Notes From the Midnight Driver

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  There she was at the table, dipping a biscotti into a cup of coffee over and over without taking a bite. She looked up and pointed the soggy baked good at my chest, dripping brown semiliquid goo everywhere. “Alex, I’ve been sitting here for hours, listening to you play, and trying to understand something. Do you know what I can’t figure out?”

  She waited so long I started to worry that maybe the question wasn’t rhetorical.

  “I can’t figure out WHY you got drunk and took my car. Where were you trying to go, besides Mrs. Wilson’s azalea bush? You’re a smart boy, but this is just…stupid and pointless.”

  I suppose that I could have told her about my boffo plan to bum-rush her ex’s house, but the whole separation thing wasn’t something that got discussed much at our table. “I dunno, Mom. I just wanted to DO something. You were out having fun, I was stuck here alone, the computer wasn’t working, and you TOOK my phone away last month, if you recall, so what was I supposed to do? Study precalc on a Friday night? Invite over some other loveless, unpopular dork to play Nintendo? Organize the bathroom cabinet?”

  “Well, you could have…”

  Aha, she was on the defensive. As soon as you get your mom out of attack mode, you’re home free. “Could have what?”

  “I don’t know, Alex—but almost anything would have been better than what you actually DID. What if you had KILLED someone?”

  Okay, maybe she wasn’t quite ready to lay down her guns.

  “Mom, I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t even hurt anyone. I broke a stupid garden-elf thing. I should probably be getting a reward for making the neighborhood more tasteful, for God’s sake. And I wasn’t even trying to do anything bad. I just wanted to go to Dad’s house and yell at him for leaving you!” So much for avoiding the separation topic.

  “You were trying to go to Dad’s? That’s what you were trying to do? But you didn’t even make it to the end of the block!”

  “Mistakes were made, Mom. Is that what you want me to say? Mistakes were made.”

  “Yes, mistakes were made, Alex. Like me trusting you, that was a biggie. Now let me tell you how things are going to be for the next month until your court date. You will be driven to school by ME, you will be picked up at school by ME, you will do your homework the instant you get home in front of ME, and then you will engage in quiet activities IN THE HOUSE until bedtime at ten P.M.”

  Ten P.M.?

  “Mom, how are you going to drop me off, pick me up, get to work on time, and sleep?” Mom is a night-shift nurse at an old people’s home, so she usually slept while I was at school.

  “I don’t know, Alex. I will have to work something out, because I am going to be on you like a bad rash for the next thirty days. And if you don’t like it, maybe you should have thought about that BEFORE you got arrested.”

  Just then, I tried to brush back the hair that was falling over my eyes as I slumped down at the table. A searing pain slashed along the stitches in my forehead and my head jerked forward. Instantly tears sprang to my eyes.

  “Oh, Alex, did that hurt?”

  I sniffled. “Yeah, Mom.”

  “GOOD!”

  Obviously, home was somewhat tense. So I thought school on Monday would actually be a relief for once. Which might have been true, if every single kid in the building hadn’t somehow turned into a fanatical newshound over the weekend. In the hallway that first day, most people just looked at me quickly, sideways, and then looked away to avoid staring at my bruised face and zigzag of black stitches. But there’s always some weasel that just can’t let things go, right? When I got to homeroom, my weasel struck.

  “Whoa, look, it’s Harry Potter! That scar is a great look for you, Gregory. Really. Who does your makeup, and can you get me an appointment for—oh, I don’t know—never?” It was Bryan Gilson, the most obnoxious guy in the junior class. It used to be, back in middle school, that we were all constantly busting on each other. But somehow, Bryan hadn’t quite noticed when everybody else grew out of it. Plus, his dad was a police officer, so it figured that he would have the whole lowdown on my situation. I tried to walk past him to my seat without saying anything.

  “Hey, don’t worry, it could be worse. Sure you look bad, but you should see the other guy. Or GNOME, I should say.”

