Up All Night Page 9

  “He won’t,” I’d say.

  Up until last year my mom used to drive. But after we moved into Ed’s house and she quit her hair-cutting job at the Mane Event so she could be a stay-at-home wife like Ed wanted her to be, she lets him do the driving. “It makes him feel important,” she says.

  “What’s your hurry, anyway?” my mom said. She was standing at the sink peeling a carrot and wearing her robe and slippers even though it was almost four o’clock. Lately, she didn’t take her shower until right before Ed got home, since he said he liked her to be “fresh” when he came in the door. “You can’t even take the driving test for another six months.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t honestly know what my hurry was. I just knew that whenever I pictured myself the way I wanted to be, I pictured myself behind the wheel of a car.

  Eventually I threw in dangerous weather conditions, reckless drivers, and assorted emergencies—toddlers darting into the street to chase after balls, trees falling on rain-slicked highways, tire blowouts, and black ice—to add excitement and variety to my curbside driving lessons. I thrilled myself by how calm and quick-witted I was—pumping the brakes, not slamming them; steering into the spin, not jerking the wheel in the opposite direction—when confronted with these unanticipated driving challenges.

  One day I was so involved in passing an eighteen-wheeler in a hailstorm that I didn’t realize that Ed had come home. It wasn’t until I looked in the rearview mirror to make sure I could see the truck’s headlights in my right side-view mirror before I changed lanes that I saw Ed standing behind the car, his hands in his pockets, like he’d been there all day just waiting for me to notice him.

  My first impulse was to lock the car door the way my mom used to do when we had to drive in the city. But when I realized the window was open, I just sat there with my arms folded across my chest.

  Ed strolled slowly around to the driver’s side and leaned in the window. He got so close, I could see the pores on his nose. “Having fun?”

  There was no right answer to this question. If I said yes, Ed would make fun of me. If I said no, he’d make fun of me.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  I reached for the door handle and pushed. Nothing happened. Ed had me pinned inside, his arm braced against the door. I glanced across the front seat at the passenger-side door. It seemed too far away to attempt. “Let me out, Ed.” I meant it to sound tough, but my voice came out puny and babyish.

  “You want to drive,” he said. “So drive.”

  I didn’t move.

  “C’mon,” he said. “I’m waiting.”

  I rammed the car door with my shoulder. It didn’t budge.

  “What’s the matter?” Ed said.

  I stared straight ahead out the windshield.

  “What’s the matter?” he said again, in a fake-sympathetic voice. “Don’t tell me you can’t.”

  That’s exactly what Ed wanted—for me to tell him that I couldn’t, that I didn’t know how, that I was just a stupid kid playing make-believe.

  I looked away. Then I looked right at him. “I can’t.”

  Ed smacked his hand against his forehead—his imitation of someone just figuring out something obvious. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “I forgot. You can’t.”

  Then Ed made a big display of opening the car door for me like I was a guest or something. As I got out, his hand snaked across my waist and landed on the back pocket of my jeans. He grabbed hold of my butt and gave it a squeeze.

  I spun around and glared at him.

  But by then his hands were sticking up in the air, his face all innocent like nothing had happened. He wiggled his fingers back and forth. “Orange Alert, kid.”

  I stomped across the yard.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he said.

  “Nowhere.”

  He laughed. “That’s exactly where you’re going. Nowhere.”

  For the next few days, I skipped my driving lessons. I went up to my room right after school and changed into shorts and a tank top, since Ed says we can’t turn on the air conditioner until after Memorial Day even though it’s already about a hundred degrees. Every day at exactly four thirty my mom would start showering and making herself “fresh” for dinner, and every day at five thirty-five, Ed slammed the front door and shouted, “Honeys, I’m home.” And every day I jacked up the volume on my iPod and went back to doing whatever it was I was doing.

  One day I was picking the polish off my nails when Ed poked his head into my room and waited for me to pay attention to him. I sighed, pulled out one of the earbuds, and waited to hear what he had to say that was so important.

  He made a serious face. “Been meaning to ask you,” he said. “What kinda mileage you getting on that car?” Then he threw his head back and laughed like this was the funniest thing anyone had ever said.

  I put my earbud back in and jacked the volume up some more, but Ed was still standing there, looking at me the way a dog looks at a steak on the grill. So I grabbed my sweatshirt and put it on, even though it was probably 112 degrees by now. Ed shook his head and left.

  A couple of days later at dinner, Ed told us about a new guy at work. “This kid is so slow,” Ed said, “he can only do about two retrievals a minute. Two point five tops.” He shook his head, like this guy was clearly a major threat to homeland security.

  My mom beamed at Ed, the way she used to beam at Tony and Jim and Ken and all the other guys who were supposed to be the One—until Tony and Jim and Ken and all the others met somebody a little younger, a little prettier. She cleared her throat like she had an important announcement to make.

  “I made a lemon meringue pie today,” she said.

  Ed rolled his eyes.

  “Now, don’t be like that, honey,” she said. “I did like you said. I waited to whip the meringue this time, so it’s just the way you like it.”

