Driving With Dead People

by Monica Holloway

“Right now.” He turned me back toward the counselor’s office.

  “She’s nosy—,” I said, but Mr. Martin interrupted.

  “Monica, you need to be careful about the way you present yourself. You’re smart and funny. You don’t want to bring yourself down by behaving badly. You may be going through a tough time right now, but this is when you need to step up and be bigger than all that stuff.”

  “It sounds easy,” I grumbled.

  “It’s more difficult to be a good person than a bad one. And you’re a good person.” He patted my shoulder. At least he still believed in me, and I appreciated his efforts to steer me straight. He opened the door to Mrs. McCormick’s office and came in behind me. Shit.

  “I’m sorry I cursed,” I said quickly. I wanted to hurl her easel with the poster of a cartoon gorilla sitting on top of a skinny man with the caption “No problem is too big to solve” out the fucking window of her claustrophobic office.

  “Well, I would think so,” she said. “I have never been so shocked in my entire life—especially after I was trying to help you. And you used such a terrible word.” Clearly, I had just added my own degrading behavior to the gossip about my family.

  “I’m sorry.” I stared at her. I was trying to think of a way to end the confrontation and not have her trash me. I put my hand on my forehead and I cried. It wasn’t that difficult. I was already sad; I just let it come. “I wish I hadn’t behaved like that. I’m going through a rough time right now,” I sobbed. Now I couldn’t tell if I was really sorry or faking it, but it sure felt good to cry—a festering boil had blown wide open.

  “Behavior like that will get you detention next time,” Mr. Martin said. “Do we understand each other?” Mrs. McCormick reached for the tissue box on her desk and handed it to me. With that gesture, I knew I was in the clear.

  “Absolutely,” I said, accepting her Kleenex.

  “Don’t you feel better now, getting all that out?” she asked. Don’t push it, I thought.

  “I do,” I said, nodding. The truth was that in the end, sad felt better than rage—a lot better. But rage came easier. Sad felt like the world was ending.

  Mr. Martin opened the door and we walked out of the counselor’s office.

  “Take some time in the ladies’ room if you want,” he said, walking back toward his office.

  Mr. Martin was worried about me. He tried to call Mom, but couldn’t find her. Neither could I.

  That night Becky said, “I heard you cussed at Mrs. McCormick.”

  “Was it announced on the loudspeaker?” I asked.

  “Everyone’s talking about it,” she said, smiling. “Your temper is a real problem.”

  “Good,” I said, but I was flustered that everyone knew.

  “I called Mom, and she sounded pretty mad,” Becky said, walking into the living room.

  “Like I’m even scared,” I said, wondering how Becky had managed to get Mom on the phone to bust me. She was never at the apartment when we really needed her.

  That spring I heard Becky talking to her friend Clare on the phone about cheerleading tryouts. As it turned out, the only thing she wanted in life was to be a cheerleader. There was no reason she couldn’t make the squad; she was adorable and good at gymnastics, her long blond pigtails flipping around in circles as she did several front walk-overs in a row.

  I decided that if she were a cheerleader, she’d be a happy person and easier to live with. Maybe we’d eat together and be the way we’d been when we were little, playing Dark Side of the Moon with the Whitmores. Also, I needed her to like me so she’d pick me up from practice sometimes.

  Tryouts were in two weeks, so I took it upon myself to campaign for Becky during homeroom and in the hallways. “Vote for Becky Peterson,” I told them. “She’s great at gymnastics.”

  At the tryouts I sat in the bleachers nervously chewing the side of my cheek. Suddenly I wanted Becky to win because she was my sister. She’d helped me slap mud pies onto our back patio when we were toddlers, and cried along with me when a wasp stung my foot at Rocky Fork State Park. I wanted her to win because she was mine—my family.

  Each of the girls came bounding out onto the gym floor one by one, yelling their cheers and flinging their arms around, ending in a high kick or a split.

  Becky ran out and stood stock-still. She slapped her two hands into a fist over her shiny blond head and shouted, “Let’s yell for the red, the black, and the white.” She was facing to the side now, head turned toward the bleachers, where I smiled in case she saw me. She continued, moving her arms in front of her chest.

