Smooth

by Matt Burns

  I made my sandwich and went back upstairs, annoyed that this plan to become a normal, polite person would require some real effort.

  At seven thirty the first morning of driver’s ed, I stepped out of Mom’s car in the parking lot and didn’t look back when she walked around from the passenger seat into the driver’s seat and drove off. I could see my breath in the cold as I stood outside the driver’s ed door, which was nestled between a dry cleaner and an off-brand cell phone store in the middle of a beige concrete strip mall, with three other kids who’d also shown up before the teacher.

  The two guys and one girl looked like they were around my age and I didn’t recognize them, thankfully. They must have all gone to other schools. “What’s up?” I forced through my teeth, looking one of the guys in the eye and nodding. He kept his hands tucked into his hoodie pockets and nodded but didn’t say anything.

  More kids showed up, and a few adults, and I said, “What’s up?” to all of them and got the same lack of reaction. The words felt stilted and unnatural, like I was trying to push open a door that needed to be pulled. Being the life of the party was much more difficult than it looked in soda commercials. I hadn’t injected enough Mountain Dew into my heart to be that guy.

  One of the older people, who I guess were there to get speeding tickets taken off their record, looked at emails on his phone. He seemed to be in his midtwenties. I walked beside him and said, “You cold?” which was one hell of a pleasant and noncontroversial question.

  He shrugged and briefly made eye contact. Bingo. I was bonded to him like a newborn duckling and the first thing it ever saw. I tried to think of a follow-up question about anything other than the weather, but I drew a blank. I figured it was okay to take it slow. I had three days to forge a lifelong friendship with my new mentor.

  Finally the teacher showed up — a heavyset woman named Paula Freeman who waddled up to the door with a folder of papers clenched in her teeth. She said, “Come on in. Excuse my tardiness. I got caught up this morning writing my stand-up jokes.” She turned on the fluorescent lights and we all took our seats at two long tables. “You can see me perform at the Chuckle Cabin every Tuesday and Sunday night at two fifteen a.m.”

  Paula handed out packets of worksheets and some battered textbooks and then had us write our names on little cards and put them in front of us. My new friend was named Carson. He had a few purple scars on his jawline, but they were covered by a layer of the kind of stubble I was looking forward to having someday. He scrolled through more emails on his phone.

  I leaned over and said, “Work sucks. I know.” I wasn’t sure why I’d said that. I’d never had a job. And then a second after I’d said it, I realized it was a very well-known Blink-182 lyric, and I suddenly became embarrassed. Luckily he didn’t seem to have heard me, because he didn’t react at all.

  Paula sped through a memorized paragraph about the importance of our worksheets and the VHS tapes we’d be watching, then told us to open our books to chapter four. In health class, too, we were always randomly skipping around chapters. The teachers tell you the class is so valuable and will save you from a car wreck or a disgusting growth all over your genitals, and then in the next breath tell you that chapters one, six, seven, nine, thirteen, and fifteen are wastes of time and you don’t need to worry about those. I’m convinced that I’ll one day die in an entirely preventable way that was covered in great detail in chapter seven of the ninth-grade health textbook.

  We had an hour to read the six-page chapter and answer a ten-question quiz at the back about proper conditions for driving. It took five minutes, and then I sat there and tried to think of something to talk to Carson about. The one thing I knew, based on sneaking glances at his phone, was that he worked some kind of office job. I tried to think of something I knew about the business world. I leaned over and whispered, “What’s your take on that article about Pepsi in Time magazine?”

  “What?”

  “You see the article about Pepsi in Time?”

  He stared at me for a second. “I don’t read Time magazine.”

  “Oh.”

  “When was it?”

  “Uh . . . I guess a few months ago.”

  He squinted at me. “Did something happen to Pepsi?”

  I tried to think. I honestly couldn’t remember anything about the actual article. It was only, like, half of one page. It had something to do with business. That was all I remembered. Shit. Apparently not all adults subscribe to the same magazines as my dad.

