“Are you sure about this? I don’t want to wreck your car.”
In the passenger seat, Gretchen buckled her seat belt. “That should answer your question.”
“I’m not good at this.”
“I happen to be a pretty good teacher. Just don’t kill us.”
Dave tensed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Okay, aiming for no deaths. Got it. What do I do now?”
“Shift into drive.”
“You’re losing me.”
“The stick on your right,” Gretchen said, “move it next to the letter D.”
“Which one is D? Did I mention I’m illiterate?”
Gretchen laughed and shifted for him, causing the car to lurch forward. “You have to hit the brake!” she squealed.
Dave hit the brake the only way he knew how, by slamming both feet down on the pedal. The sudden stop caused his seat belt to lock up tight against his chest. “Gretchen, your car is trying to kill me.” He yanked at the fabric, which only made it pull back tighter, as if he and the car were involved in some sort of tug-of-war.
“This is going to be the funniest day of my life,” Gretchen said.
For an hour, Gretchen talked him calmly through, giving him little pointers until the car’s movement felt natural. Every now and then she’d touch his shoulder or his forearm when offering her advice, and in those moments he was glad he’d waited until now to learn how to drive, glad that Julia had always been around to drive for him.
When they both decided he’d had enough practice for his first time, they switched back so that Gretchen could drive. But instead of putting the car in drive they sat quietly for a moment, and in the silence Dave could spot a mutual desire to stretch out their night, to not go home. Gretchen pulled a GPS out of the glove compartment and smiled at him. “Wanna do something cool?”
“Almost always.”
“Check this out,” she said, and she started driving the car around in strange patterns, stopping to turn the GPS on or off, hiding the screen so he couldn’t see what was happening.
After a few minutes she parked the car and turned the screen toward him. The parking lot was a blank white space in the GPS, while the streets surrounding the mall were yellow. A blue line showed the path the car had taken.
“You drew a smiley face.”
“I drew a smiley face.”
“With the car.”
“And a satellite,” she added.
“Gretchen,” Dave said, admiring the GPS screen, “you are so cool.”
It was another hour of GPS-drawing—a stick figure, a cat, the word fuzzy—before they left the parking lot and Gretchen took Dave home. It was nearly midnight, but he didn’t want to step away from Gretchen, didn’t want the night to end. But now that it was going to, he wondered how, exactly, it would. It was a first date, he knew, because how they would say good-bye mattered.
They were parked in his driveway, no lights on in his house save for the blue glow of the television in Brett’s room. Gretchen had put the car in park, but for almost thirty seconds neither one of them had moved or said a thing.
There was no doubt in his mind that he wanted to kiss her. He could feel the desire for it like a ball of energy high up in his chest, but there seemed no way to move it from there, as if a part of him was against the whole idea and would not allow it. He couldn’t help but think that Julia was somehow responsible.
Dave noticed her iPod sitting in the cup holder, a wire plugging it into the car. “Play me your favorite song,” he said, picking it up.
The screen lit at his touch, casting Gretchen’s face in a soft white light. She took it from him, her fingers touching his for what seemed like a deliberately long moment. “You won’t make fun of me?”