  Ed gave her an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it look.

  “Now, you just relax,” she said to Ed. “And you clear the table,” she said to me. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  I got up and started stacking the plates and wondering when exactly my mom turned into someone who spent her afternoons in a robe and slippers making lemon meringue pies and using words like jiffy. I scraped all the leftover pork-chop bones onto one plate, stacked the others underneath, then piled the forks and knives on top. I picked the whole stack of dishes up with one hand, took the ketchup bottle and stuck it between my elbow and my ribs, and grabbed my milk glass with my free hand. It was what Ed called a lazy man’s load. But it meant that I’d have to make one less trip to the kitchen and back, one less chance for Ed to look at me the way he does when my mom’s not around.

  I was just about to walk out when Ed reached over and put the salad bowl on top of the pile of plates in my hand. It was the good salad bowl, the one that used to belong to my grandma, and I could see right away that if I took a step, it would fall. He smirked at me as the whir of the mixer came from the kitchen. “What’s your hurry?” he said.

  Slowly, I set the stack of dishes back down on the table, balancing the whole thing carefully so the salad bowl wouldn’t crash to the floor. Before I could rearrange the load, Ed was on his feet. He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me toward him. My arms were pinned against my sides and I could smell the leftover dinner on his breath as his mouth came toward mine. I jerked my head to the side. The mixer shut off and I could hear my mom humming in the kitchen. I squirmed and Ed tightened his grip. He whispered in my ear. “One of these nights…” He dug his fingers into my arms. “Just you wait,” he said. Then he let go, just as my mom walked in holding the pie.

  “What are you doing?” Her expression went from proud to confused.

  Ed pointed to the salad bowl perched on top of the dinner dishes. “Just teaching the kid a thing or two,” he said. He picked the bowl up and handed it to me. “You understand me?”

  I clenched my teeth together and n
odded.

  That night, after my mom and Ed were asleep, I started my real driving lessons. I waited until I heard the TV go off in their room. I counted to a hundred ten times, then another ten times, then I slipped out of my room. I tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen, lifted the key to my mom’s car off the hook, and let myself out of the house. It was an old car, the kind without an alarm, so all I had to do was slip the key in the lock and ease the door open little by little. I slid into the driver’s seat and released the emergency brake. At first nothing happened. Then the car started rolling, ever so slowly, down the hill. It picked up speed as I passed the next-door neighbor’s house. I coasted past their house, then the next one, then the next one. The only sound was a slight shhh of the tires gliding over the pavement.

  At the bottom of the hill there was a stop sign. I pressed on the brake and the car came to a complete and perfect halt. I sat there for a minute under the glow of a streetlight and considered what to do next. It was nearly one in the morning. I was in my pajama pants, a T-shirt, and slippers. Behind the wheel of a car. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud. I turned the key in the ignition. The car came to life and I knew what to do next.

  I looked right, then left, put on my turn signal, and turned the steering wheel a few degrees to the left. I took my foot off the brake, applied a light but steady pressure to the accelerator, and proceeded up Pennbrook Street. I turned left again on Meadowview, then left again, until I found myself back at the top of my own street. I rounded the corner, then shut off the motor two mailboxes before ours and let the car coast, applying the brakes expertly, until it came to rest back at the curb in front of the house exactly where it had been only a few minutes earlier.

  I slid out of the driver’s seat, inched the door shut, locked it, and slipped back inside the house without making a sound. When I got back to my room, I was suddenly so tired that I fell asleep instantly and didn’t wake up until the alarm went off the next morning.

  Ed looked smaller somehow when I came down for breakfast. I also noticed, as I carried my bowl of cereal past him while he sat reading the paper and muttering about the idiots running this country, that his hair was thinning near the back of his head where he couldn’t see.

  I did the same thing the next night. Except that this time I got dressed and went as far as the end of our development. The next night I took the car out on the highway. It was then that I realized that despite what adults want you to think when they yell at you and tell you shut up so they can concentrate, driving just isn’t that hard. I drove up the highway to the next exit, turned around, and came back. On the way back, I turned the radio up all the way, rolled down the window, and cruised along with one arm out the window and the other one resting lightly on the steering wheel. As I crossed the front yard when I got back home, my joints felt loose, like they were full of air. There was only one way to describe this feeling: powerful.

  The next night, I was cruising along the highway, not exactly awake or asleep, when I saw an exit for a town I didn’t recognize. The middle-of-the-night DJ came on, saying that he was going to “make way for the morning crew.” I had to really push it on the way back—the speedometer gave a little shudder when it hit eighty-five—to get home before Ed got up.

  Ed looked at me sort of suspiciously when I sat down at the table for breakfast.

  “Get a good night’s sleep?” he asked, stabbing a piece of sausage.

  I shrugged and waited for him to make me say that yes, I’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Sir.

  But he just kept studying me. “You sure you slept okay?” he asked.

  I said I was sure.

  “’Cause you look a little tired.”

  I swallowed. “I’m fine.”

  That’s when I felt Ed’s hand on my thigh. “I know how you girls need your beauty sleep,” he said.