  I gave him a shrug that I intended to convey I don’t know, dude — the world’s a crazy place and me and you are just cruising through it together, but I think it looked more like I’m a strange idiot with poor reading comprehension skills.

  I flipped through the textbook, scanning for dumb photographs of people from the early ’90s. One page featured a teenager with a bowl cut and sunglasses giving a big thumbs-up. Someone had already drawn a half dozen penises surrounding his head and hands. They were wiry and long, unusual and well done. Whoever drew them had an artistic voice.

  I laughed at them, and Paula Freeman said, “Kevin? Something’s funny about proper conditions to drive?”

  “No,” I said, staring down at the table. I could feel the entire class’s eyes on me like heat lamps.

  “Kevin, tell me, is it safe to drive while feeling angry or upset?”

  She was speaking to me like I was three years old. I bit my lip and shook my head to answer her question.

  “No? That’s right. And what should you do if you get behind the wheel feeling angry?”

  I didn’t care enough to give a real answer, so I shut my eyes and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Well, I know your face is turning redder than a lobster in a marinara hot tub.”

  A few kids laughed at her horrible joke while she frantically searched for a notebook on her desk and wrote down her punch line. My face felt pressurized. My entire head felt like one massive, ripe whitehead about to burst.

  “Lobster,” Paula Freeman repeated, “in a marinara hot tub!”

  My embarrassment was becoming the big closing joke of her stand-up set.

  “Y’all need to pay attention to the tips in this book and not just chuckle at the ancient ding-dong doodles like Kevin over there. Driving angry or upset is distracted driving and it’s dangerous. You should pull over and wait thirty minutes to calm down. Got that, Kevin?”

  I nodded, but I still didn’t look up from the table. I’d been an idiot for thinking I could just suddenly change my personality because I was in a room full of strangers. It wasn’t the Breakfast Club; no one wanted to open up and learn from each other. We all just wanted to sit there like potatoes in a microwave, waiting to get a piece of paper saying we could drive, and then put the memories of ever having been in that classroom in a temporary folder of our brains where they would quickly be overwritten by something more memorable, like an unusually long banana we saw at the grocery store.

  For the rest of the day and the two that came after it, I didn’t speak to anyone. I brought headphones and avoided eye contact. During our lunch breaks, when most people went as a group to the deli at the corner of the strip mall, I went around behind the building, sat on the ground against the wall, turned on music, and shut my eyes.

  At the end of the last day, Paula Freeman handed us all little certificates of completion. We never got inside a car, but somehow that class proved we were good drivers. It was like a weird miniature graduation ceremony. We were supposed to walk up to the front of the class, take our certificate from her, and then go back to our seats to watch the rest of the class get theirs.

  I was one of the first to pick my certificate up, and as soon as I did, I walked straight out the door. I heard Paula Freeman say something behind me, and then everyone laughed. I didn’t even care what it was anymore. Probably another obvious comparison of my face to a tomato or a fire truck. Her entire act was a list of things that are red. What f
resh, satirical observations she was making. What a unique point of view. I stood at the entrance of the strip mall waiting for Mom to pick me up, wondering if she’d even be able to see me, since my red face must have camouflaged into the stop sign behind me.

  On Christmas morning, my parents gave us all a new computer for the family room and told me I could keep our old one in my room. I’d kind of forced them into letting me keep it because I’d been holding it hostage since Thanksgiving and I was the only one who knew how to take it apart and put it back together. Kate had screamed about me taking it at the time, but Mom let her use her laptop and she got over it, and now the desktop was officially mine. Perfect. I could continue to do my internet browsing alone without hearing some awful sitcom laugh track behind me.

  As soon as I set up the new computer, Dad looked up a traffic report and then frantically collected all the wrapping paper scraps and hauled the bag out to the garage trash can to erase any evidence of Christmas. Then he rushed into his car and told us to put our shoes on faster if we wanted any chance of beating the traffic on the way to Grandma’s house.

