Driver's Ed

by Caroline B. Cooney

  In Concert Choir, Morgan’s eyes were so stuck to the music page, there might have been magnets involved.

  In Driver’s Ed he walked blindly next to Chase, and hid behind Taft, like a toddler behind his mother.

  He didn’t look Remy’s way. He didn’t talk to her. He didn’t wave.

  He was so practiced at ignoring his parents and staying silent next to them that it was relatively easy to ignore Remy and stay silent next to her. How will she know I want to do it again, he thought, if I ignore her?

  He went on ignoring her. Actually, ignore was hardly the word. Except for Remy, Morgan was hardly even conscious. She was the world, and yet there he was focusing on ceiling cracks and linoleum splits.

  Error, he thought, the word flickering in his mind the way it did on computer screens.

  This was a game of chicken in which he was the chicken, and if he didn’t get brave, he’d be a loser forever.

  He didn’t get brave. He just tightened in on himself, as if he were a fortress in need of defense.

  He skipped Current Events. The stress of another class with Remy was too much.

  JV games began at four-thirty.

  Girls of Remy’s grade and playing level had usually given up by now. Remy didn’t have good hands, or a feel for movement and strategy. She often wondered why she stuck with basketball. But sitting on the bench, toes pressed down hard inside her thick sneakers, she would yearn to play. You never knew whether the coach would put you in. His rotations were based on something Remy did not understand and which the parents said grumpily was called favoritism.

  It was clear that Morgan Campbell was sorry he had ever gotten near her. By the light of day he must have realized Remy did not possess the perfection he required. Morgan was probably even now fantasizing about Alexandra.

  Remy wanted to go home and cry; cry for hours; cry for years.

  She was stuck with the basketball schedule and must play against Central. She made herself think of other things. Socks. Who yanked them up and who scrunched them down. Hair. Whose fell out of the ponytail and whose bangs were sweaty wet.

  “Remy!” bellowed the coach. “Pay attention! This is basketball!” As if she had been playing soccer.

  A teacher paused carelessly in the door, his timing stating clearly that JV games were worth no more.

  Remy’s father, loaded down with videocam and baby brother, and her mother, burdened with diapers, snack, bottle, toys, juice, and blanket, trooped in. Mom shouted hello to other parents, kissed little brothers and sisters, greeted older brothers and sisters, noticed who had grown and who’d had haircuts and who was wearing new shoes.

  “Remy! This is basketball!”

  Remy forced herself back into the game.

  Morgan and Lark walked into the gym and climbed the bleachers to the top.

  Morgan, like any boy, never had been, never would be, at a girls’ JV game. Morgan, however, was at a girls’ JV game.

  Right away there was a call against Remy.

  “Are you blind?” her father screamed. His hobby was Helping the Ref. In the first quarter he still had a clean mouth. “What are you, a shoe salesman? You got two eyes?”

  Remy’s teammates looked at her long and sadly. Their fathers had clean mouths. Their fathers did not embarrass the entire team and school. Their fathers sat next to Remy’s, though, and egged him on.

  If Remy’s team was ahead, Dad was sometimes able to remain calm. If they were getting shellacked, Dad would kick the bleachers and shout things about the ref’s family background. Frequently Dad informed the ref that his brain was located in another part of his body.

  Not in front of Morgan, Remy prayed. Come on, God, do your thing. Keep Dad’s mouth shut. Let me make a basket. Let Morgan be here with Lark because Morgan arranged it, not because Lark did.

  Lark and Morgan sat beneath a huge banner made by the cheerleaders, proclaiming, WE WILL CRUSH YOU!

  Lark was happy. She had been asked, she knew, in the role of escort, to make it possible for Morgan to attend. If he came alone he would be obvious, but if he wandered in with Remy’s girlfriend Lark, nobody would think anything of it. It was important, when you were getting interested in a girl, that nobody should be able to tell.

  Of course, every girl could always tell, but the boys thought they were being crafty and invisible.

