After school on Tuesday I’m sitting in the backseat of my mom’s Subaru Outback, eyes scrunched shut, waiting to die.
“Hunter,” Mom says to my brother, who is at the wheel. “You need to check the mirrors. All the mirrors. Rearview mirror. Both side mirrors.”
“There’s nothing to see!” he snaps. “We haven’t even left the driveway yet!”
“And we’re not going to leave the driveway until you do as I say.”
Our mother isn’t generally the control-freak type. It’s more that she’s overprotective. When Hunter and I were little kids getting ready to cross the street, she’d make us look both ways not once but twice. Look left, look right, look left again, look right again, and then we could put one toe off the sidewalk.
“Why don’t you drive, Mom?” I suggest, opening my eyes. Usually I keep completely quiet in the car when Hunter is driving, both because I think he needs all his concentration to avoid killing us, and also because I feel embarrassed for him, having to learn such a big, new hard thing with an audience watching every single minute. But I’m still furious about his meanness to me last weekend. My Mrs. Whistlepuff freewrite only made me even angrier at this new, nasty Hunter who showed up at the start of the school year and took my real, true brother away.
“Why don’t you shut up, Autumn?” Hunter says.
He didn’t use to say things like that to me. He used to say things like that to other kids when they picked on me for being too tall, too skinny, too quick to cry. Years ago, when Charlie Munch on our street called me “Skinny Minnie,” Hunter, without missing a beat, called him “Chunky Monkey,” and just like that Charlie’s nickname became “Chunk” forever.
“Hunter, don’t talk that way to your sister,” Mom says. To me she says, “He has to log fifty hours behind the wheel before he can get his license. There’s no way he can get that many hours if he doesn’t do some of the driving when we go out on errands. Honey, check the mirrors so we can go.”
Hunter gives a huge sigh, but he does look in the general direction of the mirrors.
“Okay,” Mom says. “Start backing out the driveway. Slowly.”
The car leaps backward, like a racehorse galloping in reverse out of the gate.
Mom and I shriek simultaneously. “Brake!” she shouts. “Hunter, brake!”
Whiplash time. My head jerks forward as the car screeches to a halt, still in the driveway.
“Ease on the gas,” she says. “Don’t press the pedal down all the way. Just press it down a little bit.”
“If I drive any slower, Autumn’s going to be late to her orthodontist appointment,” Hunter points out.
The appointment is at four, and it’s already three forty-five, although we climbed into the car ten minutes ago. It took that long for Mom to give all the instructions that Hunter is ignoring. But the office is just ten minutes away, and it doesn’t matter much if we’re late when my orthodontist is also my dad. And it’s not like Hunter cares whether I get there on time; he just wants Mom to stop talking and let him start driving.
“Better late than dead,” I chirp.
Okay, I didn’t need to say that. But he didn’t need to tell me to shut up either.
“If thou wouldst shut thy trap,” Hunter snaps, “’twould be a most excellent idea.”
Now, that was low. I cannot believe he’s sitting there teasing me even more about my “Ode to Cameron.”
I hate you, Hunter, I want to say, but Mom doesn’t let us use words like “hate” or “stupid” or “shut up.” Apparently “shut thy trap” is acceptable, or maybe she’s too stressed with the driving lesson to notice.
So angry I can hardly breathe, I pull out my Moleskine notebook, which I’m never going to let out of my sight ever again. If I can’t say what I want out loud, at least I can say it in writing.
Tuesday, October 4. Hunter driving, I write at the top of the page.
I cross out Hunter driving and write Hunter trying to drive.
The car is finally inching backward at a pace slow enough to satisfy Mom. But now we’re at the end of the driveway, and Hunter is going to have to pull out into the street. Hunter can barely drive, let alone drive backward, not to mention turning backward into traffic. Okay, there isn’t any traffic on our quiet cul-de-sac, but there might be.
I try to think of the best words to describe exactly how my insides feel, both from how Hunter is driving and from what he just said.
Butterflies fluttering. I cross it out. Cliché. Plus, butterflies are too sweet and gentle for this utter upheaval of emotion. More like Elephants stampeding.
Heart banging around in my chest like a tennis ball in a dryer. Great line. But as often happens when an especially wonderful line springs into my head, I have a bad feeling I read it in a book somewhere.
Hunter makes it out of the driveway, and we’re on the street now, waiting at the stop sign to turn onto a bigger road, a road that will have actual cars on it driven by actual other drivers.
“No!” Mom’s voice cuts through my thoughts as Hunter creeps forward. “Wait! Don’t you see that Honda?”
“It’s a million miles away! Maybe two million!”
“No, it’s not!”
“Mom, I could have pulled out ten times already. Look, it’s still a million miles away.”
“Wait until I tell you. I mean it, Hunter. Wait!”
Heart beating against my ribs like a bird trapped in a too-small cage.
Stomach choked with molten lava about to erupt.
“Okay, now,” Mom says.
The car gives another wild leap as Hunter makes his turn and starts to speed down the busier street.
“Slow down! Slow down! Slow down!”
Why has the road suddenly become incredibly narrow, the parked cars looming on the right, ongoing traffic hurtling toward us on the left?
“You’re too close!” Mom reaches over and grabs the wheel. The car swings away from the parked brand-new Audi it was about to total and veers in the other direction over the centerline. I close my eyes and brace myself for the sound of the crash. But I squint one eye to see the two of them, four hands on the wheel, swing it back into our lane.
“Mom,” Hunter says, “it’s better to hit a parked car than a moving car.”
“At least the moving car has a chance of getting out of the way,” she fires back.
“Um, it’s better not to hit either one,” I say.
Hunter’s ears flare red. I hope being mad won’t hinder his efforts to avoid hitting anything.
Without taking his eyes off the road, he says, “You know what, Autumn, great critic of other people’s driving? Thy poetry sucks. And guess who else thinks it sucks? Cameron’s brother told me Cameron thought your poem sucked, too.”
“Hunter,” Mom says in a warning tone. “Suck” is another word on Mom’s forbidden list.
But it’s not the word I care about. Is Hunter telling me the truth? Did David really tell Cameron about my poem and Cameron thought it was bad?
I don’t mind if the car crashes now, which it very well might.
“Hunter, it’s a yellow light. Stop! It’s going to change any second. Stop!”
Hunter accelerates and makes it through the light just before it turns red.
“See?” he crows as he zips close to an enormous truck barreling toward us from the opposite direction.
If only the New Yorker poetry editor read my poems the very first thing when he got to his office Monday morning and showed them to a bunch of other New Yorker poetry people, and they already decided to accept one for publication! If only he’s emailing me right now to tell me! I know that can’t happen—well, it could happen, but it would be ridiculously fast after they said “two to six months” on their website. But I glance at the email alert on my phone just in case.
Nothing.
Two minutes later I check again.
Still nothing.