The Driveway
The boy pulled his car, a gray, mid-80s Buick Century, into the driveway. It was a “grandma car” in every sense of the term: it looked like a car at which you would expect to find a little old lady behind the wheel; it drove like a car that wanted a little old lady behind the wheel; and until relatively recently, it had a little old lady — the boy’s grandmother — behind the wheel. But now the car was his, and he was proud of it.
He eased the car to a stop and put it in park. The vehicle idled peacefully. Normally the boy would turn off the engine, but it was a cold February night and he planned to sit there for a while. Or at least he hoped to. He was in no rush for the evening to end. The headlights reflected garishly off the garage door in front of them. The boy turned them off.
Outside the neighborhood slept. It was only 11:00pm, but hardly a light shone from behind the curtains in the windows of the nearby houses save for the occasional flash of a bedroom television. It was winter, so there was no hum of air conditioning units, no dogs barking from behind their fences, no neighbors sharing a late-night conversation while smoking on the front porch.
There were no lights on in the house at the end of the driveway. But the boy knew at least one person inside was awake. Lying in bed, but awake. Waiting. Waiting for the front door to open and for the boy to leave. Waiting for the front door to close and the grandma car to pull out of the driveway and for the sound of teeth being brushed and for the squeak of bedsprings in the adjacent bedroom to signal the end of waiting. Waiting to be able to sleep, to know that all was right in the house.
The boy was in no rush.
His heart thumped. He couldn’t help it. Even after two-and-a-half months — eighty days to be precise, not that he was counting, since that first date — he couldn’t believe he had wound up here, living this moment. His mind raced, but not in an orderly fashion, with each thought staying in its own lane as it sprinted around the track like he would later that spring. The thoughts were a jumble, obstructing each other and bumping into each other and shedding pieces that were probably unimportant but maybe not. A veritable demolition derby of ideas and emotions.
Finally, one thought stood out. It was a humble one, but the boy figured it was good enough to start with. Besides, he had to do something. So he obeyed the thought.
He turned his head. He locked eyes with the girl. The girl smiled at the boy.
His body flooded with … what was that? Love? Lust? Utter disbelief that a guy like him was in the same car as a girl like her? She was smart and cute and talented and oh-so-different from him in so many ways. For one thing, the girl had dated before. The boy had not. Not really. He had girl friends but not girlfriends. He didn’t know how any of this was supposed to work. He made it up on the fly. And frankly, he wasn’t very good at it.
He smiled back.
The boy and the girl sat in silence, stuck in each other’s eyes, each unsure what to say or do. “Maybe I should hold her hand,” the boy thought to himself. But that would require reaching his hand out toward her. How far should he reach it? Should he go halfway to allow her to come the other half? Surely he couldn’t reach all the way to her. Her hand rested on her leg, and he couldn’t possibly risk touching her thigh! Scandalous! He could leave his hand near his side, turning his hand upward as if it invite her hand to him. Would that be too passive? Or would that be a sign of respect, of empowerment?
They alternated blinks. Did she hold that last blink a little longer than normal? The boy wondered if she was sending a message. But what? He wished he knew anything about women. He was eighteen. He was supposed to have learned this stuff by now!
He should say something, the boy thought. He could talk about their evening, though they had already done a lot of that during the drive. And besides, they talked about their friends and band and school all the time.
The Buick purred. Its blue digital clock taunted the boy as it ticked off the minutes. 11:16. 11:17.
Or he could address the elephant in the room. The elephant with the three word name. The boy loved the girl. He told her that he loved her, but he hadn’t really told her that he loved her. He had written it — he had written the actual words “I love you” — in the card he gave to her on Valentine’s Day. It took him over an hour to get up the nerve to put the words on paper. But he hadn’t said the words out loud, nor had she said them out loud to him. Putting it in writing was one thing, but saying it out loud meant it was real. He wanted it to be real.
11:21.
He reached out his hand. He went two-thirds of the way, far enough to make his intentions clear, but he hoped not so far as to risk appearing too presumptuous. A moment passed. Had he misread the situation? Did he move too quickly? Was she … Oh, there she goes. She held his hand. The boy and the girl linked fingers. She squeezed lightly. He squeezed back. They smiled.
Still they sat in silence. It wasn’t as though they had nothing to talk about. They often spoke on the phone. Nightly, in fact, with few exceptions. They talked for hours about every topic imaginable. About school and friends of course, but also about religion and politics and unusual headlines in that day’s newspaper and mathematics and people they had seen that day who looked like famous actors and all kinds of trivia and esoterica. But not in the driveway. Sitting side-by-side in the driveway was different. It was intense. The boy got tangled up in his own thoughts. So they said little. Instead, they stared, each lost in the other’s eyes.
11:26. 11:27. The blue digital clock was relentless.
The girl was supposed to be home by 11:00pm. She was home, sort of. She was in the driveway, just outside of the home. That should count. The boy and the girl knew that it didn’t count to her father, who soon would get tired of lying awake in bed, restless, waiting for the sound of the front door to open and the Buick to back out of the driveway. He would soon go to the front door and flash the porch light, and the night would be over. 11:28. One of them should say something.
“Are you going to kiss me or what?”
Her voice shattered the silence and shocked the boy. A kiss! She wants a kiss! She wants a kiss? The boy wanted it, too, but he had never kissed a girl before. He had thought about kissing a girl — kissing this girl — a lot. Here was his opportunity! His first opportunity. His only opportunity? He had better act. But what was with that question: “Are you going to kiss me or what?”. It was so bold, so daring, so direct. So unlike her! Was she annoyed with him? Should he have initiated the first kiss? Had he screwed this all up?
Shut up, boy, and kiss the girl.
He leaned toward her, she leaned toward him, and they kissed. The boy didn’t know what to do or if it was a good kiss, but it was a kiss. Their first. They separated, looked at each other, and kissed again. Their second.
The porch light blinked. They sat upright and looked at each other through fresh eyes. She is radiant, the boy thought. The girl sighed, knowing that her father would scold her for sitting in the driveway so long. She smiled and responded out loud to what so far had only been written. “I love you, too.”
The boy beamed. “I love you, too … too.” He cringed. She giggled.
She opened the car door and stepped out. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Sadie,” said the boy. She closed the door, walked up the front steps, and went inside the house. The porch light turned off. The boy closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and replayed the events in his mind. “Click,” he said to himself, a method he had picked up to take a snapshot of a moment he wanted to be sure to remember.
The boy turned on the headlights, put the car into reverse, and backed out of the driveway. As he drove home he replayed the girl’s words: “Are you going to kiss me or what?”. He chuckled to himself. They were going to make a great old married couple some day. He just knew it.