Never emotions. Never saying what was on my mind. Maybe it had something to do with fear, but maybe I just didn’t think it was worth it. Maybe I didn’t even think I was allowed to be feeling the way I was feeling, let alone tell him.

“Um, I just, you know,” I started, crushed under the weight of how much I wanted to say but just couldn’t. “I like you, you know?”

He faltered. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again like a fish before he finally said, “Wendy, I’m leaving in a couple weeks… It wouldn’t have worked out…”

He left it at that. Emmanuel walked through the gas station doors, as though he was waiting for his cue. We both looked up.

“Emmanuel’s coming back,” Ralph needlessly announced. As if he was asking me not to carry the conversation with a third party present. As if I was actually capable of saying anything else on the matter.

“Alright, I got some water and a couple bags of chips,” Emmanuel said as soon as he got in the seat behind me. He looked up at us, both of us looking straight ahead. “Did I miss something?”

My mouth suddenly began to taste sour, and in the next moment I flung the car door open and ran to the nearest trash can. It felt great, really, knowing the people who had their life together would be waking up soon to work out and drink something green, and I had just thrown up a peach-mango Smirnoff Smash outside of a gas station.

It wouldn’t have worked out. But what if it did?

They gave me water and took me home, Emmanuel patting my shoulder from his place in the front seat and Ralph continually glancing in his rear-view window. I wasn’t drunk, and I doubted the alcohol was what made me throw up, but it was easier to let them think that.

I felt ashamed investing so much energy in him when my feelings were only fueled by the quantifiable amount of time spent together and the crumbs of affection. Even those eventually subsided and left me starving. It was just so strange, he’d kiss me and drive me home and I thought that counted as something, and it gave me hope that something would come out of it, but maybe I had always been a fool. Maybe the feelings were forbidden.

It rained the day before he left. His BMW was packed with boxes and suitcases, so he picked me up in his mom’s car. He drove us to Target on the soaking wet roads, playing alternative music we used to listen to when we were in middle school. Radical Face and MGMT. I bought him a CD for his drive, which I let him pick out, because I didn’t know what he would choose between Abbey Road and Wish You Were Here. He went with Wish You Were Here.

“It’s gonna be weird, you know, with you gone and everything,” I told him, lingering in his passenger seat in front of my house.

“Yeah,” he replied. A few more moments passed. “I’ll miss you, Wendy.”

It’s sunny today, the day he left. Not a cloud in the sky. It feels like I’m being mocked. Later on I’ll see my friends, and they’ll say they miss him, and they’ll decide who will take me home by playing rock-paper-scissors. “You’re kidding me,” the loser will groan, but I’ll hear it as “Hey Wendy, you suck.”

I’ll wonder if he played the CD I bought for him on his drive to California, and if it will make him think of me. And I’ll miss him, too.

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About the Creator

Molly Mac

21 | literature & film student | instagram: @m.mac82

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