Adult Category, Finalist
Halfway through our last summer, Miranda decided I needed to learn how to drive. I was curled up on our blue couch from Goodwill, tilting the library copy of Persuasion toward the hazy light from the windows. “Why?”
“Why not?” She lifted a shoulder uncovered by her black off-the-shoulder tee that would prompt yet another fight when our parents returned from the restaurant. “I’m bored.” In the fall, Miranda would be attending NYU on a full ride, a subject that had been re-litigated over a dozen family dinners. Our father balked at her declared major—music—while our mother worried whether Jade House would be short-staffed on weekends without Miranda to help wait tables, and wouldn’t it be more convenient if Miranda went to college nearby so she could visit more?
On the wall beside her bed, Miranda had hung a calendar to mark the days until her flight to JFK. During those evenings our parents were arguing about money again and I went to her room to escape, I’d lie on her bed staring at the red crosses until I could see their imprints on the backs of my eyelids.
But now it was only June, and Miranda’s appetite for entertainment had not yet been sated. I flipped a page, considering. “With what car?”
“A friend’s.” In the hallway mirror, Miranda swept her bangs this way and that. “Don’t you ever just want to go somewhere?”
Not really. I weighed the promise of our parents’ disapproval when they returned home, wrung out from a long day of deep-frying egg rolls, chopping garlic, boiling steaming vats of beef noodle soup. Still, there were a precious few hours until then, so I dog-eared my page and pushed off the couch. “As long as we’re back by seven.”
Outside, I shielded my eyes against the brightness. At the end of our cul-de-sac sat a dinged-up cherry-red Mazda. So this was what she’d been up to those days she’d disappeared and returned hours later, reeking of something burnt. There was a familiar one-two punch in my chest: a warm flare of being in on her secret, a pang of having been left out until now.
I eyed the scuffed bumper, the white-brown bird poop crusted against the passenger-side window. “Whose car is this, again?”
“Rosie’s.” Miranda slapped the keys into my palm, then popped open the driver-side door and held it out with a flourish. “Your noble steed awaits.”
Rosie, Miranda’s friend from Chinese school, was evidently a huge slob. Used tissues, a lottery ticket, a crumpled Coca-Cola can, and an assortment of receipts littered the floor and cup holders. A trace of something syrup-sweet, like artificial strawberry, lingered in the hot air.
I sat gingerly on the stained beige seat, adding to the reminders piling up in my head: get home by seven, remind Miranda to change out of that shirt, throw my shorts into the wash. Something shiny caught the afternoon light, and I removed from beside my shoe a gold foil condom wrapper, which I held pinched between two fingers. “Is the condom somewhere in this car, too?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to.” Miranda plucked the foil from my grasp and tossed it in the back, then frowned as I went to stick the keys in the ignition. “No. Wrong.” She pointed toward my feet. “Foot on the brake when you start the car. You know which one’s the brake, right?”
“I’m not stupid.” I pressed the ball of my foot against the left pedal, cautiously at first, then firmly once it became clear nothing terrible was about to happen.
“Good. Right foot for everything. You only ever need to press one of the brake and accelerator at a time. So you shift between the two. Press the other now.” At my hesitation, she sighed. “It’s fine. The car’s not even on, dummy.”
“Okay, okay.” I practiced moving between the pedals. The brake had a lot more resistance than the accelerator. “Have I graduated to turning on the car yet?”
I had, but before the car could start moving, I first had to learn to move the seat, adjust the mirrors, honk, turn on the blinkers and windshield wipers. By the time Miranda directed me to move the car into drive, I was so focused trying to remember which side was the turn signal and which was the wipers that I wasn’t prepared for the car to begin rolling forward.
“Brake. Sophie, brake.”
I scrambled to find the pedal amid the litter. Left pedal? Yes, thank God. The car jolted to a stop, my heart hammering.
“Right. So the car, it kind of just goes by default.”
I squeezed the wheel until my fingers were white, palms slippery with sweat. “Would’ve been nice to know, like, thirty seconds ago.”
