BY LUCY ROSENTHAL
When you pick me up from the first day at my new job as a photographer’s assistant in the city, you’re wearing that big denim coat that I like. The one with the thick white fleece lining the collar and the hole in the breast pocket that I patched up with flannel for you. It is the most beautiful type of winter evening: a dusty pink sky and feathery snow. The air is paper-thin but not even that cold. As we cross the park to get to your car, a man asks us to bum a cigarette. He tells us that we are a beautiful couple and that if we make a wish together under the pine tree, we will be together forever. Really! He insists, I really mean it. For the rest of the walk, we are beaming.
You take me to the suburbs to make pasta and drink red wine with all of your friends. They’re the same old friends you’ve had since high school and when you’re all together you get loud and manic with inside jokes and secret words and raucous laughter. A silent knot of jealousy grows inside me for the childhood that you had and I did not, the one that you can’t quite seem to get rid of. I try my best to pretend I understand and I laugh along.
After dinner we go to trivia at a bar that you all go to every Tuesday. I’m nervous that I won’t know any of the answers, but the first category is movies, and I get every question right. Your friends are impressed. They announce the category for the second round and then there’s a five-minute break, during which your friends cheat by looking things up on their phones in the bathroom.
We win that night, which is apparently rare for you guys. We split the prize money evenly. It isn’t really fair to me since I won us an entire round all on my own, but I don’t say anything. We drive back to your friends’ house in two separate cars, you and me alone in your big red Nissan. The roads curve through the forest, narrow and pitch-black and silent. Your friends’ car gets far ahead of us; we lose them as they go around the bend. Then, we drive by a dirt clearing to see that they have pulled over and are facing the road, flashing their headlights at us. You laugh and keep driving.
I ask what that was about and you say you’ve been playing little tricks on each other like that a lot recently. We pull ahead and get to your friend’s driveway first. A wide concrete cul-de-sac on top of a giant hill. It is the middle of nowhere. As your friends’ car comes into the driveway, you suddenly turn until we’re perpendicular to them. You stop, get out of the car, and run towards your friends. I wonder what you’re doing but then quickly understand that this is one of the tricks.
A little car game. An inside joke. I smile. I’m part of one now. I watch you serenely from the passenger seat as you plunge through the darkness and jump in front of your friends’ headlights to give them a little scare.
That’s when I realize that your car is still moving. You had accidentally pulled into reverse instead of park. I am strapped into the passenger side, drifting backwards towards the edge of the hill. My first instinct is to grab the door handle, but it’s locked, and in my sudden state of panic I can’t figure out how to get it open. The windows are down. Can I fit through those? I scream your name. You don’t hear me at first. I scream and scream, the car is moving! You turn back, your face ghostly white in the dark as you charge back towards the car and yell at me to put it in drive. I can’t exactly make out the words you’re saying. I try to reach for the gearshift but I’m frozen.
By the time I have figured out what is happening and what I need to do to stop it, the car’s back wheels have already dipped over the crest of the hill, and down I go. It’s so fast. I can’t see anything. I somehow think to ram the car into park, but the thought comes to me too late, and at the same time that I unleash the horrible screeching sound from the brakes, the car crashes into a tree.
Everything is dark and still. I unlock the door and tumble out of the car, surprised to find that I am in the bushes at the bottom of the hill. I am unscathed, but one of your taillights is shattered. My first thought is that your dad is gonna kill you over it, and that it’s all my fault for not having stopped it sooner.
From up above, I can hear everyone running towards me. I yell I’m okay so that nobody thinks I’m dead. I climb up the hill and you grab me once I get to the top. You’ve got tears in your eyes and you look sickened to your core. I tremble in your arms as you stroke my hair and I just keep saying I’m okay, I’m okay, and you just keep saying that you thought you’d killed me.
Your friends all stand around us and stare. It makes me realize that this type of thing happening is the only thing that could finally get them to act like I am there. I do not want this attention. I do not want it now; I do not want it ever. To be honest, your friends are not gentle, and they are not kind. You invite me in for tea and TV but I say no. You offer to take me home if I’m still too shaken up to drive myself, but there’s no way I’m getting back in your car now.
You tell me it’s okay if I am angry, if I am livid. I say that I am not. I really think that I was, but I just wasn’t ready to admit it. I drive myself home just to play pretend at having control. I listen to Bruce Springsteen and stare at the exit signs as they drift by and I cry. They are suddenly crystal-clearer than I have ever seen them, and I feel like I miss them when they go away, before the next one comes into view.
I think about my dad and the time he and my mom were young and driving down the Garden State Parkway at some ungodly hour of the night and his Karmann Ghia broke down. They called my Grandpa from a phone booth and he drove out to rescue them. Grandpa was pissed but my parents were safe. I think of them waiting together, holding each other on the side of the Parkway all those decades ago, and I realize that you will never be able to protect me. Not like that. And now there is so much resentment in me that I will probably never be able to protect you either. Maybe I will never be able to protect anyone.
When I was growing up I had a bad habit of crawling into bed with my mom, even when I was much too old, afraid of sleeping alone. I want nothing more than to do that now. I want to shove my face into her neck, inhale the sesame and rose scent of her skin, and have her promise me that nothing like what happened tonight will ever happen again. But I can’t. Usually I tell her everything. But I can never, ever tell her about this. If she ever found out, she would probably want you dead.
Lucy Rosenthal is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. She holds a BA in film from Vassar College and is an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work focuses on themes of transition, childhood memories, inheritance, sexual journeys, and reclamation of the body. She reads tarot, cuts her own hair, and is really good at making U-turns.