  Mr. Marland whistled with two fingers in his mouth. He sounded like a freight train ripping through the building.

  Lark did not know how her parents would behave in public. They never came to anything, even teacher conferences. They had basically skipped Lark’s life. She didn’t mind. She had made her own.

  And her own game involved looking out for herself, since nobody else was doing it. Nickie Budie’s voice, when he’d called Thursday afternoon to arrange a pickup time, had been a warning signal. He was a Future Criminal of America if there ever was one, and what had seemed like an amusing adventure suddenly sounded tricky, THICKLY SETTLED was nice, but not getting caught was nicer.

  Lark hoped Remy would play well in front of Morgan, although Remy didn’t play well in front of anybody else, so why would she rise to this occasion? Rumor had it once the season started, Remy wouldn’t be kept on Junior Varsity, a form of humiliation few suffered.

  Lark herself competed only in sports without spectators. Never in this world would Lark be a fool in front of a crowd. Field hockey and softball were okay because nobody ever came. Basketball was different. By the third quarter, and definitely the fourth, the gym would begin to fill. People arriving for Varsity would want to see how the younger girls were doing; what their potential was.

  She glanced at Morgan. Yes, definitely a boy deciding what the potential was.

  “Blue ball!” the ref shouted.

  “A blind man can see it’s White!” bellowed Mr. Marland.

  Morgan loved the Marlands. They were so obvious. What you saw was what you got. You could see Mrs. Marland across a gym and know that her first name was Imogene and she was receptionist in a pediatric practice. You could listen to Mr. Marland and know that he would always believe in his daughter’s abilities, whether she had any or not.

  Plus, whenever you watched the Marlands, you were always glad you had different parents.

  Remy was fouled. One and one.

  Morgan prayed for her. Let her make them both!

  She sank the first one.

  In games you could always yell for the player. So Morgan was free to yell, and he yelled, “Way to go, Remy!”

  She bounced the ball four times, trying to drain off tension.

  I’ll ask her out after the game, he thought. I’ll tell her I was an idiot for not talking to her during class.

  He knew he would do neither one.

  Okay, then, I’ll call her tonight, he thought.

  That was far enough off that he could believe he might really do it.

  * * *

  Morgan was not in the gym when Remy and her team got out of the locker room. Morgan was not at Pizza Hut to celebrate the JV victory. Morgan had left no messages with Lark. And that night, though Remy waited and circled and prayed, the phone did not ring.

  What was the point in having a God if he did not make the phone ring when you wanted it to?

  Friday night, and the phone was not ringing. She had a sick glance down the hallways of her life; a horror that all of her Friday nights would be phoneless.

  No, God, she said forcefully. Anything but that.

  Saturday would come and go, filled with the chores of a working family: groceries, laundry, vacuuming, a rented movie to fill the evening.

  Sunday would arrive and here she was, irked with God. Why could the Marlands never skip church like normal people?

  When she was little, Remy loved church.

  It was so mysterious. Why had everybody come? Why were they dressed up? Why did they serve such strange food? Why did you pay for this, hiding your money in little white envelopes?

  By her teens, however,
Remy detested church. It was not mysterious. It was dumb. Everybody was a hypocrite. There was no point and when she had children of her own she would not subject them to this. Her kids would play on soccer teams with Sunday-morning games. So there.

  Thinking of Mrs. Willit’s awful sermons made her think of Mr. Willit, nominating Morgan for normalcy.

  If Morgan were normal, she thought, he would have stayed after the game and asked me out.

  “Let’s quit going to church,” Remy said to her brother. “Will you quit with me?”

  Mac could not stand being on his sister’s side, so even if he detested church ninety times more than Remy, which he did, he couldn’t agree with her. “Of course not,” he said. “Do you think I want to hurt Mom?” He continued to drink out of the orange juice carton, letting it dribble down his chin and spill on the floor where Remy would step in it.

  She was sick of this. She wanted to make a dent in the world. If Morgan Campbell wouldn’t call, something else would have to happen.

