Driver's Ed

by Caroline B. Cooney

  She held Henry before putting him in the car seat, and pressed her face against his, so their tears blended. Oh, God! she thought, and it was no prayer to a little local deity, it was to the real one. The big one. But there was no answer.

  Car pools consumed the children in batches. Shepherds returned their crooks by hurling them across the church like javelins. The bales had been torn open, and hay was strewn around as if camels had been put up for the night.

  Christmas! Morgan thought, swearing. He wondered who had given Starr a ride home and why they hadn’t waited for him. Life had broken down into installments, payment after payment.

  Tonight was the first of several Campbell Christmas parties. Tonight was lawyers. Lawyers under the tree, lawyers by the punch bowl, lawyers singing carols, lawyers opposed to carols.

  Morgan thought of presidential hopefuls and the secrets they had thought hidden, or had forgotten about, or hadn’t known were important. TV found out, and the candidates were ruined. From New York to Los Angeles, from Chicago to New Orleans, America said, “Ugh, kick him out.”

  I have to know, thought Morgan, if my parents would kick me out.

  He had a dim sense of no longer knowing what the Campbell family was, or why it existed. No longer knowing what love was, or whether it existed.

  In the church kitchen, between the stretch of ovens and dishwashers, was a telephone, LOCAL CALLS ONLY, it said, which ensured that everybody in Sunday school would make long-distance calls.

  Morgan’s was local.

  He called Nicholas. “I have to tell.”

  Nicholas stood very still.

  His family was not religious, and for them Christmas was stockings, poinsettias, and lots of shopping.

  His mother was Frisbee-ing junk mail across the kitchen into the open trash can and his father was circling Christmas-tree ads in the paper. They always cut their own tree. Dad liked to pick a tree farm at a pretty big distance, so getting it would be an event.

  Nicholas scoffed at this. You could drive to the corner, point to a tree, and have them deliver. Even when he was eight or ten, Nickie was too old for such nonsense. Now he was seventeen and he thought, I’m too young. I can’t have this happening to me. Morgan is going to tell? Does he have any idea what will happen to us?

  He held the phone loosely, trying to be casual. What could he say with his mother and father in the room while he talked?

  Tell, and I’ll kill you, Morgan. No, wait, I’m coming over. I’m going to kill you first, before you tell. Anyway, I won’t admit I was there. Me? Drive that jerk Morgan around? Give me a break. I’ll lie, Morgan. It’ll be all you. And what about Remy, huh? You going to haul Remy into this? Going to ruin her life?

  But the room was full of parents. There was nothing Nicholas could say, not a word.

  His mother handed him a Christmas card to read while he talked on the phone: old neighbors who had moved to Kansas and said the schools were better.

  Nicholas said to Morgan, “Not yet. Let’s talk about it first.”

  I’ll kill him. I have to get rid of him. He can’t tell. It would kill my parents.

  Remy extricated Henry from the car seat. Of course, when Henry was in such a bad mood, he would not be carried, but also refused to walk. When she finally got Henry in and set him on the floor, she had to barricade him with her knees till she got the door locked behind them.

  She loved that moment of safety when the door closed tight against the dark and the chill. She had not even had time to feel warm, to know that houses were good, and furnaces were best, when Mac yelled, “Call Nicholas. He says it’s important. He says Morgan is going to tell.”

  Henry screamed to be picked up, lifting his arms and jumping against her. He tried to hook his little fingers in a tear in her jeans to yank her down to his level.

  “What’ll Nickie tell?” said Mac.

  “Gossip.”

  “Tell me first.”

  “No.” Remy ran to her room. Shivering and trembling, she stared at the extension.

  Oh, God! she thought again, and then he was in the room with her—God was—suffocating and horrifying—somebody she did not want around at all—some grim, vengeful God from some ancient time, who would use a scythe and cut off her hands.

  Remy picked up the phone, but called Morgan, not Nicholas.

  Mrs. Campbell answered. “Hello, Remy, dear. Morgan just got in. Won’t it be wonderful when you two have your licenses? And you don’t have to arrange chauffeurs or miss rides? I understand your test is next week.”

  Small talk. Please. “Yes, it is.”