“Chill. Jesus.” Flipping down the vanity mirror, she rubbed at a smudge of eyeliner like we hadn’t just plowed through someone’s front lawn, then slammed up the mirror and turned those kohl-lined eyes back to me. “Ready to go for real this time?”
***
So that was how Miranda and I spent the summer: driving Rosie’s banged-up red Mazda, stopping and going in bursts. We practiced in the empty lot of our old middle school, then the streets around our house, cruising slow enough that other cars would speed into the next lane to pass us up. Beyond the safety of the parking lot, everything was messy and unpredictable, traffic cones and road closures emerging like unruly weeds. Drivers cut me off, flipped me off, honked when I waited too long to make an unprotected left.
But at least I had Miranda beside me in the passenger’s seat. She invented missions: fries from In-N-Out, instant ramen from 99 Ranch. One day she wanted lychee rose tea from Tea Zone, so we drove across town. I had to execute a risky three-lane merge, cutting an inelegant zig-zag across from Pizza Parlor. Thankfully, a green Prius slowed to let me into the left lane before I was forced to get on the freeway.
“Breathe.” As we waited for the light, Miranda leaned back her seat and propped her bare feet on the dashboard. “You’re doing fine.”
I unstuck my sweaty thighs from the beige seat with the weird stains I’d sort of gotten used to. “Did you not see me almost miss that merge?”
“Yeah, so? We would’ve gotten on the freeway—”
“I’m not ready—”
“And then off again. You don’t even have to merge at this entrance.” She picked at her flaking black nail polish. “Calm your tits, Soph. I got you.”
Leaning forward, she spun the radio’s volume dial, and the Mazda flooded with the rich sweep of orchestral music.
I twisted the dial down.
She turned it up again, gently this time so I could still hear myself think over the warble of the oboe, and I let her.
In the parking lot of Tea Zone, we slurped tapioca pearls through thick straws. The AC was on full blast, and I wondered if Rosie knew or cared. In our parents’ car, we always rolled down the windows instead because it saved money. “Doesn’t Rosie ever want her car back?”
Miranda was fishing around in her drink, and for a second, I thought she hadn’t heard. I opened my mouth to repeat the question when she said, “It’s not Rosie’s, anymore.” “Huh?”
She sighed. “I bought it off her. Don’t tell Mom.”
Where had she gotten the money? Could those afternoons spent tutoring rich kids how to hold a violin bow add up to a whole car? I felt as though I’d been expecting a final step on a staircase but found only air. There were doors inside of Miranda I couldn’t access, but I didn’t know the right words to ask.
Instead I asked an easier question. “Why?”
Her brows scrunched together. “What do you mean? It’s a way out.”
“To where?”
“Are you kidding?” She flung out her arms, as wide as she could in the cramped space. Though she was gazing up at the grubby sun-roof that made a grinding noise any time we tried to wind it back, she was somewhere far away, somewhere I could not follow. “Anywhere.”
I wanted to see into the slideshow of her mind, a carousel of color: the art museums and rooftop bars and neon-lit concerts of her Manhattan future, all of it without me. I wanted to reach out, touch her arm with fingertips clammy from the sweating condensation of my milk tea, just to
see her come back to me, frown, ask what the hell did I want anyway. But I couldn’t bring myself to break the spell she had put upon herself.
I couldn’t, either, that afternoon in April. When I went to check the mail and found, under bills and coupons and advertisements, the thick envelope with the purple letters NYU Undergraduate Admissions. I tested the weight of it, envisioned walking to the neighbors’ recycling bin. But in the end, I brought it inside.
***
Then it was July, August, the Tuesday before Miranda’s flight to JFK. I had just stepped out of the shower when I heard the raised voices: our parents were home early. Closing my eyes, I swayed in the warm steam, noise crescendoing over me. Shards of Mandarin flying like shrapnel: waste of space, spending money like running water. There was a crash, maybe one of my mother’s ceramic dishes this time, maybe one of my father’s orchid pots. I thought about stepping back into the shower, turning on the water again until it was loud enough.