  By the time my mom came over to refill Ed’s mug, his hands were folded on the table in front of him.

  He winked at me as she walked away to put the coffeepot back on the counter. “Orange Alert,” he said. “Always on Orange Alert.”

  That night I figured I should probably take a break from my driving lessons. I couldn’t sleep after I heard the TV go off in my mom and Ed’s room, though, so I was lying in bed, counting to a hundred for the tenth time, when I heard the sound of a floorboard creaking in their room. I held perfectly still. Then came another creak. I didn’t wait to hear more. I jumped out of bed, ran to the kitchen, grabbed the keys off the hook, and slipped out the door.

  It wasn’t until I was way past the turnoff for the highway that I realized I’d gone too far. I was on a windy country road that seemed to just go on and on, past dairy farms and cornfields and more dairy farms and more cornfields. I knew vaguely that I was lost, that I should turn around, but I kept going. It was a whole new driving challenge, nothing like what I used to dream up in my curbside driving lessons. The point was simply to go and go and go, to inch the speedometer up so high it shivered, to hit the accelerator at the crest of a hill so that the car would actually leave the road for one long, beautiful second and then hit the pavement with a stomach-dropping scrape.

  It wasn’t until the yellow line in the middle of the road started to blur, then fracture into a million tiny pieces, that I realized I’d finally encountered the one driving challenge I couldn’t handle—the tears that seemed to be pooling in my eyes no matter how hard I tried to blink them back. The yellow line swam before my eyes. The road turned to fog. The car rounded a curve and the back tires spun out with a screech.

  I slammed on the brake. The car spun sideways, then swung sickeningly in the other direction. There was a far-off thunk, then a small crumpling noise, like the sound of a soda can being flattened. The car rocked to a halt. I seemed to have had nothing to do with this. It had simply stopped. I opened the door, got out, and took in the sight of the car, sitting at the side of the road at a weird angle. The back door was dented. I understood then that I had hit a fence post; it was leaning into the road, straining on the barbed wire that connected it to the rest of the fence. But everything else—including me—was fine.

  I got back in, executed a perfect three-point turn, and headed home.

  It was still dark when I got to the top of our street, but I could see Ed standing by the curb in his pajamas, his hands on his hips. I didn’t have to think about what to do.

  I didn’t turn off the motor two mailboxes before ours like I normally did.

  I kept my foot on the gas.

  I didn’t speed up. I didn’t slow down. I aimed straight for Ed.

  As I got close, I could see that he was smirking. When I got a little closer, he started to look confused. His mouth was stalled in midsmirk, but his eyebrows were scrunched together the way they did when he couldn’t work the computer.

  As I got even closer, I saw what I wanted to see: Ed was scared.

  He jumped out of the way at the last minute, tripping over the curb and landing face-first on grass. Which means neither of us will know what I would’ve done if he hadn’t.

  But I think we both knew then that Ed wouldn’t be bothering me anymore.

  I stopped the car a few feet past where he was lying on the grass, switched off the ignition, and got out.

  I turned and looked at him before heading back inside. “Orange Alert, Ed,” I said. “You better be on Orange Alert.”

  About Patricia McCormick

  Patricia McCormick has won numerous awards for her novels Cut, My Brother’s Keeper, and Sold, which was a National Book Award nominee and was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006. Her writing has been described by VOYA as “breathtaking in both its simplicity and attention to detail…stunning.” She lives in New York City with her family. You can visit her online at www.pattymccormick.com.

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  SUPERMAN IS DEAD

  Sarah Weeks

 
; No way. I’m not telling you what I did. You’ll copy it,” I say, putting my feet up on the coffee table and grabbing a throw pillow off the end of the couch to jam behind my neck. “I will tell you this, though: I totally rocked it.”

  The assignment is for AP English. Ms. Shaw gave us all the same photograph of a woman lying on her side in a lawn chair. There’s a man sitting beside her, but all you see of him are his hands and the cuffs of his white dress shirt. The woman’s back is to the camera, and in between the index and middle fingers of his right hand the man holds a lit cigarette. The assignment is to write a story about what we think was happening when the shutter clicked. Right up my alley.

  “Come on,” says Nick. “I won’t steal your idea—I just want to hear what you did. It’s ten o’ clock already and I got nothing here. I need a jump start. Inspiration.”

  “Not my problem, man.”

  “Go ahead, be like that. But when you have to do the chem lab for tomorrow, don’t be calling me to whine about how hard it is.”

  “Fine. I’ll read it to you. But you have to promise—”

  “Jeez, Brian, relax, will you? I’m not going to steal your stupid idea.”

  “Brian?” my little brother calls me from the other room. I ignore him.

  “I don’t have a title yet,” I say.

  “Brian!” my brother calls again.

  “I’m on the phone!” I yell back.

  “Babysitting?” asks Nick.

  “Yeah. My mom’s at some conference in Westchester. She’s not coming back into the city until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Wow,” says Nick. “I can’t believe she’s letting you stay there alone overnight. Isn’t she worried you’re going to, like, party or something?”