  Like a watchman in a city of old, Morgan’s mother called out, “Eleven o’clock approaching!” In some families the warning meant bedtime. In Morgan Campbell’s it meant the late news.

  Rafe and Nance Campbell and their son and daughter gathered before the televisions.

  Dad channel-grazed, remoting at high speed from station to station. Stalking lions on PBS blended into diamond rings on Home Shopper, evaporating into wrestling matches on ESPN, only to dissolve into rock stars on MTV.

  “This is the kind of dangerous light pattern that sets off convulsions in small children, Daddy,” said Starr.

  Dad grinned and stopped. He left the sound on for the local ABC news affiliate, their usual favorite.

  Morgan liked the late-night commentators. He knew them as well as any family friend.

  Anne was slender, graceful, and utterly lovely.

  Rob was thick, stern, and heavy lidded.

  Sports were handled by Chuck, who grinned steadily; he knew he had the best job on earth.

  Weather was Irene, a confused middle-aged woman who worried so much about the possibility of snow that Morgan assumed she had no life, but spent her existence staring at weather patterns and feeling desperate.

  “And now a new dimension to vandalism in our city,” said Anne, smoothing her papers and looking kind and sweet. Anne’s hair was neither blond nor gray, but truly silver, as if she had come off a starship. “The smashing of mailboxes is well known to us; there have been five sieges of this destruction since the opening of city schools on September second.”

  Starr moaned. “Tell us how kids today are responsible for everything,” she said to Anne.

  Eleven-ten, thought Morgan. Too late to call Remy now. The weekend is shot. And now Remy’ll be mad at me and by Monday she’ll hate me.

  He tried to reconstruct the feeling of her lips and hair, but he seemed to have no touch memory. To know it again he would have to do it again.

  His mouth was dry.

  “And now, a spate of sign stealing has hit the suburban areas, with terrible results.” Anne looked gravely into Morgan’s eyes.

  Sign stealing.

  What terrible results? That sounded like media hype to Morgan. How could there be terrible results from taking a street name?

  He was not nervous, exactly. He was a plane that was not landing. Waiting for permission to come down. Holding-pattern tense.

  “Last night,” said Anne, “a fatal car accident occurred at the corner of Warren Street and Cherry Road.”

  His mother passed a wicker basket filled with skinny stick pretzels. Starr made pretzel-stick people on the coffee table.

  The camera panned over the intersection Morgan had left twenty-four hours before. His mouth got drier and then his eyes dried, too, as if he were evaporating.

  “A car driven by twenty-six-year-old Denise Thompson was hit broadside by a truck. Denise Thompson was killed instantly. Police say this is a particularly dangerous intersection. There is supposed to be a stop sign on Cherry Road. But when Mrs. Thompson, driving home after dropping her baby-sitter off, came to the intersection with Warren Street, there was no stop sign.”

  The camera slipped slowly over a blue car so completely crushed by a mason’s dump truck that Morgan could not tell if it was a sedan or a wagon, old or new, American or foreign. The front door had been cut off to extricate the driver. The opening bore no resemblance to a door’s shape. It was a twisted cave.

  “Today, police tried to reconstruct the incident,” said Anne, and now on television, the wrecked car was gone. Towed away. Traffic flowed on Warren. Life—except Denise Thompson’s—went on.

  Morgan was screaming on the inside. It was soundless, yet so loud that jet engines might have been taking off in his brain. There is supposed to be a stop sign on Cherry Road.

  A reporter on the scene addressed a policeman. “Do you have any idea who did this?”

  “Kids,” said the cop, shrugging. He had seen it before, he would see it again. “They don’t think. They like the shape of stop signs, you know. We hafta replace ’em all the time. Kids probably figure whoever’s driving here will figure it out. You know, stop whether the sign’s there or not. Kids don’t stop to think. They forget that eventually it’s the middle of the night. No traffic. No clues. This Denise Thompson, she’s a stranger to the road, she needs that stop sign.”

