“Driving Lessons” by Brandon Yu

Dad was terrified.

There was surely nothing more unsettling than being in the passenger seat with your teenage son at the wheel. I know this because I have been one.
	
After passing the paper exam for my learner’s permit at the local DMV, I was ready to try my hand at the real thing. Mom lent me her white Honda CRV for the occasion, and I enlisted dad’s help to teach me the basics of driving on a cloudy Saturday morning. For the first time in my life, I found myself in the driver’s seat of a car. I white-knuckled the steering wheel, sweat prickling my scalp. Slowly, I proceeded down the street at the breathtaking speed of two miles per hour.

After circling the island around my house a few times, dad suggested we drive to the local Walgreens a couple of miles away. It was an easy two-lane road on the way there, but I kept veering onto the shoulder whenever I saw a car approach from the other direction. When we arrived at Walgreens, I asked dad if I could cruise around town to get a feel for the car. By then, dad had lowered himself into his seat until the top half of his head was barely visible from the passenger window, adopting a hostile, sullen expression as if he were being held hostage at gunpoint. His response was taciturn. “Watch the lines,” he said, referring to the solid yellow dash bisecting the road.

I nodded, making a mental note to be careful. By the time we got to the next stoplight, dad was a professional backseat driver, making a series of curt, unpleasant instructions that I felt were more for his comfort than my knowledge.

“Take a right,” he said. “Go right when the light is green. Understand?”
	
“Turn right, turn right,” he urged when the light changed, as if I would have made a sudden left turn into oncoming traffic just for kicks.

“Go straight,” he said, as if I did not know how roads worked.

A few minutes of driving took us to an isolated plain of grass with a subdivision of gentrified two-story houses in the distance. I parked on the side of the road, which had devolved into a rough gravel pathway flanked by lush, exotic weeds. Crushed beer cans and candy wrappers littered the grass. Dad sighed and produced a paper map from the glovebox. He unfolded it between his hands and snapped it like a newspaper, raising his eyebrows in pugnacious irritation.

“See here,” he grumbled, taking off his glasses and squinting at the map in concentration. “We take a detour here, a left there, a right at the intersection, and then onto the ramp to highway 270.” He clapped the newspaper in half. “Tell you what,” he said, grinning with artificial cheerfulness. “Why don’t you drive around while I look for a way out? I will point you in the right direction, just as soon as I can figure this damn thing out.”

It was not a bad idea. I needed practice, so I fastened my seatbelt. “Sure, dad,” I said. In retrospect, dad just wanted to feel in control of something while I piloted us around in a giant missile on four wheels. Our journey grew increasingly desperate and feverish as I navigated back roads without the assistance of signs or pavement markings to guide me. Eventually, dad gave up looking for a way out and instead focused on his primary objective— survival.

“Do I go left?” I asked at a four-way intersection in the middle of nowhere. “Dad?”

I looked at him for confirmation. He stared straight ahead, glaring at nothing. I took this as a yes and stepped on the gas before he could say anything, boosting us forward at forty-miles per hour and catapulting us onto the other side of the intersection with a suspension-rattling jolt. Through the death-defying chaos of my first day behind the wheel, I heard dad scream, “Stop! Stop! STOP!”

But I was too scared to slow down. Dad screaming in my ears only stressed me out more. On I drove, fishtailing around bends and rocketing down empty roads, spitting gravel, and burning rubber. In front of us was a sizable hump in the road where the railroad intersected, and it was here that I met my greatest challenge that day. With dad’s sound and fury bearing down on me, there was only one way out. I stomped on the gas, and the car shot up the hump like a Skee-Ball on a ramp.

We went airborne.

When the car landed on the other side of the tracks with an earthshaking crash, I finally found the courage to pull the car to a halt in the middle of the road. Dad clutched his chest with one hand, breathing heavily. In the colossal silence that ensued, I managed a nervous, hesitant smile.

“How’d I do?” I asked him. 

Dad gave me a look that transcended all understanding.




I'm Brandon Yu. I'm a third-year engineering student in South Florida with a passion for telling stories. I've been writing for more than a couple years, and I've found personal essays particularly fun to write. I don't sleep because I'm an engineering student, but I like to go jogging when I have the time.