You asked me if you could drive my car the rest of the way home and I said, “Only if you have your learner’s permit on you.”
We were passing by Dulles High when you said it, and I didn't know how serious you really were, but you'd jokingly asked once already, so it seemed to me that you were pretty eager to get behind the wheel.
I pulled into that gravely, pothole-ridden parking lot and put my car into park. You went in front and I crossed towards the trunk so our conversation took a break as the tint of my rear windshield blocked our line of sight. The light at the front of the school was still on. I almost wanted to sit on that little concrete slab they call a bench and pretend like somebody was coming to pick me up one last time.
I made a comment about the stupid speed bump they put right at the exit of the parking lot. That jolt felt like the relief of so many hours wasted waiting for the deluge of yellow school buses to drain away before finally being able to pull out onto the main road.
Last time we were both in my car like this, driving home from Meghan's house under the cover of night, I started playing “Pluto Projector” right about here. We stopped talking and started singing along, and as the song ended in your driveway, I hugged you and cried my first tears in months. It was stupid. I felt like I wouldn't ever see you again.
I guess I really wasn't going to ever see you again. Everything is different; I live in a different world now. Baltimore is a different world.
I don't know if it was the break in dialogue from swapping seats, or the feeling that I had to let you focus on the road or if I really did just run out of things to talk about this far into the ride. Maybe it was all three. Either way, I just started singing along to “Sugar” and waving my arm out of the open window.
It looked a little like a scene from a coming-of-age film I couldn't place: the shaky blue night sky, the cool oak trees rushing by, my arm undulating in the wind like a Chinese dragon kite.
We kept pulling through our neighborhood, with the trees all still shining their anachronistic green. The seasons in Houston never render quite right, and this Christmastime was no exception. It was the middle of winter and I was sweating through my shirt in the humidity, a sensation I had genuinely forgotten after more below-freezing, wind-chilling evenings than I could keep track of at university.
It was always like the trees were getting tricked by the consistently inconsistent Texas climate into not losing their leaves until a week before they would grow them back for spring. The trees were decidedly deciduous, but the beauty of autumn hues was something that I had to come to college to experience — it was almost like the trees were from somewhere else, taken from their habitats and forced to bunker down their roots into soil not for them.
Eventually, you pulled off to the curb in front of your house and I gave you a hug and a good night. You tried grabbing the box of Sprites you took home through my backseat window, but you dropped half of them on the car floor. We laughed about it for a while until you turned away from me and I watched you walk away. I wanted to say something more — to stop you and keep tonight going before I would have to retire back into my own solitude.
I wanted more, but I didn't know what to say. The trees didn’t belong here either.
Steve Wang is a freshman from Missouri City, Texas majoring in Biomedical Engineering. He is an Arts & Entertainment Editor for The News-Letter.