  Hardly anyone else was on the road.

  Few things make a fifteen-year-old feel more insignificant than Christmas with extended family. Here are the gifts I received: The Beginner’s Guide to Card Tricks, a child’s acoustic guitar, an expensive Harley-Davidson motorcycle figurine, a framed photograph of a lion, a set of poker chips, and a jar full of baking supplies that could someday become brownies. There was no pattern, through line, or consistency to that spread; it was a collection of random items that had probably never been put together before and never would be put together again. It was like a dozen delivery trucks had crashed together on the highway and my uncles and aunts had pulled over and said, “Oh, shit, did anyone get anything for Kevin?” and then pointed to a smoking pile and decided, “That’ll do.”

  On the drive over, Dad had reviewed the plan for the afternoon: a half hour of mingling with relatives followed by an hour of basketball on TV, an hour for eating, and then a half hour to open gifts and “wrap things up” and be the first people to leave. It aligned almost perfectly with my own schedule, except during his mingling and basketball windows I’d penciled in “hiding in low-traffic areas.” The idea crossed my mind of blocking out a section to masturbate — not out of any real sexual desire, more as a way to kill time — but I ultimately decided against it. It felt like a mature and wise decision. Instead of giving frankincense or myrrh, I’d eliminate the possibility of my family members walking in on me beating off in an upstairs bathroom. It was the greatest gift they’d never know they’d received.

  Dad dove right into the fray, shaking hands with all of his brothers and sisters-in-law, asking them these insanely specific questions about their jobs. I have no idea how he keeps track of all those personal details about people. Either he has some serial-killer-style archive of notebooks in his office or he was born with a dental hygienist’s infinite memory for small talk.

  I tried to avoid everyone, but my uncles and aunts piled on the standard questions that I never had any good answers for:

  “Kevin, how are you?”

  “Good.”

  “Kevin, how’s school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Kevin, are you studying anything interesting?”

  “Just the normal classes everyone has to take.”

  “Kevin, have you read any more books about World War Two fighter planes?”

  “Not since I was seven, no.”

  “Kevin, have you started thinking about colleges yet?”

  “Uh . . . no?”

  “Kevin, do you have a girlfriend? Any special lady in your life? A crush?”

  “I’m gonna help my mom in the kitchen.”

  I went upstairs to the playroom with toys and stuff for the grandkids. There was a computer in there, too, and I turned it on and sat in the tiny kid’s chair in front of it. I tried to go online, but my grandma had installed such insanely strict antiporn, antiviolence, antianything content blockers that a siren would go off if you searched for Moby-Dick. Her internet was unfit for anything but images of baby ducklings and Crock-Pot recipes.

  Microsoft Word was on there, though, so I opened it and typed SHORT STORY at the top. I had a bunch of bad ideas from the movie outline that could have become the story for Alex — things about musicians, people falling in love, modern twists on old stories — but I didn’t write any of those.

  What I typed, almost without thinking, was “I went to a driver’s ed class that didn’t even let you drive a car. They probably knew I’d try to steer it off a bridge.”

  I thought it was kind of a funny way to start. From there, I described the first day of driver’s ed exactly how it had happened. I mentioned that guy Carson I had tried to be friends with, and all the other teenagers in the class. I spent a few paragraphs explaining how Paula Freeman looked and sounded and I attempted to get inside how her brain worked as she wrote her horrible comedy act. I lost track of time up there. I was putting in more and more detailed descriptions and even some jokes. I felt charged up, being able to just focus on telling the story and not having to worry about how we’d film it or what Luke or Will would want to change. It was entirely my story and I could put whatever I wanted into it.

