Did I Ever Tell You by Genevieve Kingston

Author:Genevieve Kingston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Gwenny DRIVING… Holy smokes! How exciting!! Please be safe, wear your seatbelt and drive with caution.

xoxox Mommy

On the morning of my birthday, I’d gone to the DMV before school and gotten a license to go with my own thirdhand blue Volvo. The leather purse dangled from my car keys as I drove myself to school that morning. My friends and I squealed over the battered sedan as if it were a Ferrari.

* * *

If my mother had been too impatient to wait for her graduation day, I wished mine would never come. At sixteen I had a boyfriend, my own car, and four spectacular friends. Margaret was an artist and a true romantic, though she hid it well beneath a tough, joking exterior she’d developed growing up with two brothers. Erica was a choir kid who wore enormous sunglasses, drove a white Mercedes, and always smelled like vanilla. Emma subscribed to fashion magazines, owned CDs by obscure bands, and bought her clothes from American Apparel in San Francisco. Freesia was involved with nearly every committee and club on campus, and also competed on a synchronized swimming team. She seemed to share my nostalgia for the past and loved taking snapshots of the rest of us, developing them later in the darkroom of her photography class. The five of us, along with Zach, called ourselves the Sensational Six, and they became my escape from all the sadness and anxiety I now felt at home. We spent most weekends squashed into a single car, tracing the tidy grid of our small city, learning its shape, seeking its hidden spaces. Our favorite of these was a hilltop overlooking the city’s south side, accessed by a perilously steep and winding road. The engine of my ancient Volvo always roared and whined in protest as we inched our way up.

“I think I can, I think I can,” everyone would chant, as I leaned hard on the accelerator.

At the top, we’d hop a low fence, ignoring a NO TRESPASSING sign with the brazenness I’d learned from my father (my rule-following was limited to school). The site had been under a development contract for years, but no construction ever seemed to begin. We’d make our way to our favorite lookout in starlight, sometimes bringing a plastic water bottle half-full of tequila or vodka to pass around, taking little sips, making it last.

Our city spread beneath us, made of glowing streetlights and veins of sparkling traffic. To the southeast I could pick out Our Lady of the Washing Machine Agitator, as Granny Liz used to call the Catholic church with the tall white spire. Directly below us spun the pink neon sign of the Flamingo Hotel, where friends and family had stayed when they came to visit my mother and our house was too full of guests to hold any more. I did not know the names of the constellations in the night sky overhead, but the ones made by the landmarks in the streets below me were as familiar to me as my own name.

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