  The stop sign that stood on its side in Morgan’s garage.

  His veins and arteries were expanding as if he were going to explode.

  “When do you think the sign was taken?” asked the reporter.

  “Neighbor said it was here when she got home from shopping around nine,” said the cop. “Accident happened ten-eighteen. Cut on the posts is fresh, you can see the contrast right here.” The camera zeroed in. The slice that Morgan had made with Nickie’s hacksaw glittered clean and metallic at the top of the grimy posts.

  No, thought Morgan. That didn’t happen. It was just a sign. We weren’t doing anything. It was just a sign.

  A weeping man, face so distorted by pain it was impossible to tell what he really looked like, swatted away the microphone. Even so, it picked up his screams. “My wife is dead!” he shouted. “We have a two-year-old! He’s lost his mother! All because some goddamn kid thought it was fun to take a stop sign.”

  Some goddamn kid.

  Morgan’s mind burned. His heart seemed to catch fire. He was so hot and dry, he felt blistered. He wanted to look at his skin but could not take his eyes off the screen.

  Nobody died, he thought. Not because of me. I’m a nice person. It was only a sign.

  The husband was opening his wallet, ripping it apart, throwing useless things like credit cards and twenty-dollar bills to the ground. He yanked out a photograph and held it up to the camera. His hand was shaking. The reporter steadied the picture for his crew.

  A pretty young woman, brown hair falling into her eyes, was stretching her hands out to a tottering child. Her smile was complete; you knew that at that moment, her world had been complete too: full of love and rejoicing and a perfect healthy baby.

  “Denise Thompson,” said Anne, “leaves her husband, Mark, and a two-year-old son, Bobby.”

  No.

  “Anybody with information about this act of vandalism, which led to an innocent woman’s death,” said Anne invisibly, “should telephone police at the phone number seen on your screen.”

  Denise Thompson’s husband looked both wild and helpless. Out of control, yet too weak to move. Suddenly he wanted the microphone, and he seized it, paying no attention to reporter or cameraman.

  “If I find the kid that took that sign …”

  He wiped his eyes with the hand that held the mike. “… If I find out who murdered my wife … who left our son without his mother …”

  Mark Thompson did not finish his threat. He stared past the cameras and into his future. He seemed to fold, and become smaller. After a while he let go of the mike and stumbled away.

>   The camera followed him silently.

  The police phone number stayed on the screen.

  The number seemed to memorize itself; began playing in his head like lyrics to a song. Morgan looked away from the television, but of course the room was full of televisions: three more of them, their blank gray screens like coffins. If he turned them on, they, too, would speak of stolen signs and dead mothers.

  It was just a sign! he thought. Everybody does it. It doesn’t count. It’s—

  “Whoever took that sign,” said Rafe Campbell, “should be shot.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “Mac,” said Remy, “you just told Daddy that was decaf.”

  Mac grinned. “So he won’t sleep well tonight.”

  “Mac! Daddy believed you. He had two cups.”

  Remy’s brother laughed contentedly to himself.

  “Mother, does anybody need a person like Mac? Don’t you think Mac should be in boarding school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why isn’t he?”

  “We can’t afford it. Otherwise we would have shipped him away years ago.”

  Mac loved this kind of talk.

  “What if the baby turns out like Mac?” said Remy.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Mac. “You’re fifteen years older than he is. You’ll never know how Matthew turns out. By the time Matthew’s in second grade, you’ll have your own baby.”

  This was thought provoking, but not enough to take her mind off Morgan. He wouldn’t telephone this late. She might as well give up. At least she hadn’t confided in Lark. She could keep her ruined hopes in her heart, instead of lying around for Lark to laugh at and pick on.

  Being a Marland, Remy consoled herself with a final dose of junk food before bed. She ate the other half of her Heath bar, while Mom had another chocolate-covered doughnut, and Mac, an immense helping of pineapple ice cream. Mac preferred flavors nobody else would touch, thus ensuring there was always enough for him.