  It was basically nonfiction, until I got to the part when Paula Freeman had called me out in front of the whole class for getting a question wrong and pointed out how red my face was. What had really happened was I sat there, folded my arms, and stewed in silent frustration. But instead I wrote:

  I stand up and slam my textbook shut. They watch me, unsure what I’m about to do. I walk to the front of the class and snatch a set of keys from Paula Freeman’s desk, then stomp out the door and into the parking lot. I unlock the driver’s ed car with two steering wheels, and as I close the door behind me, I see Paula Freeman in the rearview mirror sprinting through the parking lot, screaming and shouting and flailing her arms. “You ain’t licensed to drive that car!”

  Fat chance a maniac like me respects the authority of a piece of plastic issued by the DMV. I start the car and rev its decrepit engine. It coughs like I’m trying to keep a dead man alive against his will, but once it’s going, it’s pure lightning and I peel out of the parking lot and whip onto the highway faster than a once-caged eagle clawing his way to freedom.

  Paula Freeman huffs her way back into the classroom. “He’s gone,” she says. “I lost another one. He ain’t never coming back.”

  “I bet he’s robbing a bank,” one girl says. “He had that look about him. The look of a bandit.”

  A guy says, “No, he’s on his way to Mexico, where he will change his identity and become an entrepreneur. It’s always risky to start your own business, but something about that guy makes me confident he’ll succeed.”

  Paula Freeman says, “No. I’ve seen this before. That boy is gonna drive for a hundred years without ever slowing down. Long after we’re dead and buried, he’ll be watching the world burn through the gaps between bug corpses on his windshield.”

  “But, Paula,” a girl says, “won’t he run out of gas sometime between now and one hundred years from now?”

  Paula laughs. “Y’all have a lot to learn about driving if you think that stone-cold lunatic could possibly run out of gas. Open your books to page — ”

  The class shrieks as I kick in the door and walk back to my seat, holding a bag from the grocery store. I pull out a bottle of redness-reducing moisturizer, unscrew the cap, and smear it over my face.

  I keep rubbing until my face is caked in white slime. I withdraw a long stick lighter from my pocket and click a flame out of it, lighting my face on fire. I roast stoically, with my eyes closed. The smell of burnt hamburgers circulates.

  “No!” Paula Freeman shouts. “No!”

  The class members scream and hurl chairs through windows; they beg forgiveness from false gods; they hide under the tables, and I crouch down to their level. They each open
their eyes, and once they are all staring at my flaming face, I say, “Boo.”

  Every student’s head explodes.

  As I cross through the fiery gates into hell, Paula Freeman weeps into her hands, wailing, “Not again, dear Lord, not again.”

  The end.

  I didn’t know what any of that story was supposed to mean. I wasn’t sure if it was symbolism. It was just a weird and sort of gross image that I thought was kind of funny and naturally came out when I was writing. I didn’t question it.

  “Kevin! Dinner!” Mom yelled from downstairs. “Kevin? Are you upstairs?”

  I’d been up there for over an hour without realizing any time had passed at all. I emailed the story to myself and went downstairs. I had to sit at the adult table and endure small talk about work and diseases afflicting great-aunts I’d never heard of, which ordinarily would have made me want to take the ham’s place inside the oven. But I felt good. I’d been creative and productive. I’d made something that hadn’t existed an hour before. I wanted to write more stories. Every time an uncle said something offensive or an aunt asked me if I was still interested in that thing I was into when I was seven, I didn’t get mad. I just thought about the story it would inspire and all the things I’d be able to do once I put myself inside it.

  The night before our next blood test, I edited my story over and over while imagining what Alex was doing at the same time. She could have been sitting in her room alone just like me, or she could have been out at an elf-themed party with fifty of her hottest friends. Daydreaming about Alex had become a test of my emotions. If I felt any hope, I’d see her with her headphones on in bed, reading Sylvia Plath poems and novels that won awards I’d never heard of. But if I started slipping into pessimism, that vision morphed into the opening credits of a reality show, where Alex was one of ten hyperconfident, popular babes introducing themselves with one-liners about wanting to hook up with everyone.