  I took a deep breath. Two. Three. Sat down in my seat. Bryan walked over and stood next to me. Everyone was staring now, naturally, waiting to see whether I would jump up and try to slug Bryan. Who weighed about three hundred pounds more than me and played football, just in case my concussion, head wound, and crippling soreness weren’t enough of an advantage for him. Just as the standoff was becoming unbearable, just when I would have had to say or do something, my best friend, Laurie Flynn, came streaking into the classroom. She ran over and pushed Gilson out of the way like he was a toddler. Yay! Laurie was here to deliver me from evil, to smite my enemies, to…

  “Move it, siddown, and shut up, Bryan. Just because you’re a hulking water buffalo doesn’t mean I can’t waste you with one hand tied behind my back like I did in third grade. And close your mouth before you drool on my shoes, you cretin!”

  Then she actually TURNED HER BACK on Bryan, knowing he would slink away from her wrath. Of course, that meant all ninety-three pounds of her was suddenly focused on me. Before I could attempt to calm her down with a “thank-you,” she leaned over with her forearms on my desk and let me have it.

  Geez, where are homeroom teachers when you need ’em?

  “Alex Peter Gregory, you are a moron.” She slammed her palms down on my desk and stomped her foot.

  I get a lot of that.

  “You are a bonehead. You are a complete goober. You’re worse than a goober. You’re like…an assistant goober! You’re a dork, a half-wit. You’re a…a…a dork-wit!”

  I gave her a cheesy little puppy-dog face, but nothing was going to slow this steamroller down. “Please don’t yell at me, Laurie. I’m in pain here, and you’re not helping. Plus, everyone’s staring at us. And, uh, you’re standing on my foot.”

  She gave me the same demonic grin that she’d once used to make a substitute teacher quit in the middle of sixth-grade music class, and said, “I know.”

  “Well, do you think you could get off my toes for a minute and let me explain?”

  “Oh, your mom explained everything, buddy boy. Didn’t she tell you I called on Saturday, four times? And then again yesterday, twice? She must have gotten tired of telling me you ‘just couldn’t come to the phone,’ because she finally gave in and told me the whole ugly, pathetic story while you were downstairs goofing around on your guitar.”

  A brief bit of explanation, here: Laurie is only five feet tall, and looks exactly like Tinker Bell from Peter Pan. She has perfect blond hair, a little upturned button nose, sparkly blue eyes, a sweet little angel mouth, and even slightly pointy little elf ears—plus a perfect gymnast body that the other girls are always giving her dirty looks over. All of which she hates. So she takes karate three nights a week, including a special class in Chinese hand-weapon combat, wears nothing but baggy black clothes, and has three rings in her left eyebrow.

  She still looks like a pixie—but she looks like a terrifying Goth pixie.

  One other key fact about Laurie: Ever since she moved here from New York City when we were six, she has been pretty much my only friend. Oh, yeah, and my mom loves her. She’s like the daughter Mom never had, but would have liked very much if God hadn’t given her a dorky, uncoordinated nerdball of a son instead.

  “I wasn’t goofing around, I was practicing. What was I supposed to do, sit in the kitchen and let my mom beat me with a wooden spoon all day?”

  “And why didn’t you call me on Friday night if you were planning to do something so half-witted?”

  “Laurie, I wasn’t planning to do something halfwitted.”

  “I suppose with your fantastic natural gift for it, who needs planning?”

  “Ha-ha. Look, you weren’t home on Friday nigh
t, remember? You were working at the Gap.”

  “Oh, that’s right—stores don’t have phones. And you’ve only known my cell number for half a decade, so you couldn’t possibly get in touch with me that way.”

  “Okay, maybe I didn’t want to call you, Miss Understanding Friend of the Year. I didn’t want to get lectured, I wanted to get drunk. And face my dad. Instead of just sitting there all worried about…”

  “About what? Whether the police might be getting bored without an idiot to arrest?”

  “About my mom’s first date, okay?”

  Laurie actually stopped and thought about this for a moment. And the bell rang for first period.

