She loved this car. And she had earned it. Senior year had been grueling. The AP courses would have been manageable on their own, but volunteering in the shelter, writing the college essays, holding the champion title as Coxswain of her crew, and placing second in nationals with the debate team kept her in constant motion. Seven days a week and not one moment to stop. To be still. To listen to something other than the voices of the adults around her who knew best. Coach Chris, always drilling them that “Winning is the whole shebang!” And “Sync your team or sink yourself!” Her parents constantly managing her schedule, checking in if she had finished assignments or written thank you notes, giving pointers for making good impressions during college interviews, offering last minute pep-talks while chauffeuring her from one obligation to the next. Everyone of their efforts blaring as loudly as through her cox-box of their need for her to be the perfect child. She was never alone. Never was there not something she had to do. Never was there not an expectation that had to be met, no, rather exceeded. Only those few precious seconds between her head hitting the pillow at 9:30 every night and sleep engulfing her with one quick swallow, in those precious, fleeting moments, something would flutter on the rim of her consciousness, something curious, something dangerous. If she could just focus… but before she new it, the 4:45 am alarm would rudely summon her into motion again.

And then, there she was. The day of graduation. When she came down that morning for breakfast, before they would all leave together for the ceremony, her dad seamed angry. He was telling mom that kids had egged the house. That they would have to clean it up before they left or it would bake onto the siding. He motioned for everyone to come out and see the damage, ushering her ahead. She stepped out of the front door with the rest of the family close behind, and there, directly in front of the house, was a bright red and white Mini Cooper convertible with a huge white bow on top. When she turned around, she saw her mom and sister holding their phones, filming her stunned reaction and joyful tears. Her dad held up the keys and said, “You earned it!”

That was a month ago. After a week of graduation parties, the family went to their summer house at the Outer Banks for three weeks. She had never felt so free. She, in the driver’s seat. Her own hands on the steering wheel. The one place besides the toilet where she was alone with no other voices drowning out her own. How many times had people had to honk behind her because she was just basking in the brief silence and rest that a stop-light could offer. Now the top was down, both the trunk and the back seat were full of the things she would need for the rest of the summer in DC for the obligatory internship before heading farther north to Connecticut at the end of August. Again she was lost in her thoughts, which seemed almost like a new acquaintance after all those years of back-seating it. Here at the junction where I-40 heads west off of the I-95 that would take her all the way to DC, again the impatient commuters scolded her. Usually the angry, grating noise jolted her out of her time-suspension, snapped her back to her “on-setting,” reminded her to stay in-line, “in-sync,” just as she kept her crew obeying a navigation they hadn’t chosen. But this time she could not be pulled from the aimless, lazy river of her mind. This time the incessant bleating of their horns triggered something else. Something did snap. She heard it loud and clear. It was the same pop that came from opening a jar of her mother’s peach-preserves. She engaged her blinker, flipped the bird at the cars behind her, slowly pulled on to I-40, and in her beloved, bright red convertible, her journey began.