My car. Beat the shit out of her car. It went ba-bam! Or, no-- Pop! Clang! And the sprinkle of tin on concrete, an object propelled past my passenger window. A street full of schoolchildren and protective mommies in mom-jeans stopped walking, the gasp still stuck in their chests.
If you were close enough to my car you could hear the, “Holy shit!” coming through my closed window. And if you stuck around for the onslaught, you damn rubbernecker, you could hear the seven “Holy shit!”s that ensued.
“Holy shit!” I said. And when that wasn’t enough I said, “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”
It was a bad time in suburban New York. It was a bad time to be an unlicenced driver.
The street held their gasp but my hands had already flitted over the wheel in panic, sweat sliding on leather. On vinyl? On plastic? What is it you think of when you panic?
Not of the people on the street, bicycles and running shoes and blonde daughters, not the black of a police uniform nor the first Spring day in five months of an oppressive Winter. What you think of is your unholy life, the one flapping like a bird under your skin, the one that follows you everywhere and always. The one that’s sitting on your lap right now, letting you panic and swear towards the pack of elementary kids, but which weighs you down: into this seat. Onto this leather, this vinyl, this plastic. This blend of synthetic fibers and your own sweat.
Your unholy life tells you, You’re not going anywhere.
“Fuck!” you say.
And so came the guilt, the queasiness, the excess of saliva in the mouth. To resume a doomed story, I’ll add how I pulled up to the crosswalk in an animal’s horror. It was there that I quickly realized I was not yet skilled enough to pull to the curb. And with a slap to the wheel I set the horn off, shocking a street of protective moms and smug kiddies. Dropping my head to my hands, a rap came at my driver’s side window. It had poignant clarity amongst this shit-swamp of panic.
I opened my eyes hoping to see my mother.
Well, it was somebody’s mother. Graying hair which seemed to have been cut brutally, and with a bathroom razor. It hung to the chin. The bangs to the eyebrows. I busied myself with her bad haircut as though it might rationalize my quick touch up to her car. The bang I’d heard, the high pitch of breaking glass, and, worst of all-- some ominous “shikking” sound.
The woman told me, through excessive hand signals, to please pull over. Oh, and not to worry. However, the fact that I was as yet unable to perform the action of “pulling over” did cause me great worry. And after nodding at her and mouthing the most useless words on the planet (“I’M SORRY.”) I began to improvise a move to the curb.
This ended with me standing on the sidewalk, looking at a silver hunk of a car-- front wheels mounting the curb, back wheels about four feet from said curb. The woman approached me, judged my blend of youth and fear, and started asking for my insurance and registration.
Both words-- though vaguely familiar-- meant nothing to me.
It is hard to remember the details before the police arrived, since they were passed inside a mind dawning on the fact that, actually, everything was not going to be alright. And the stutters. And the sick laughter. And the admission to the woman that, no, I didn’t have a licence, I was just “practicing”.
Next to an elementary school.
Anyway, I was somehow back in the tilted car when the police arrived. I heard another clear knock to the window and a tall man with a face full of acne scars was looking at me. Oh, that policeman glare.
This was when I tried to open the window but only ended up locking the door. The window button not being found, I opened up the driver’s door and said hi.
A series of incriminating questions were asked.
While the policeman was speaking to my mom on my cell phone, I caught the eyes of a nearby crossing guard. This is a woman who’s always had a certain love for me through my tough, hellish years in suburban new york, and when I saw her I gave her a smile. She wasn’t in the mood for a meet n greet, however, and mouthed back “WHAT. HAPPENED.”
I paused. I felt myself smirking.
“I don’t have a licence,” I said.
My smirk disappeared when I saw her face assume one of the most horrified expressions since van Gogh’s “The Scream”.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, turning back towards the police officer. Back towards the mini van at which I’d chipped away.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
But ‘I’m sorry’ is the most useless phrase on the planet. Vindictive kindergarten teachers will squeeze it out of you like it’s worth money... But it doesn’t mean anything. You get to a point and you realize it doesn’t mean anything.
And so the legal process begins.
“Mommy,” you’ll say, drunk at home tonight. “The person I hit was such a mom. You should’ve seen her mini van, her haircut.”
“I don’t care.”
“But maybe I did. Maybe I cared. Like, subconsciously. Like subconsciously I wanted to hit her ‘cause she was such a suburban mom, you know, jogging on the weekends, her kids who play lacrosse, her mini van.”
“Don’t try and rationalize this.”
But that’s what you’ve been doing all along. That, you realized, on the glass-littered sidewalk, the day fading, the kids all gone-- that was the only defense left. When “I’m sorry” is gone, what have you got? You’ve got the power to wheedle and pity and blame and hate. You’ve got the power to accept and eschew.
“I am sorry,” you’ll say, “But what can I do?”
My car. Simply beat the shit. Out of your weak-ass car.
Oops.
My problem here is the abrupt transition from first person to second. It's not that I dislike the fact that you use second person to get across the moral of the story-- it's done well. But I don't like how this character suddenly disappears, fading into the very general, very impersonal "you". I loved the tone of voice you used with this narrator and their situation, so when that dissolved into the second person, it left the character hanging. Either pick back up at the end with the first person "I" again, rounding out their story, or find a way to keep the character active in the narration through that bit of second person.