I’m 24 years old and I just bought my first car. Well, I half-bought a car, anyway. The significant other bought the other half. He’s generously designated the passenger side as mine.
I have a love-hate relationship with ground transportation. The morning after prom, I rolled out of bed, terrible up-do still intact, and took my road test. I celebrated getting my license by getting my diploma the next afternoon.
After a summer away from home, re-learning the art of the right-of-way was a little tricky, but I got through it unscathed, mostly by depending on friends with both licenses and cars. I just had the little piece of plastic that didn’t get me into the good nightclubs.
Commuting to school was an intricate dance of sharing. I hadn’t worked much during high school, with parents that encouraged extracurriculars over part-time employment for the sake of college and scholarship applications. My graduation gift savings went directly from my aunts and uncles’ hands to the university cashier’s office, and $7.50 an hour from a grocery store doesn’t add up that quickly. Could I have gotten one of those new fangled car loans? I don’t know. I didn’t bother to even think about it.
I would wake up early on a school day, drive my mother to work, then drive to school in her big, white minivan. It was all very sexy and lots of attractive college juniors and seniors wanted to date me.
But then I took public transportation for a semester, and there went that dream. If anything, taking the bus was awkward. I was awkward, fumbling for exact change was awkward, and the other girl on the bus who went to the same college as me was awkward. We’d awkwardly nod to each other, maybe exchange a few awkward hellos, and then awkwardly avoid eye contact if we saw each other on campus, I assume because we each knew the other’s dirty little secret.
Why, you ask, in all those years of undergraduate education, did I not once invest in my own set of wheels? Well, because after graduation, I was going to move to New York City for graduate school, hang out at a coffee shop all the time like on “Friends,” become best pals with a real-life Serena Van der Woodsen, and then spend my commuting hours either in town cars or glamorously riding the subway.
I moved to Florida instead. Florida, with its slow left-lane drivers, and its general inability to get out of the way of on-coming emergency vehicles, and its general confusion about the purpose of turn signals.
I guess the half-a-first-car thing was necessary—an overdue right of passage, if you will. It’s red, it’s fine, it gets me from A to B. Well, it gets him from A to B. I only own the passenger side, after all.
