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This is the last period of the day, and in another week it will be the very last class of my year. I tap my sticky leg against the cool metal of my desk during one more boring driver's ed class, rendered useless because of the license I hold from Missouri and the provisional license from this lovely state, New Jersey, though this isn't sufficient proof that I can drive to the good folks at the board of education. June heat in inner cities makes the air feel like the squish under your toes when you wear your sneakers in the rain. It's better than January bitter chills that leave your fingertips pale and useless with undiagnosed frostbite. Yet they still make us go to school during these suppressing summer temperatures, suffering through too-long lectures in classrooms that are either air-conditioned to simulate morgues or left alone to encourage flies and body odor.
          The new teacher's low, humming drone is the perfect backdrop for my creative impulses. He may think I'm zoning out, and maybe I am, because I love driving and he manages to ruin the magic of it. But my brain is more active in this hour of the day than he realizes; this is where I come up with the best snatches of story. I need these bits of imagined conversation and plot. They fuel depthperception, dp, the little homemade zine I created with Andy this year. I make-believe I'm a writer and Andy tells everyone he's an artist, and somehow we muddle through.
          On good days he waits for me outside the doorway of this classroom, greeting me with his small-toothed smile and a kiss that searches my tongue for traces of the cigarettes I try to deny smoking during the lunches we don't have together. Satisfied that I haven't lit one up, or at least tricked by breath mints into thinking otherwise, we walk to my locker (where he keeps most of his things) and he lets me show him the paragraph I turned out today. He reads it as I root through the mess of essay tests and unfinished drawings that litter the bottom of the cubbyhole. I finish just as he does, and we switch places. He knows where his art supplies are by sense memory now, and he tries to tell me a story as he packs his bag. It doesn't seem like it'll come up in conversation ever again, something about these kids he saw throwing a football over a police car, so I let his voice slip somewhere to the back of my mind. I like watching him tell me stories, factual or created, because if I don't focus on the actual words, but on the way he says them, I can see comic strips in his eyes.
          I leave him at school, because he has an extended art class and I have to get over to the cheap copy shop downtown. It's been three months since we started working on a new issue of dp, six months since an issue came out, five months since we started going out. There just hasn't been time. My mom lets me take her battered green Toyota to school every day so I don't have to waste money on the bus. I've tried to explain that gas costs more, but she hasn't needed to drive in years and nobody wanted to buy her car. It just makes her happy to think that her little girl is all grown up now, even though she refuses to acknowledge it when it actually matters, like going on the Pill or wanting a job so I can quit taking so much of her money. I scrabble for my keys in my messy messenger bag and fish up my prize, unlocking the door and slipping in behind the wheel. The comforting smell of heated plush seats and a little bit of mentholated ash is a trigger for me to squeeze out the tension of my day and just drive.
          It's too short a distance to the store, and I should have walked, but even on boring city streets where I have to go children slow, I get a thrill from the gas pedal that works its way through my thin rubber sole and into my bloodstream. This is what it's like to be bigger than myself. All people see of me from the outside is the metal shell. I am a 1992 green-with-patched-up-white-spots Toyota Camry. My five minute joyride ends, and I park the car a block away from the store. I exit with the air of a kid who's just gotten off the best ride at Six Flags, 'I wanna go again! I wanna go again!', but I get out and lock the door behind me. My cropped black pants leave too much calf exposed to the sun, and I can already feel my skin burning a shiny red to match my hair. It's much too hot, even for almost-summer-vacation. Something's wrong, I feel it in my solar plexus, but I don't know what. Andy says I think too much, that all writers have too much coffee and booze and thoughts going into their system.
          The burly storeowner pokes his head up from a project he's working on in the back of the wonderfully cold store, squinty eyes focusing on my impossible-to-deflate red curls.
          "Don't be shy, Shai!"
          I hate that joke from anyone else, but he's one of those Jersey muscleheads who had something in his skull besides Bruce Springsteen lyrics and brain cells killed by too much Bud, and I like him for it. It's my order he's working so diligently on, and I flush with lioness pride when he brings me a box filled with one hundred copies of depthperception, volume four, the result of many boring math and driver's ed periods, the result of late nights spent worrying too much to sleep. I fussed with they layout on this one so we’d have exactly eight pages, not including front and back cover. We're moderately successful for a zine; we have a handful of like-minded teens spread mostly over the Eastern seaboard sending us five dollars per cheaply-mimeographed issue. It's not really a profit, but it's enough to make me think I'm not just being masturbatory. That maybe I have some reason to pursue this writing thing.
          Andy likes the whole package of artistry, the mystique and the license to dress outlandishly and the understanding that he isn't lazy, just misunderstood and preoccupied with his important visions. I don't tell him this, because he would go wide-eyed with hurt and I'd have to stare at the back of his dyed-black head on my pillow until I relented, kissing his shoulder and apologizing. If I told him, I'd want him to change. To know that I do what I do not because I'm in love with the idea of being "a writer," but because I don’t know how else to make sense of things. To know that it's more important that someone gets something real out of my words, even if message sent isn’t message received. They don't need to know my vision, my muse. They can superimpose their own and say, "That's my life, how can she know this?"