Someone knocked. “Soph. Let’s go.” Through the door, Miranda’s voice was muffled. Her music pulsed in the background: pounding percussion, thumps of a low bass. I opened my eyes. My face was a smear against the steamed-up mirror, my hair dripping onto the pale orange tiles, splattering like tears.
Outside, the sun was beginning to dip beyond the horizon, shadows stretching around us. In the Mazda, Miranda tossed me the keys. “Where d’you want to go?”
“Uh, dunno.” I raked my fingers through damp hair. “Library still open?” “Please. Anywhere in the world, and you choose the library down the street?”
“You’re usually the one who chooses.”
“Anywhere. Come on, Sophie.” She tossed up her hands. “The movie theater. Home Depot. Fuckin’ Toronto.”
I pressed the brake and turned on the car. “All those involve getting on the freeway.” I was afraid of the freeway, the horrifying speed, the lanes that ended with no warning. And soon it would be too dark to see.
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s time you learn that, too. Pick a place.”
Tamping down the queasiness in my stomach, I tried to summon a place—somewhere, anywhere. “I guess the dog park.”
When we reached the freeway entrance, something pulled taut in my chest. I ran through the checklist: hands at ten and two, check the side mirrors, turn on the headlights, and most of all, breathe.
“Speed into the merge.” Miranda twisted around in her seat, looking out the back window. “You need enough speed to have options. Either slow down to let the incoming car pass you, or speed up to get ahead of it.”
My heart lodged in my throat. I eased down the accelerator, leaning into the curve. An image flashed in my mind: the red Mazda crashing through the cement barrier and sailing into open air, our bodies tracing twin parabolas.
“Go-go-go.” Miranda’s voice pierced me like a fish hook, reeled me back. In the left mirror, a pair of white-blue headlights illuminated the darkness. “More. Fuckin’ gun it.” “I can’t!” I was shaking, gaze darting from mirror to mirror and uncertain where to land. But I pressed down a little more, felt the car surge. The speedometer hit fifty-five, sixty.
“You’re fine. You’re doing it. Okay, left blinker. Look over your shoulder, see, you have plenty of space. Ready?”
I pictured myself as Miranda, someone who had done this a dozen times already. Sunglasses on, friends chattering in the backseat, Mozart thrumming with the windows down. Always headed toward the next horizon. Leaving, instead of being left behind.
Then it was over, and I was in a lane. The asphalt hummed beneath my wheels, the glowing white dashes on the road racing past, lit by my headlights’ valiant attempt against the gathering dusk. The tension in my hands and shoulders loosened, and I could breathe again. “Good.” Miranda twisted back around. “Just two exits. You did it, see?”
I did it, and now I was here, the red Mazda one blood cell drifting down the artery of 680, connected to the pulsating network of roads and freeways stretching across the state, the whole country. For the first time, I thought I understood what Miranda sought here in the driver’s seat: the sensation that I too could go somewhere, be someone. Go anywhere, be anyone.
When we pulled into the parking lot at the dog park, I turned off the ignition, and we sat there for a moment. It was dark enough that we could only make out the suggestion of shapes tumbling around in the grass as a cacophony of yaps and growls and barks filled the cool night. Dog owners stood in clumps near the baseball diamond, empty leashes in hand.
When I was five, we lived across the street from this dog park in that cramped apartment with the sagging, dripping ceiling, back when Miranda and I shared a bunk bed. Sometimes, walking home from school, we’d sit at that wooden bench, my feet dangling, and she’d ask which type of dog we should get, and I’d point out my favorites. A corgi the color of a toasted marshmallow. A big fluffy cloud of a dog. I knew, even then, that our family would never get a dog. I wouldn’t have wanted one, anyway, not in the home that was most days a battlefield.