  “Are you excited?” said Mrs. Campbell, excited.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I’ll be thinking about you, Remy. I know you’ll pass.”

  “Thank you.”

  Phones were exchanged.

  “Hello, Remy,” said Morgan.

  She leaped into it feet first. “Morgan, don’t. Don’t tell. You can’t. Please. There’s nothing we can make better by telling.”

  “It’s just that I’m having a hard time thinking about anything else.”

  “Me too—but, Morgan, I keep looking at my family. You’re letting Henry be Jesus again and my mother is so happy and here her darling daughter goes out and kills people.”

  There was a weird sound, not out of the phone, but behind Remy. A sort of sucking, like a small vacuum cleaner. She whipped around, and there stood Mac, who had breathed in so fast, he had choked himself.

  She looked into her brother’s eyes and saw that she had just achieved a childhood dream: she had shocked Mac.

  “You took the stop sign?” said Mac. “You?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Now someone knew.

  And not just any someone. A someone who loved to make trouble on purpose. Her own worthless, rotten brother.

  “It’s my fault, Remy,” said Morgan. His voice was so tired, it didn’t seem to take up the whole line. “You didn’t actually take the stop sign. You didn’t actually take any of them. I won’t bring you into it.”

  She was weirdly angry with him. “Don’t you free me from blame, Morgan Campbell. Don’t you carry this all by yourself!” Her tears rushed down as if they had places to go, people to see. “Mac, don’t you tell!”

  Her brother was stunned. “You and Nicholas and Morgan took it?” said Mac.

  “Listen,” said Morgan. “I’ll leave you out of it. I promise. It’s just that … ah, Remy … I have to tell.”

  “You don’t have to, Morgan!” She was twisting back and forth, keeping her eyes on Mac, so he wouldn’t run and find Mom, and concentrating on Morgan, so she’d win the argument. “They can’t find out, Morgan. Let it lie there.”

  Let it lie there. Remy was piling sin upon sin, like blankets on beds. She would be the princess in the fairy tale, the little green pea of her terrible deed always at the bottom of her sleep. She would never again get through a night.

  Morgan was still silent, and she knew that he would tell. He had to tell. It was going to come out of him like vomit purging itself from a sick stomach. “At least wait until you and I can talk it over, Morgan. Not on the phone. Holding hands.”

  Maybe holding hands with her was the last thing on earth he wanted, but if she could hang on to him, maybe they would make it.

  After a long silence he said that he couldn’t tell his parents tonight anyway because of an important Christmas party. So, okay, he would wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow they would meet and talk about it. “My father will drive us to the mall. I’ll tell him I’m taking you to the movies. Eight screens, there’s got to be a movie we’d want to see. First we’ll talk.”

  An important Christmas party, thought Remy, hanging up slowly to postpone dealing with Mac.

  Lovely sweet crystal-clear Christmas. Why couldn’t this have happened before some stupid holiday, like Arbor Day or something? Why did it have to touch Christmas?

  She stared at her brother. He was so short and thin. So achingly little for an eig
hth grader. If knowledge gave him power, she couldn’t see it. “Just tell me if you’re going to tell,” she said fiercely.

  He shook his head.

  Remy sank onto her bed, and her brother sank down beside her. Clumsily, Mac patted her back. More clumsily, he put his arm around her and tried to hug. They were definitely amateurs at showing affection.

  But, oh, how it counted! She actually rested her head on his lower, smaller shoulder. “Mac, it was such fun! Morgan and I were having so much fun.”

  “You never thought of what might happen?” he whispered.

  “I thought of what might happen to me. I never thought of what might happen to her.” She was clinging to him now. “Oh, Mac! Why couldn’t Denise Thompson remember the crossing? Why couldn’t she have driven home a different way? Why did there have to be such a big truck coming? If she’d hit some lightweight little Chicken McNugget of a car, she’d be alive.”

  I’m starting to hate the woman I killed, thought Remy. Like it’s her fault. Little by little I’m not nice anymore. I want to be a nice person!

  Her brother’s voice was not junior high. Not taunting or teasing or obnoxious. It was sad. “You’re in trouble now, Rem,” he said, as if he loved her, and was willing to be in trouble with her.

