"You're a virgin who can't drive."
Probably the most cutting truth/insult in the teenage girl lexicon. It's...repulsive. Reductive, Typifying, emblematic of the only two things that matter when you are eighteen: being free and being loved. I feel an ugly twelve the third time I try to parallel-park and the so-called "friendliest driving instructor in the state of Maryland!" tells me, in a sing-song chirrup, "You're not done!" I am done. This is the best I can do. Please let me show you I can back up in a straight line, you unfashionable immigrant (tempers run high; sorry).
When I have to get out, before a lot of people, and shuffle back to the driver's side it is humiliating. All the other eager parents, waiting for little Johnny to finish his right hand turn, are screaming the epithet also with their piercing eyes, shielded against the June sun: There goes a virgin who can't drive. More pathetically, she is in college. I mentally make a list of people in my head who I admire who are also virgins, who can't drive. I come up with...Mother Theresa. Mary. Maybe Mary.
My Dad won't let me drive because I seem too emotional so I hunch against the side door and let "Huge Ego" fill the conversational void in our car. It is so static in here I want to vomit--I'm wearing twelve year old shoes and twelve year old underwear and attending summer camp every day, like a twelve year old. I am a virgin who can't drive, I am a virgin who can't drive...
inexplicably I start to imagine irrational, crazy things to deal with the pain: I could get smack somewhere, and shoot up in the window sill while I listen to Otis Redding and gaze down at my neighborhood in the dark. I could dye my hair fierce fire-engine red and drink alone tonight as I watch Bladerunner. I could be more pathetic, but also somehow more cool--because at least I wouldn't be sitting shotgun in my Dad's company car journaling about boys and music and eating skittles while I walk to the grocery store to buy pads. Maybe it's like that awful movie Jack with Robin Williams, and I am twelve but no one has told me yet. Maybe this is Groundhog Day...somehow...
Coming back into my house (as a virgin, who can't drive) I meet the neighbor's dog, Hobbes: he's a black and brown dachsund with a really melancholy expression for a canine. Nobody seems to be watching him, and I suddenly recall a conversation my mother told me about where she talked to the family and they all claimed to hate the little dog; he'd been some Christmas present no one had really had the gumption to take care of. With Red Dye 52 burning a hole in my hand, the sun overhead, a friendless animal and me in the frontyard of my parents house in suburban Washington, I get this weird feeling that I've been given the gift of immortality on the condition that everything will always be "almost" and no real changes will hold.
I'm rescheduling the test.
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