But Miranda would say things like Maybe later, maybe when we go to college, maybe when we’re billionaires in our penthouse apartments across the street from each other so we can go over and talk and play with each others’ dogs. My home will have a big kitchen and a piano room and walls I’ve painted with landscapes of Tokyo and Rome and the Sierra Nevadas, and I’ll have a big dog, a husky, one that will be able to climb mountains with me. Your place will have a bookshelf and potted basil on the windowsill, and it will always smell like freshly baked cookies, and you’ll have a tiny dog, a shih tzu maybe, who sits next to you while you’re reading and petting its soft little curls. And I would paint this imagined future in my head, summoning it during those fraught family dinners when I needed to escape into my own mind, and it would be enough to sustain me.
“I finished packing.” Miranda’s voice splintered the quiet. “First time in my life I’m ahead of schedule.”
I knew what she wanted: for me to ask about what she was excited for in New York, for me to gush over the life she was going to get to live. Instead I said nothing. How could I do it without her? Miranda, who always had an adventure and a dream and an escape plan.
One afternoon a few months ago, when I was supposed to be doing laundry, my mother caught me slouched against the motionless dryer, caught up in a book, the clothes long since dried. As she yanked out wrinkled sweaters, jeans, cardigans and shook them in my face, all of them shrunken and ruined, she screamed at me: Selfish pig, head in the clouds, you’ll never amount to anything. I pressed myself to the wall, the windowsill digging into my spine. And then Miranda was in the doorway, yelling back, and I was not alone.
This was how we survived: I searched for tripwires and navigated us around them, she protected me when there was one I’d overlooked. We had cultivated a balance of two orbiting
satellites, avoiding collision with nearby planets by holding each other in a gravitational pull. With her gone, would I crash, or float untethered through a sea of empty space? “Soph?” Miranda’s voice softened. “You know I don’t want to leave, but I have to.” Half her face was lit by the glow of the single parking lot lamp. Her mascara was smudged, her lipstick the same cherry-red as the Mazda, but underneath it all, we still had the same dirt-brown eyes, round nose, mere suggestions of eyebrows. When we were little, people used to think we were twins. “I have to, so you know it’s possible. That there are better things out there. That not everything has to be like this all the time.”
I squeezed the keys, cold teeth digging into my fingertips until they ached. “Not all of it’s bad.” Most days I spent reading on the couch, and when our parents came home I’d be in my room, or lying on Miranda’s bed, listening to her tell me about her day, showing her song lyrics I’d scribbled in the margins of my chemistry notebook while she strummed along on her guitar.
Even the weekends at the restaurant weren’t so bad, sitting behind the register folding maroon cloth napkins into triangles and doing calculus homework, Miranda flitting in and out to complain about the low tippers at Table 8, the pushy grandparents at Table 3. I could picture myself still here in two years, five, ten: a bug caught in amber while the world kept turning.
Miranda shook her head. “I have to,” she repeated. “You can come visit me and sleep on the couch of my shitty dorm and go to the New York Public Library, and I’ll take you to the best bagel places. And then it’ll be your turn, soon. You have good grades, you can do it. We both will. It’s just going to be me a little earlier.” She took a breath. “Okay?”
Outside, a moth fluttered in the lamplight. I wanted her to hug me, tell me she’d miss me so much that the thought of it felt like ripping out her lungs. But I knew she wouldn’t. “Okay.”
“Promise you’ll get out. That you won’t let them guilt-trip you into staying.” Miranda grabbed my hand, pried the keys out of my fingers where I was hurting myself, held my cold hands in her warm ones and looked me straight in the eye. “Promise.”
Tears pressed against my eyelids. “Okay.” I blinked hard the way she once showed me to not cry. “Promise.”
“Okay,” she whispered. She released my hands, and I missed her warmth. We sat in the quiet dark until the dog owners collected their dogs and wrestled them into their cars, and Miranda held out the keys. “When I leave,” she said, studying me, “the Mazda’s yours.”
I didn’t know what to say—Thank you, or I’ll take care of it, or I’ll take care of myself—so instead I only nodded and took the keys, spun them around the ring once, twice. Then I pressed my foot on the brake and started the car, just the way she taught me.
Lena Chen is a Taiwanese-American writer working on a novel. When she’s not writing, she enjoys playing board games, attempting crosswords, and jogging around San Francisco saying hi to the neighborhood cats.
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