  “Let’s yell for the Braves, ’cause they’re all right.”

  “Braves.” (Front walk-over.)

  “Braves.” (Back walk-over.)

  “Fight.” (High jump with kick.) “Fight.” (Same.) “Fight.” (Straight down into the splits.)

  She did it! My row erupted in applause and whistles. Becky smiled and ran off.

  Twenty minutes later I saw her in the hallway with Donna Frazee and said, “You looked good,” but she kept walking. Maybe cheerleading wouldn’t help us after all.

  The next day during homeroom, Mr. Martin came on the loudspeaker and announced the cheerleaders for what would be Becky’s senior year. Becky was not one of them. After all we’d been through, what would it have hurt for her to win? She had done a great job, and now she was going to be even more miserable.

  That night I was in my room studying and heard her crying. I stood in the hallway, not knowing how to approach her. Becky and I had had our share of arguments, but I had taken on the “Peterson mentality”—that we could hurt one another, but no one else could.

  I walked into her room and saw her sitting on the bed sobbing into her cupped hands. When she realized I was standing there, she turned and snapped, “What are you doing in here? My door was closed!”

  “Looking for a pair of gray kneesocks,” I lied. I would have given anything to say something helpful, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “Quit wearing my stuff,” she yelled, wiping away tears. “Get out of my room and leave me alone.”

  “You almost won,” I told her without knowing for sure.

  “Who cares anyway?” she said, getting up and grabbing a brush off her desk. “Get outta here.” She turned away from me and began pulling the brush through her long, thick hair.

  I closed her door behind me, leaving her alone. I wanted to make her feel better, I just didn’t know how.

  Having given up on Mom and Dad, I now looked for attention, meals, and stimulation in the outside world. I ran for class vice president and won. I won speech tournaments, and even the ones I lost were fun because all my friends were there. I spent the night at other people’s houses; I was a counselor for the summer arts and drama workshops for the elementary students.

  Becky became shyer and even angrier.

  I fell and broke my ankle, and Mrs. Bates, who taught AV at the high school, took me to get my cast put on.

  One afternoon I heard there was a rumor going around school that I’d faked my broken foot to get attention. No one would tell me who was saying it, but Julie and I asked around, and Becky’s good friend, Alice Johnson, said, “Becky started it. She hates you.”

  I had never been handed such undiluted truth.

  Besides Becky, I had another problem. Mr. Selman was no longer being coy. He actively pursued me, kissing me on the mouth while I tried to shove him off me, and leaving love notes on my locker, signed “S.” Mom and Jim, lost in their love bubble, weren’t any help.

  I thought of talking to Mr. Martin. I was sure he would help me, but I couldn’t imagine creating a huge scandal. Plus, I liked Selman when he wasn’t hitting on me. I was embarrassed, grossed out, and more than a little pleased to be getting some attention. I flirted with him, even while I cringed at the thought of him touching me.

  I decided to deal with Selman in my own way.

  One night I broke into Selman’s apartment with Julie, who kne
w he’d been pursuing me. It was one of the craziest things we ever did, but we hauled all his furniture out onto the lawn and set up his living room outside.

  He left us a note the next morning written in red ink and taped to Julie’s mailbox: “REVENGE WILL BE MINE.”

  We shrieked and ran around in circles. We were excited and horrified by all the possibilities.

  “What’s he going to do?” Julie wondered.

  “God only knows,” I said. “Probably slobber on us.”

  When we got to school, he’d covered the outside of our lockers with shaving cream.

  Julie and I turned up the intensity of our attacks, breaking into his car, releasing the emergency brake, and rolling it down the small hill beside his house. I pushed, and Julie steered it right into an alley. The next morning he was disheveled and late to class.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Someone stole my car,” he panted, shoving his briefcase under his desk.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “It’s not where I parked it last night, so I’m pretty sure,” he said.

  “What if it accidentally rolled down the hill?” I asked. Selman turned to look at me with his good eye. He was starting to smile.

