At seventeen, I'd never driven *myself* much of anywhere either. But I had most definitely never gotten behind the wheel with a friend ridin' suicide. (Seat, that is.)
I was bringing "Tabitha" to a small gardeny place where one or both of our fathers were performing. I don't remember why she needed a ride from me instead of just coming with her dad, as I had done. Whatever the reason, I left rehearsal halfway through to pick her up from her house.
It was big and white and sprawling; she was small and contained, compact. With a natural athlete's build, although she didn't play any sports. I seem to remember her wearing a tank top and a flowy hippie skirt. Her hair...she'd had it feathered at one point; was it growing out by now? Her hair had always betrayed her desire to fit in at school. (We'd discussed that. She thought it was important. I disagreed.)
Out she came, in any event, and hopped in the car. Off we went.
I don't know what I had expected, driving a friend someplace for the first time, but it turned out she wasn't even nervous. There was no "You do notice that stop sign coming up, right?" Quite the contrary. Amazingly to me, she seemed to think I knew what I was doing. In fact, she assumed I knew what I was doing. To the point where she wasn't even conscious of it. She was too busy telling me girl stuff.
The girl stuff was not, sadly, "mall-and-cute-guy" girl stuff. Instead, it was "parental-divorce-and-exploitative-guy" girl stuff. "This is what guys do," she tutored me. "First they look at your ass, then they look at your tits, then they wonder how you'd be in bed."
Did they really. I wouldn't have known. I went to an all-girl school at this point. Plus, I was depressed. I don't think I had a body during those years. I can't remember feeling it at all, in any way, except when it decided not to breathe. So it had no reaction to her statement--not revulsion, not fear, not arousal. She might as well have been describing Martian moon rituals.
I remember glancing at her while she did, sunken as she was into that seat, totally surrendered to it, and being awed by that portrait of trust all the more profound for how offhand it was.
#
It's been raining here. This is not the kind of place where it ought to rain in January. Even the place where I grew up, which was northern but soft in the winter, didn't see rain in January.
February yes. (And snow in April. Rain in February, snow in April.)
But not January.
I was already worried about this back when I drove Tabitha. It was scarier then, actually, because it was still something largely off in the future. We couldn't picture it. Now we're starting to live it.
Tabitha and I lost touch a good long time ago. Sometimes I almost wonder if it was even real, or if we dreamed each other. It was that kind of friendship, where we wrote stories together and had sleepovers when at 3am we'd decide to do an improv. (Hey, our dads were artsy--this was normal to us.) She lived in that wild and rambling house from another time.
She thought I knew what I was doing in that car. She really did. She just...rode. A passenger.
I'd never had one before.
