One Night in a Car

America is Tom Basset’s silver Mustang glowing in the light of a McDonald’s drive-thru, where Kara Lowell sits in the passenger seat wondering which number, one through nine, won’t betray the extent of her hunger. They’ve been waiting behind the ’08 Rav 4 forever, and the stuttering driver continues to trip over the word McCrispy. Tom turns to Kara, laughing softly. 

She laughs too, unsure if his gentle eyes are just hiding a lupine plot to fuck her. His real secret is that he’s scared shitless and completely in love. 

The Rav 4 finally pulls forward, and the Mustang takes its place at the screen.

“Welcome to McDonald’s! Will you be using your McDonald’s app today?”

“It’s AI,” Tom says, grinning. “Fifty-five burgers, fifty-five fries, fifty-five tacos.” Ha ha. They both love Tim Robinson. Tom touches Kara’s upper arm with the back of his hand, and her eyes snap down to the floorboards, even though they weren’t making eye contact in the first place. 

“Who the fuck’s playing on my drive-thru?” a new voice asks through the speaker. 

“Oh sorry, I thought—”

“You thought. Fuck do you actually want?”

“Jesus. Uh. A number six.”

“…”

“The chicken nugget me—”

“What driiiiink, man, goddamn.”

“Sprite.”

“Out. All out. Fresh out.”

“A Coke then.”

“Been out since Tuesday, we got Mr. Pibb.”

“Okay. Okay, that’s fine.”

“What else?”

Tom looks at Kara with some of the blood, and all of the confidence, drained from his face. She isn’t ready for the question. 

“Just a Happy Meal!” she blurts out. Fuck, Jesus Fuck, cymbal crashes and very loud incorrect buzzers in her head. Tom golden arches an eyebrow.

“That’s all you want? Get whatever. I want you to get whatever,” he says.

“No, that’s fine, that's all I want. And a McFlurry. I’ll have a McFlurry.”

At the next window, the name tag reads Romeo. He hates the couple even more face to face. Something about their youth and the nerve to make a joke while he’s working. 

“That your girlfriend?” Romeo asks Tom, never mind the total. What a terrible question. Who knows and there’s a lonely world at the end of either wrong answer. 

“Are you that tight over this?” 

Romeo leans out of the sliding glass, almost into the driver’s side window. Looking past Tom, right at Kara.

“He just tryna fuck you, miss.”

That damn well does it. Tom’s face hardens like his father’s as he swings his door open straight into the stucco wall, really diminishing the effect of his gallantry. But at least he still says the right thing.

“Watch your fucking mouth, that is my girlfriend you’re talking to.”

Kara stares at the dashboard and melts, and now it’s hyperpop synths in her head. Tom breathes. Romeo smiles like he won. 

“Matter of fact, this one’s on the house. Y’all folks have a wonderful evening.”

Tom snatches the food, closes the door, and idles forward into the night. Still so young. Romeo pulls a plastic pint of whiskey out of his pocket and takes a slug, thinking what a fine evening it is to get fired from this McDonald’s. Fuck these clowns, mascots, and Mustang-driving punks.

***

The Happy Meal toy looks like her, with black hair and, for whatever reason, sad eyes. Some weird panic snags in her throat at not having any idea who this character is or what she’s from, but it passes and they stare at each other. 

Tom shoves the last bit of trash into the bag and crunches it like a snowball. Kara’s McFlurry is melting, untouched, in the cupholder. He looks at her gazing at the doll, reclined way back, and the word reverie shoots into his mind from some book he read in high school so very recently. Something about the quiet parking lot aimed at the dark road in front of them feels like a dream, like a drive-in movie on the windshield. All he wants to say is that he meant what he said back there about her being his girlfriend, but that would wake them both up. 

Hot Mulligan comes on his Spotify shuffle like an alarm clock. Kara lights up and cranks the volume, a little too high, then turns it back some. 

“Give me credit, I told you you’d like them,” she says with a smirk.