  MY DAY IN COURT

  Thirty days is a long time. I mean, it’s not a long time if you’re sitting and watching a glacier move, or if you’re waiting for a chunk of radioactive uranium to become a safe material for jewelry-making. But it’s an eternity if you’re doing nothing but going to school, cranking out homework, and pacing around the house bickering with your mom. I was avoiding pretty much all human contact, with a special focus on ignoring my dad’s attempts to communicate with me. He called daily, but I let the machine pick up, and then erased the increasingly pathetic messages. He e-mailed TWICE a day, but I never opened the files, and then I blocked him with my spam filter. Too bad my life didn’t come with one of those; I would have been able to screen out his very existence. My parents didn’t have a whole official custody thing worked out, partly because I was already sixteen, and partly because, like I said before, their divorce lawyers were too busy milking them for my college money to get the legal stuff finalized. But unofficially, my dad was supposed to be able to see me whenever he wanted.

  Of course, he was also supposed to have stayed with my mom until death did them part, but we all know how that turned out. So if he could dump us, I could delete him like one of those suspicious e-mails from Africa where they ask for your bank account number.

  I was more mixed up about why I was ducking Laurie at every turn. She could have listened, and maybe even given me some advice, or helped me figure out why I had basically nuked my life on a random Friday evening. Plus, her parents had been divorced since her sixth birthday party, when her mom hadn’t showed, and her dad had stood up and announced that Daddy’s “special present” for his little princess was going to be a real, live suburban dream home for two. So she knew the ropes, for sure.

  But I kept remembering this time when we were nine. I can see it now: I was wearing my pin-striped Yankees bathing suit. I had set up a skateboard ramp on the roof of my back porch, and a trampoline on the patio next to the pool. It seemed totally realistic to me that I could climb up onto the roof with my hot-green board, zip off the ramp, kick the board away in midair, bounce off the trampoline, and finish the stunt with a perfectly executed swan dive into the pool. I called her up and told her to rush over RIGHT NOW with her suit and her dad’s video camera—this would be a moment that should be preserved for posterity, I figured.

  So Laurie got there a few minutes later, took one look at my spectacular and well-planned-out setup, and immediately started trying to talk me out of the entire escapade. I can still hear her little pipsqueak voice echoing off the bricks of the patio: “Alex, this is dumb. A billion thousand things could go wrong.”

  “Duh, that’s not even a real number. Plus, this is totally safe. I planned it SCIENTIFICALLY (my big word that summer, like when I had SCIENTIFICALLY spilled honey on a bees’ nest to see whether they would die of happiness. The emergency-room doctors were getting lots of overtime thanks to my selfless devotion to SCIENCE). What could possibly happen?”

  “Well, you could fall off the board on the roof, tumble off the roof, and die. Or you could make the jump, land on your board on the trampoline, and die. If you’re better at this than I think you are, you might make the trampoline jump, then miss the pool, and die. Or make it into the pool, but hit your head on the edge, and die.”

  I admit, that last one was a pretty good guess.

  The following September, the video became a truly legendary show-and-tell, but Laurie has never been one for looking on the bright side where my adventures are concerned. Which, again, is why I wasn’t in a rush to consult with her on this latest escapade.

  Anyway, between school, mom-time, and the big excitement of meeting with my lawyer (who is also my uncle Larry; his only comment was, “You really SAID and DID all this?”), the month passed. And I got my day in court.

  You wake up in the morning on your court date, and it’s Showtime. You shower and shave the nine faint peach-fuzz follicles that may or may not yet exist on your face even though you tell your friends you have ’em.You brush, floss, brush again, gargle mouthwash, and still worry that you might get sent to jail due to bad breath. Your mom supervises you as you garb yourself for the battle in your only suit. Then you have to lean all the way forward as you eat your cornflakes so that no milk gets on your lovely babyblue silk tie. Last spring’s band-concert shoes go on; the blisters start. Your head buzzes with nervousness.Your palms are ice-cold and sweaty at the same time, which seems to defy all of the laws of nature, but whatever. Somehow, Mom shuffles you into the car, with its shiny new front bumper. The drive downtown is so quiet that you you can leave the radio off and just hear the sound waves directly through the frames of your sunglasses.