  “Is that what happened?” he asked.

  “I’m just saying it could happen. Maybe the brake wasn’t on,” I said.

  “Peterson, if you took my car, I’m gonna kill you,” he said.

  “I can’t really say for sure,” I said.

  “I’ll expect my car to be in front of my house by four thirty p.m. today or I’m calling the police,” he said. “You’re lucky. If I hadn’t gotten up late this morning, I’d have called them already.”

  Maybe he was harmless after all. He was a great distraction and was funny as hell. I wasn’t attracted to him, but at least someone was watching me closely.

  He had admitted he loved me. Told me that after I graduated, we could date. I didn’t know how to tell him that was never going to happen.

  But I loved him as a friend, and if he was inappropriate with me, I was doubly inappropriate. I shattered a window at his house while Julie and I were breaking in to change the outgoing message on his answering machine and steal all his silverware, I stuck extralong maxi pads all over his front door when I knew he’d be bringing home an attractive date, and I mooned him out the back window of a bus, my bare ass pressed firmly against the glass. Clearly, I was begging for his attention.

  JoAnn was the only one who took it for what it really was. She threatened to drive to Elk Grove and kick his ass. Every time we talked on the phone, she was sure to ask about him.

  “Is Selman still messing with you?”

  “Not too much,” I’d say.

  “Damn it. I’m going to kill that man. He’d better keep his hands off you.” JoAnn called often and sometimes came up and got me so I could spend a weekend at Ohio State with her.

  When I was still fifteen, Julie rushed into my bedroom one sunny Saturday morning. Her eyes were red and swollen and she was talking fast.

  “Wendy’s dead,” she said.

  I wasn’t even awake yet. “What?”

  “Wendy’s dead. She shot herself after the ball game last night.”

  I sat up. “Shot herself where?”

  “In the chest,” Julie said.

  “And she’s dead?” I asked.

  “Dad picked her up around midnight.”

  Julie started crying again. I couldn’t move. All of a sudden my cozy pink room felt cold and spooky. All I could think of was Wendy holding those baby rabbits.

  The phone rang. Our friends were starting to call. We decided to meet at Pizza Palace at eleven thirty. None of us were hungry.

  Wendy didn’t get her picture in the Elk Grove Courier. Only an obituary that read:

  WENDY JOHNSON

  Miss Wendy Johnson, 15, RR 1, Elk Grove, died at home Friday night. She was born in Cincinnati on September 15, 1962, and is the daughter of Carl and Marianne Johnson.

  Miss Johnson was a sophomore at Mason County High School and a member of the Elk Grove United Methodist Church. Her activities at school included choir, cheer block, speech club, and Spanish club.

  She is survived by her parents.

  Funeral services will be held Monday at 2:00 p.m. at Kilner and Sons Mortuary.

  At school Monday, I unlocked one of the glass showcases lining the hallways. As class vice president and a friend of Wendy’s, I felt I should do something to memorialize her. I put in a vase of red roses I’d picked up that morning and pictures Julie had brought me from Mrs. Johnson. Just as I was finishing the showcase, Mr. Martin walked up behind me.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s for Wendy,” I answered. Mr. Martin put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  “Take it down,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Take it down,” he repeated. “We do not honor little girls who kill themselves. I don’t want an epidemic on my hands.” He turned and walked away.

  What did he mean, “an epidemic”?

  I took it down quickly, just as Mr. Martin had asked. I looked at the empty showcase, and thought, Wendy is courageous, and I’m a coward.

  Just as Sarah Keeler had taught me that children die, Wendy taught me that you don’t have to wade through the insanity; you can get off the bus. This scared me so much that a sweaty panic swept over me. From that moment on I knew it was possible (and easy, with all the guns in my house) to end my own life.