“What are you talking about? I showed them to you.” 

And that’s a lie but now they’re making out in his car with a soundtrack. His hand cautiously reaching up her shirt. She exhales like his childhood dog, he intrusively thinks. He rolls over the center console to get on top of her but manages to flick the spoon out of the McFlurry and send ice cream and Oreo bits everywhere. The particles float in space for a split second. At least she’s laughing.

She’s staring into his eyes from an eyelash-length away. There’s a bright, rust-orange ring in the hazel around her pupils, and she says, “Take me to the beach.” So he starts the car and thanks god for an inline six. 

On the highway, they roll the windows down and the wind makes that noise that feels like it’s inside your skull, so they turn up the music again and run back Hot Mulligan like it’s 2018. She thinks how they would’ve had no reason to be alone together eight years ago. 

Tom takes the exit that says TO BEACHES as Kara spoons up a drippy bite of McFlurry. 

***

Romeo Etienne is fucked up in his ’07 Civic. After his manager told him to pound shit, he hit the liquor store like it’s his last day on earth. Like it’s Friday, at least. He even thinks to himself, Man, I’m fucked up, a time-honored thought amongst many Honda Civic owners through the decades. Drinking and driving is an art in the order of the Dutch Masters, and Romeo’s got one lit. He makes his way down A1A—the scenic route hugging the coast—and inhales. 

Tom and Kara head east toward that same coastline like pilgrims. Things are short-circuiting a little in the Mustang, young lust and the rest of it. Kisses at every idle, tongues staking deeper and deeper claims. 

Somewhere between singing their lungs out, taking the exit, and approaching the terminus where they will fuck in the sand under a bright moon by the noisy ocean, Kara finds her courage. The sugar high of the McFlurry feels like Adderall right now, and Tom’s focus on the road instead of on her is inexcusable. 

“What are you doing?” Tom asks with so much electricity running through his body that the question is rhetorical.

She’s unzipping his pants under the eye of a harsh red light that’s wasting their precious time. Of course his dick is hard and she descends on it, starving for whatever is going on right now. 

Tom’s mind drifts and his right foot has better places to be than the brake pedal. Almost on the verge, he lets the car drift further and further against the red onto A1A. His second-to-last thought, as he looks all too squarely at the green light to his left and the sign reading George Bush Blvd. above it, is: What a funny place to get head for the first time. His last thought is: How much does an engagement ring cost? 

A Civic with most of its paint missing slams on its brakes. A bright yellow ’92 Porsche 9/11 doesn’t. The night explodes. A gorgeous silver Mustang is obliterated.

Romeo has just sobered up for the last time in his entire life without knowing it yet. Slow-mo, et cetera, he tumbles out of his unscathed car toward the ruined one that looks familiar. 

The driver is dead. Forget taking a pulse. The boy he recognizes from his last shift at his shitty job is now a half-collapsed body—the left half, where his heart is—bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. His dick is out, losing an erection in rhythm with the freed blood. 

Closer to Romeo in what used to be the passenger seat is the girl, unconscious with a coin flip for a future.

Romeo pulls her out, and shouts, “I know you,” to nobody who can hear it. In the girl’s strange eyes he remembers his CPR training from a pointless stint in the Coast Guard years ago. On the pavement, on fire, he sees a doll.

Romeo gives thirty chest compressions, then leans in to administer rescue breaths. He exhales a dose of life force into her throat, again, again. The driver of the Porsche walks up in a daze and tells Romeo he’s not supposed to be doing mouth-to-mouth, that’s not a thing anymore. Romeo punches him in the jaw and goes back to performing CPR. 

Sirens in the distance, not so distant. He begs God out loud that she’s about to open her eyes and speak the fresh tragedy that will define an entire life ahead of her. He summons an enormous gulp of air and any magic on its currents into his lungs and puts his wide open mouth over hers. 

The breath of life is sharp with ethanol, dark with mash. It’s the first drink she’s ever had.