          I hand over the money to the guy, and he takes out a five-dollar bill and presses it into my palm, curling my fingers over it as he extracts one copy from the box.
          "I've been reading them all, and I feel bad being a devoted reader and not paying anything." His face beams a certain kind of bar-lit, fractured understanding at me, and I want to cry out of joy and tenderness. Instead I grab the box and hoist it onto my hip, gripping the bottom corners of the light package and retreating. Once I'm back in my car, still parked, I take out my cell phone and dial these digits from memory.
          "Hallo?" I hear scraping in the background, raw laughter and someone cursing.
          "Hey, And. It's me. Got the copies." I hear his pencil scratching loud against the canvas. He says he likes to mix his media. I want to say he wants to be Andy Warhol but has no new blood, no talent for it. He's silent a beat too long for my tastes. "Um?"
          "Oh, great. Can you package them tonight? I think I left some stamps over at your house last time I was there." I can't remember the last time he was there, but I remember my mom almost walking in on us naked. I also can't remember the last time I wanted to spend time with him if he wasn't naked.
          "How about you come over and help?" He always looks at the fresh-pressed issue with me, hands tracing over his own pictures lovingly, outlining my words when he remembers their existence. I hear him drop his pencil. I can almost hear the muscles in his face shift his thin, pretty, pierced lips into a frown.
          "I, um, can't. Art show tonight. Free wine."
          "Oh? Whose show?" I can't keep this queen-bitch chill from my voice. He tells me the name of the artist whose stuff is on display, and something clicks in my head. "You hate that guy. You said his stuff isn't galvanizing enough or something like that. No cow dung or Twin Tower depictions."
          "Yeah, well. Maybe he's improved, I dunno. And the guy who runs it might like to see my work for the next opening, I hear the next artist had a hissy fit and now he's been booted." I knew it. It has nothing to do with art appreciation. My hand cramps around the body of the cell phone.
          "You asshole."
          "Huh? Sorry, someone's pottery wheel is mad loud."
          "I said. You. Asshole."
          "What the fuck is this?" His voice box strains to accommodate his high-pitched anger. He sighs, and I bet he's running his free hand through his hair. "Fine, fine. You can come with me, I just figured it wouldn't be your scene."
          "This has nothing to do with going to the fucking show. You always come over to see the issue the day it comes out." I don't want to sound hurt, but I do. I want to sound angry, and I am. "When's the last time we didn't have sex when you came over?"
          "What kind of question is that?" The background noise diminishes, and I hear a door closing with a dull thunk. He must have gone into the hallway.
          "When's the last time we didn't fuck on my couch so I didn't have to listen to your whiny, pretentious bullshit for another minute? Huh, Andy? You asshole." His breathing comes in broken-glass jags. I bet he's crying, that pansy loser. "You know what? Fuck it, don't come over. Go to your art show, have their crappy cheese and talk to all the stupid fucks who jerk off over their canvases and call it Beaux Arts." I hang up on his melodramatic falsetto expletives, feeling the catharsis that I usually only find after reading a particularly ghastly tragedy. By the end of that speech my voice had risen to its peak, and I could feel the car itself calming down around me.
          I force my key into the ignition and veer out of my parking space. I drive as fast as the speed limit allowed. Usually I would be dissecting my words, wondering how long it would take for him to call me back and say I was right, he was sorry, he'd change. I'd never told him he was pretentious. I've said I felt used, felt ignored for his work; I've said that he's self-absorbed and oblivious. But never before have I insinuated that he's, well, one of those pathetic souls I mentioned.
          Instead of all of these thoughts, however, all I can really think is "click it or ticket." I didn't bother to buckle my seatbelt. I don't care. I don't even know where I'm going. Some suburb past Bayonne, far from Andy and art shows and cheese wheels and copy shops. Far from the bed where I lost my virginity, smoked my first cigarette, started writing depthperception. Far from the forbidden birth-control pills hidden between mattress and box spring, far from the single mother who forbids the birth-control pills. Far from algebra textbooks and driver's ed.
          My teacher's voice comes into my head, his smooth words slurring over the "click it or ticket" chorus that's been the soundtrack to my drive for the last fifteen minutes.
          "Depth perception is the ability to perceive the world in three dimensions. Depth perception allows a driver to accurately gauge distances. Only animals higher-up on the food chain have it, the other ones don't need it." A kid in my class asked him if that's why it's so easy to run over animals, but I stopped listening. I started thinking about depth perception then, couldn't get the idea out of my head. We all need depth perception, not just for driving or for walking around. We need it to gauge the distance between two people standing so close they're kissing, to figure out how far down a person's soul is, or whether he even has a soul.
          The world from my windshield is more vivid than I ever remembered it. I can see the shapes of trees, all trees and highway as I fly on the freeway now. I can see the distance I've put between me and Andy, not just the ones I've traveled on the roadways today. I want to whoop with the happiness of freedom at last, of nudging my Camry a little past the speed limit.
          I'm driving to who knows where, but I'll be back just a little after dinner. There's nothing to do anymore, no boyfriend to appease, no mother to argue with, no zine to publish.
          All I have to do is drive. And drive. And drive.