To the Kid Who Drove Too Fast
I’m 15 when you’re pronounced dead. It’s just five days after Christmas. The knowledge radiates from the TV downstairs, carried up to my bedroom like vapor. My sister is upset—she’s older, and she knew you. On the news segment, I recognize a girl’s voice, metallic and transmitted through however many wires. She is—was?—your girlfriend, even though she’s my age. Sometimes I count her blonde highlights in science class and wonder why she wears your camouflage-patterned coat even though the classroom is stuffed with artificial heat. “If he had been wearing his seat belt and going the speed limit,” she says, “all of this could have been avoided.” The news segment ends. My parents shake their heads, change the channel.
When winter break is over, we’re funneled back into that low brick building with wire across the windows, and Chase, you’re all anyone can talk about. An announcement is made on the intercom. A lot of people pray. They sell pins with your face on them to raise money for the funeral. I don’t see your girlfriend for a while. When she returns, her braces are blue instead of green—blue like your truck, blue like your boots.
I don’t think about you much, only when my parents take the long way home after picking me up from school. Then, we drive along the barbed wire fence, past the Baptist church and Angus cows fattening in the field, to that bend in Little River Church Road where you lost control. Frostbitten bouquets decay at the base of a plastic cross, their color seeping into the orange Carolina clay. You stare out from a metal frame, your face smaller than my fist, slowly bleached by the sun.
The flowers wither. The white cross mildews and turns green like an abandoned penny. The marks your truck left on the tree fade. Once a year, on December 30, fresh flowers would appear, the cross would be wiped down, and a new copy of the same picture would be interred within the frame. You are reduced to the same five Facebook posts shared over and over again, an anecdote in driver’s ed class, a poster stapled to a telephone pole for a 5K fundraiser in your honor.
I turn 16, the same age you were when you crashed through the windshield. I’m too thin and speak words so sharp that they cut the roof of my mouth. I’m willing to say anything to get a rise out of my parents, my teachers, anyone who looks at me for too long. When I drive my car past the place where you died, I don’t even notice. I keep my eyes planted on the horizon line, hating every trailer park and steeple I pass. Even though I didn’t know you, I don’t like you, not even in death. You were the embodiment of everything I want to get away from: someone who killed deer for sport and took the animals’ bodies to be gutted by the taxidermist downtown, someone who would marry their high school sweetheart, someone whose lower lip bulged with stolen dip.
When I dream, it’s of skyscrapers glittering wetly, of sidewalks steeped in neon. Once, a girl told me, “You don’t look like you belong here.” I was sitting on the steps outside the cafeteria, my back against graffiti-stained bricks. I remember shutting my book and squinting up at her; I could tell by her face she didn’t mean it cruelly. I thanked her and opened my book. She shrugged and walked away.
I switch schools. You fade from my consciousness like a bruise. People at the new high school like me more than they did at the old one. I wear beetle-green combat boots and drive nose-ringed girls around at night in my convertible, spitting cherry-flavored slushy over the edge of the driver-side door so it smacks the backseat passengers in the face. And we laugh, getting stoned on dirt roads, mosquitos biting at our most tender places. I drive until we are lost, the desolate landscape choking off any cell service. I drive until we are afraid of where we are; silos loom, erupting from the earth. The white lines that contain us dissolve at the edges of my vision. Eventually, the tires stumble across a familiar road, and we sigh with relief.
“Now that I have buried my own dead, wound flowers to a wire frame that would sit atop my grandmother’s casket, death means so much more to me. ”
After I graduate high school and move 300 miles away, I hide my southern accent, no longer inventing syllables and softening words so they melt like candy in my mouth. But when I study O’Connor, Faulkner, and Lee, I recognize the poltergeist heat throbbing between each word, can smell the fertilizer wafting from the tobacco fields. I feel as if they too knew the bleeding, shot doe that had stumbled across my parent’s driveway as she made her way to the woods. They knew that when you killed a copperhead, you had to bury its head far away from its body. They knew that sometimes, boys like you, Chase, died for no reason.
Now I’m 25, nine years older than you will ever be. When I was last home, my sister mentioned that soon will be the ten-year anniversary of your death. I borrowed my dad’s car—the convertible had long ago been totaled—and drove to Little River Church Road. I had driven past your memorial so many times in the past decade, not recognizing it for what it was. It was only in the past two years, when the world forced us back into our homes and I moved back to my parents’, languishing on the front porch, that I thought of where you crashed. Now that I have buried my own dead, wound flowers to a wire frame that would sit atop my grandmother’s casket, death means so much more to me.
In the picture at your memorial site, you look the way you always do, tiny and made of ink. Honeysuckle vines wind around the cross. I lean against the hood and remember all the times, growing up in this town, that I had opened the door of a waiting, headlightless car and driven off with near-strangers. The wrongness that satiated my boredom. How I stretched against the confines of this town, and how, after all this, maybe you had done the same.
“In my imagination, I see you, deep in the tangled countryside, you and boys like you driving too fast in the jet-black night.”
I close my eyes and listen to the leaves shake on the tree limbs. In my imagination, I see you, deep in the tangled countryside, you and boys like you driving too fast in the jet-black night. I can smell the scent of exhaust and oakmoss that filled the air during your last hours. I can picture, by the roadside, girls grown from motor oil lacquering their eyelids with stolen liner in the dirtied rearview mirror of parked cars. They wait for your headlights to appear. “Where are they racing to?” Someone asks. Half answers flutter in the dark. “The end of Little River Church Road,” someone says.
When you pull up in your truck, another boy is standing on the yellow vertebrae of the road, his arms over his head like a prophet, hauls himself over the side of your truck bed. Then your taillights disappear into the dark. The highway unspools under fickle moonlight. The boy in the bed of your truck is standing; he presses his hips violently against the back window. Occasionally, you glance at him as he kicks at the window—the others in the car whoop and holler. The gas pedal creeps closer to the floor.
Soon you are down a road that twists and writhes like a beheaded snake. In a rare act of mercy, you let your foot off the gas—but not before Little River Church Road appears like an animal in a flashlight’s beam: sudden, alarming. The tires ache against the pavement, then the earth.
The tree looms toward you. You cut the wheel, forcing the tires to shriek. The two boys next to you are thrown against your body. Your forehead hits the window leaving a greasy smudge. Branches thin like fingers hit the boy in the back and he smacks against the truck bed.
“Y’all good?” you call.
The boy blinks tears from his eyes. Your friends, drunk and swollen, laugh.
“I’m good.”
You drive back to the girls lounging against hand-me-down cars. The boys fall out of the truck like shattered glass. The girls kiss them, mouths filled with smoke. The forest shivers something loose that goes darting across the highway. The girls wave their cigarettes, red constellations in the dark. You start the engine just as another boy hauls himself into the truck bed.
“This time, don’t stop for nothing,” he tells you.
You smile, your teeth shining wetly against the night, and put the gearshift in drive.
About the Author
Sylvie Baggett grew up on a lavender farm in rural North Carolina, a very different environment from Brooklyn, New York, where she now resides. For work, she’s an editor. For fun, she’s probably lying to strangers in bars or singing country songs in the kitchen.
Read Sylvie’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Mayer Tawfik.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