  Mom parks three blocks from the courthouse, just so your blistering feet can really get some grind time in. The walk brings out more icy sweat, only this time it’s all over your entire body. At the bottom of the marble courthouse steps, Mom gives you a quick hug, yanks off your sunglasses (“You don’t want to look like a criminal!”), ruffles your hair like you’re still five, and then tries to ruffle it back into neatness, even though you fully realize that if any aspect of your hygiene is going to get you sent to the slammer, it will still probably be the breath and not the comb & curl.

  You wait in line, go through the metal detectors, meet your lawyer at the door of the courtroom, and walk in.

  I was shocked when I first saw this particular courtroom, by the way. I had been expecting a big marble gallery-type room, with vaulted ceilings, dark wood everywhere, and maybe gargoyles of justice on top of Greek columns. But this place was just a tiny, plain box, with folding tables, which were for the defense and prosecutors, facing a metal desk. A smooth-looking old guy with greased-back hair and a suit so dark that it seemed to suck in the sickly fluorescent light was sitting sort of sideways in the prosecution chair, chatting with the judge and drinking coffee out of a paper Manhattan Bagel cup. He and my lawyer/uncle greeted each other like they worked together every day, which I guess they basically did. This was discouraging, though; I wanted my lawyer and the prosecutor to bare their teeth and snarl at each other, like gladiators entering the ring, not wave and nod like old college buddies.

  If they were pals, who was on MY side?

  The judge smiled at my mom. She was motherly looking, with dark hair tied in an old-fashioned bun, tiny black-framed glasses, and a regular gray business suit. Again, this was weird: Where was her robe? Where was her wooden hammer thing? And why was she saying, “Hello, Janet. I haven’t seen you for a while. Still working at the home?”

  Was this a court session, or a class reunion?

  Before my mom could answer, the door swung open behind me, and things got a lot less chummy in a hurry. I was afraid to look anyone here in the eye, but I peeked sideways to see whose entry had clammed everybody up. Four guys in uniforms walked in. Two were paramedics, and two were familiar-looking police officers.

  Oh, crud. These guys were my squad-car amigo and a guy who looked just like Sarge, only less blurry than I remembered him. Wow, this was enough to get me thinkin’ about something my grandma had always said: Be careful how you treat people, because you never know when you’ll need their help later on. And I hadn’t exactly sown the seeds of love with these gents with all the spilling, laughing, and ralphing I’d done at our first encounter.
Oh, and the underage drunk driving. Guess we shouldn’t forget the underage drunk driving.

  We all sat down at the flimsy collapsible tables, and the judge started my big hearing, the most serious moment of my life to date. “Good morning, everybody. I’ve looked over the papers here, and in the case of New Jersey versus Alexander Gregory, the whole probable-cause schtick seems like a waste of time.”

  A waste of time? Was she just going to dismiss this whole thing, since everyone was in cahoots with each other anyway?

  “Honestly, Mr. Sharpe (that would be Uncle Larry), this looks like a slam dunk.”

  Whoa, hold on a minute—SLAM DUNK? Shouldn’t Uncle Larry be leaping up and shouting, “Objection?” The two officers were smirking, and the smoothie prosecutor was practically packing his briefcase already.

  Uncle Larry leaped heroically to my defense, right after taking a big sip of coffee and flipping through his notes for ten seconds or so. “You’re right, Judge. I know it’s irregular, but since my client is a first offender, why don’t we save everybody the time and expense of a trial and see what kind of plea we can figure out?”

  Whoa, Unc. Way to stick up for the family honor.

  The judge said, “Sounds good to me. Gentlemen?” She scanned the faces of the assorted 9-1-1 guys and prosecutor, all of whom now HAD started to get their things together. They were all mumbling and nodding, and suddenly the judge had the wood hammer dealie in her hand. “All righty, then. All rise.” All rose. “In the case of New Jersey versus Alexander Gregory, the court accepts the defendant’s guilty plea. The State of New Jersey will meet with the defendant for sentencing, right here, immediately following a fifteen-minute break.” I couldn’t stifle one panicky joke-thought: How were they going to get the whole state in this one little room?

  Everyone except Uncle Larry, Mom, and I filed out the back door, making small talk and generally acting relieved that my defense had been a farce, a sham, a…

  “Well, that went well, Janet.”