  Part IV

  Driving with Dead People

  Chapter Fourteen

  The fall I turned sixteen, I spent Saturday afternoons in the high school cafeteria watching films of violent car accidents far more grisly than the ones Dad had filmed. For Mr. Meese, my driver’s ed teacher, this was his favorite part. Nothing pleased him more than one of us passing out cold on the cafeteria linoleum after seeing some teenager’s head lying on the side of a country road, his torso still in the driver’s seat. An eerie voice-over explained that he’d been drunk, driving more than one hundred miles an hour, when a deer stepped in front of the car. The impact hurled the deer through the windshield, decapitating the kid.

  One day a boy ran out of the room to puke after seeing a film of an EMT opening the door of a compact car and revealing a blood-covered teenager shoved halfway through the windshield, her butt off the seat, and her arms, mangled and bloody, dangling at her sides. The camera panned to the front of the car where the top of her head had been sliced into sections from the shattered windshield, the skin on her face hanging in shreds.

  Each film had running commentary on the dangers of not wearing your seat belt, driving while intoxicated, or speeding.

  After the gruesome films, Mr. Meese would sit in the passenger seat, with me behind the wheel of the white driver’s ed car. I’d steer us toward the pharmacy to practice my parallel parking. After a few weeks and several harrowing attempts to enter the line of traffic on Interstate 75 around Cincinnati, I earned my driver’s license.

  Before I was allowed to drive alone, I practiced in Mom’s car on weekends. The tricky part wasn’t negotiating the road, it was that every time I stopped, her loaded handgun slid out from under the driver’s seat and lodged itself under the brake pedal. She called it the “pea shooter.”

  “This gun keeps getting stuck under here,” I finally told her.

  “Kick it back under the seat,” she said, so I did—over and over again.

  Like JoAnn, Becky decided to attend Ohio State University that fall. JoAnn didn’t exactly welcome Becky to college. She had been struggling with depression so severe, she was finding it difficult to get to her classes. She wasn’t sure what was so debilitating, but she didn’t want Becky (or any of us) to know.

  Mom made Becky leave her old red Mustang. (There wasn’t parking available to freshmen anyway.) I’d finally have mobility and could leave the school bus, and my anxiety about catching a ride to Galesburg, behind. />
  I never thought I’d miss Becky, but I did. At least when she was home, the lights were on and someone was there. Now all the rooms were empty but mine. She was hateful, but she was home. Now I was all alone.

  We had our licenses, so Dave told Julie and me that we could drive the Kilner and Sons hearse. He would pay us five bucks an hour to drive to the Cincinnati airport and pick up bodies that had been flown in from out of state. We’d drive a fully loaded gold Cadillac (they had traded in the black one) with an excellent stereo system, make money, and spend all our time together. It was the perfect job.

  Julie and I felt mature getting to drive the hearse, and it was true that we’d finally lost the ugly awkwardness of puberty. She was busty with beautiful dark eyes and straight white teeth, and I was tan and lanky—not the types that usually showed up in a hearse at the cargo hold of the airport.

  On the day of our initiation, Dave tossed Julie the keys and we drove over to the coin-operated car wash on Eighth Street, plugged in four quarters, hit the switch, took out the metal wand, and sprayed the hearse top to bottom.

  “Are there towels in the back?” I asked Julie.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, swinging the back door open. “No towels,” she reported.

  “Now we’re gonna have water spots.” I was aggravated.

  “Let’s get in and drive like hell so the water blows off,” Julie suggested.

  We climbed in and sped out onto Highway 50 toward Cincinnati, water droplets vanishing behind us.

  We stopped in Jennings Falls about ten miles west of Elk Grove to buy a pack of Virginia Slims and two Pepsis at the Sinclair station. We never smoked without Pepsis. A cigarette tasted nasty without the sweetness of a Pepsi chaser; plus, if I didn’t have something to drink, I coughed the entire time I smoked.

  We weren’t technically allowed to smoke but, luckily, several of the other hearse drivers were heavy smokers and the cab already smelled like an ashtray before we even lit up.

  Julie put in a Dire Straits tape and fast-forwarded to “Sultans of Swing.” With our windows down, our Virginia Slims lit, and our Pepsis cold, we were feeling pretty smooth. It didn’t bother us that people on the highway looked at us suspiciously as if maybe we had stolen the hearse.