  “Not if we don’t tell. Oh, Mac, they really could sue us. Or put us in jail. But not if we don’t tell. The odds are they can’t find out unless we admit it! So we’re not telling.”

  Mac was quiet for a long time. “I think you’re in trouble whether you tell or not,” he said at last.

  “You gotta understand something,” said Nickie.

  Nickie was smoking. Any minute the party guests would begin to arrive and it was entirely possible that Morgan’s parents would glance out the window and see Nickie in their driveway. Mom and Dad hated both Nickie and cigarettes. Nickie was sucking slowly and grandly, rotating smoke in his mouth, shifting his jaws, as if his smoke had more substance than other people’s smoke and required space.

  Nickie leaned on the Buick’s open door, midswagger. He used the cigarette as a pointer.

  “I’m not gonna get hooked into this,” said Nickie. “You can’t prove a thing, Morgan. You’re the one has that sign, remember. And in case you didn’t know it, every sign has a code number on the back, so the traffic department can identify it. It isn’t just any stop sign you got in your cellar, buddy. It’s the stop sign.”

  Nickie grinned. His teeth were separated, fanglike. His clothes fit even worse, as if he had grown over the weekend. How could he not notice that everything was too small on him? Didn’t it make him crazy to have his pants halfway up his calf?

  “You chose the sign,” said Morgan. “You picked that stop sign. You and I both took it.”

  “You’re lying, Morgan. And if you say I had anything to do with this, I’ll ruin you.” He was calm. He was making no threat. Ruining Morgan was a fact.

  Nickie sounded primitive, and yet modern. Like one of the terrible civil wars they kept studying: where brothers and cousins decided Yes, this is the day we’ll shell the neighbors, murder the firemen, kill the schoolchildren, and bomb the hospital.

  Morgan got sarcastic. “I should wear a bulletproof vest? Have somebody taste my food?”

  Nickie smiled and in that instant Morgan saw why parents didn’t want their kids near Nickie Budie. “I’ll make it worse,” said Nickie gently. He spread the words through a swirl of gray smoke. The smile grew on his face and the smoke hung like the smile. “I’ll tell the police, and your parents, and your friends, and all those teachers you cozy up to, that you were hoping there’d be an accident. That’s the kind of person you are, Morgan. You hung around the intersection, Morgan, and when it happened, you watched. You enjoyed yourself when Denise Thompson bought it.”

  Politics drew lawyers. Campaigns and publicity excited them. The Campbell house, magnificently decorated for Christmas, was packed with lawyers. Morgan was always slightly surprised to be reminded that his father as well as his mother was a lawyer.

  Men and women gathered round with puppy-dog excitement. If they’d had them, tails would have wagged continually. Instead they ran their mouths. They were lawyers, they had to talk. They couldn’t say anything once, they had to say it twelve ways.

  CNN, mute, ran on one television, while the stereo played Christmas carols sung by English boy choirs. A lawyer with a weight problem turned the TV channel. “I want to see if the guy runs the ad again,” he said.

  Morgan was passing hors d’oeuvres. His tray had bacon-wrapped mushrooms, shrimp-filled rolls, and miniature asparagus quiches. He kept the tray steady.

  The lawyer put three little quiches on a red-and-green napkin and speared a mushroom with a toothpick.

  Let it be a car ad, thought Morgan, who knew perfectly well it was not a car ad. All these guests were already driving the car of their dreams.

  Few were deflected from their wine and conversation. Only Morgan and the heavyweight lawyer glanced at the screen.

  The ad came on.

  Once more Morgan watched Denise Thompson hold out her arms, and once more listened to the end of the story: Bobby Thompson would never hug his mother again.

  Morgan’s parents were over by the tree, telling where they had acquired their crystal star collection. This one in Paris, this one in San Francisco, this one in a darling little gift shop on the Cape.

  “What would happen to the people who took that stop sign?” said Morgan very casually. “If they were ever found, I mean?”

  Morgan’s lawyer jumped right in and chewed on it. The man actually flexed his forehead wrinkles. “It’s an interesting legal question. Taking a sign is only a misdemeanor. A larceny.”

  Morgan set the tray down, locked his fingers together, and studied his white knuckles. “You mean it’s no big deal?”

  “Maybe a fine. Fifty bucks. Unless you get into reckless endangerment.”

  Morgan felt his way. “And if there is reckless endangerment? Would they go to jail?”

  The lawyer swallowed a baby quiche whole, like a raw oyster, chasing it with wine. He shrugged. “It’s probably kids. Probably no priors. It’d be very rare for a juvenile with no priors to do time. They might get a felony sentence. One to five.”

  One to five. As in years. One to five years! Out of his life!

  But that was fair. Denise Thompson, after all, had no years.

  “With kids, though,” said the lawyer, stabbing a toothpick through a mushroom as if he were executing it, “none of it would be served.”

  “None?”

  The lawyer shook his head. “Never happen. Kid would get probation and community service.”

  They had been joined by a law partner of his mother’s. She also took a baby quiche, but nibbled hers crumb by crumb. They were about to get a second opinion. That was fine with Morgan. He wanted to hear again about how none of the five years would be served.

  “Your dad would like to see that changed, Morgan,” she said. “The system is stacked so that criminal teenagers rarely end up paying for what they do wrong. Not in money. Not in prison terms. Not in public shame. Say the person who took that sign is a male minor, which is probably the case. You prove it, but you can’t even get the boy’s name in the newspaper or on television to shame him, never mind jail time. What’s the penalty? Basically, see, in this case, a woman dies and the kid responsible for her death sails along on a fair wind.”

  “Now, wait. The law says he’s not responsible,” said the other lawyer. “He’s responsible only for taking the sign.”

  “Correct,” said the woman, “but the law and morality don’t always cross paths. Anyway, your dad’s idea, Morgan, is to put the parents’ name in the paper instead. Make parents responsible. So they catch little Neddy Smith, who stole this sign, but little Neddy’s name cannot be printed. So instead you get this into the paper: The fourteen-year-old-son of Joe and Mary Smith, who live at 150 South Main Street, was convicted today of the theft of, et cetera, et ce
tera. Joe teaches school at Center Elementary and Mary is a real estate broker.” She finished her final crumb. “The parents, with any luck, lose some customers, some friends, and some standing in the community. At least somebody pays a price.”

  Over by the beautiful Christmas tree, glittering like one of her ornaments, Nance Campbell burst into peals of laughter. Her laugh was wonderful and room filling. Everybody turned to admire her.

  The sixteen-year-old son of Rafe and Nance Campbell, of 1127 Farmington Avenue, was found guilty of stealing a stop sign, which resulted in the death of Denise Thompson. Nance Campbell is a prominent attorney. Rafe Campbell is running for governor.

  Food Court at the mall. A thousand strangers having pizza wedges, egg rolls, curly french fries, or frozen yogurt. A thousand strollers with a thousand cranky babies, a thousand packages resting against a thousand knees. Morgan did not see how any of those people could have a problem as big as his.

  “So in other words,” said Remy, “we wouldn’t go to jail, we wouldn’t go to prison, we wouldn’t get our names in the paper, and we wouldn’t even pay much of a fine.”

  Morgan made piles of salt and pepper on the table and mixed them with a thin red-and-white-striped coffee stirrer. “Right.”

  “All that would happen is, our parents will hate us. Their lives will be ruined. Your father’s campaign will end before it starts.”

  “That,” said Morgan, “and Mr. Thompson will buy a shotgun and stalk us.”

  “Oh, well, then,” said Remy. “What are we waiting for?”

  They giggled hysterically. They were in a booth. They had started with Morgan on his side and Remy on hers, facing each other, but Morgan got brave and switched and was next to her now. Very next to her. The arm not lying on the table mixing salt and pepper was around her waist, pulling her in tight and warm.

  Her left hand and his right balanced the glass shakers on their sides, tilted tepee-style over the salt.

  Remy brushed her lips over his cheek.

  He held her a little tighter. “But that’s only the legal side,” said Morgan. He let out his breath so hard, the salt blew in a tiny white hurricane across the slick tabletop. “Now I have to tell you about Nickie.”