The windows of the car are down but the breeze doesn’t feel refreshing. That’s just one big hoax, honestly—that breezes are nice. Not sure when people started buying into that idea, but it’s stupid. Either breezes are cold and whipping, like a million icy needles, or breezes are like they are right now. It’s so hot out that the breeze isn’t cool, it’s just propelling the heat into the car to form a smothering blanket of sensory grossness combined with the sound of some metal part grinding under the hood of the car.
The whole situation is eerily reminiscent of sitting next to a way-too-smoky campfire with a disgusting amount of screaming children (which I’ve done more times than I’d like to admit in my days as a camper then CIT at Camp Harlem). As I squint to try to ward off the heat, which, yeah, I know won’t work but I’m not gonna stop trying, I notice that I’m at Mile Marker 100, which feels like it should be some sort of milestone, only I can’t remember which one I started at so for all I know I’ve gotten nowhere. The sun is beating down on my back, though, and it wasn’t all the way up when I left, so it must have been at least half an hour.
This road trip was unplanned, the result of a relatively short but dramatic sequence of events this morning.
I came downstairs, had Eggos as usual (I love their weird sort of spongy texture), and when my mom got home from her spin class (or maybe it’s Zumba? I can’t keep track anymore) I chatted with her about the upcoming day. She told me she was going to get a manicure and asked if I wanted one. I declined, mostly because I hate the smell of nail salons (though I would like to have my nails done) and reminded me that we had Lily’s friend’s bat mitzvah party tonight. After all that, I heard myself say the words I’d been thinking about for years. Maybe it was because my seventeenth birthday was coming up (it was a week from today) and it was sort of hitting me how the years were slipping away. I didn’t want to spend another day being miserable about this. That was a waste of the rest of my youth. I asked my mom if I could get a nose job.
I made sure to keep my voice stable and smooth, like the way those really sweet teachers explain those concepts that you spent hours crying over in five minutes, as I asked and laid everything out in meticulous detail. I’d imagined this moment since I first learned of the procedure and I wasn’t about to screw it up by getting all freaked out. I told her that I’d made enough money working as a madricha at Hebrew school to pay for it myself and that I’d schedule it over the summer so I didn’t miss any school while I was in recovery and that Jennie’s dad had a colleague he loved who specialized in teen plastic surgery and had offered to give us a friends and family discount.
I’d never seen my mom’s face as white as when I made this whole proposition. The first thing she said was this, “The last thing you’re using your money from the Hebrew school to do is to get a nose job. That’s basically apostasy.”
This was when I began to lose my cool. I had resolved not to cry, but soon enough I was moving from calm, collected, and practical to whiny and near tears. Usually, I only hate the sound of my own voice when I hear a recording of it, but it was so terrible this morning that even I wanted myself to shut up. It was hard not to be upset though.
“But I really, really hate it right now,” I told her. “You’re my mother. Shouldn’t you want me to not hate myself? Plus it’s practically a safety hazard. I swear to you I’m going to get into an accident soon because it blocks my field of vision.”
“I’m not arguing with you about this, Hallie,” she said, her tone assured but her face still the color of our lawn right after it snows. “And you’re not going to get into an accident. You got your license at the end of the school year just fine. Don’t be ridiculous.”
I wasn’t being ridiculous, though. I was being completely serious. Now, on the stretch of this highway that I only vaguely remember from drives to my grandparents’ house when I was younger, I’m conducting a very scientific roadtrip experiment—testing how much driving it takes until I get into an accident, because I assure you that this thing on my face is a safety hazard and it won’t be long before I hit something. I mean, I can see my own blackheads better than I can see the exit signs.
I focus on the sound of Emma Cortland, the host of Crime Show, as I drive, trying my best to tune everything else out, including the sight of my own nose. I know what I’m doing. I am a good driver, but this is also probably the longest I’ve ever been on the highway.
I’ve heard this episode before. It’s only the second one in the whole series but it’s a masterpiece, and I really can’t help myself from coming back to it. It’s about this guy, Andrew, who gets a bunch of scam phone calls and then decides to take down the entire operation himself, in turn becoming unlikely friends with some of the guys who have gotten trapped in the phone scheme.
In another life, I think, I would be more like Andrew. Really independent. Maybe I wouldn’t go as far as him (he basically shut out his wife for years to work on the case), but still. I suppose that this little drive of mine is the beginning of my independence, in a way.
Somehow or another, I end up on I-66 and as I’m cruising I begin to feel the tears coming down my cheeks. This is always what happens at the end of this episode, I can’t help it. Andrew had spent years trying to get this scammer out of the crime syndicate, which was basically keeping his family in poverty, and he was making progress, really helping. Then, the guy he was trying to help out OD’d. It’s heartbreaking. That’s it.
For some reason or another, Spotify doesn’t autoplay the next episode and without the distraction of the podcast the magnitude of what I’m doing begins to hit me. The fact that I’m out here, just driving. It hits me that I have no particular destination, and it’s not my intention to run away forever, but I just have this feeling of having to go. Somewhere.
I’m not regretting what I’m doing, let me be absolutely clear about all that. In fact, this whole thing is sort of liberating. Being just me. It’s never like this. Back at home Jennie and I are attached at the hip, which is fine, but this? This is new, it’s exciting. I am realizing, though, that I am all alone with nothing more than my Google Maps, Spotify, and Apple Pay on a highway that I’ve only been on before as a passenger. Alone, and hungry. I never finished my Eggos this morning. In fact, I stormed out before even clearing the plate. I decide to just veer off at the next exit and grab the first thing I can find.
That first thing ends up being a Dunkin, which, sure, isn’t maybe the most substantive, but the donut, shitty avocado toast, and small latte (which at Dunkin is really extra large) get the job done.
I sit on a scuffed up, bar-height orange chair sipping on the latte, and I can see in my periphery wads of gum shoved under the counter side window.
For just a second, I think about turning around and going home. I think about how this day should go—getting myself cleaned up, ready for the bat mitzvah, telling my mom I just had to run some errands and that I didn’t mean to scare her and that would be the end of that.
Soon the caffeine hits, though, and I’m back on the road, pushing on the gas like a feral animal and watching in real time as my tank drains.
I think about turning Crime Show back on but it hits me that I sort of like the sound of well…nothing. It feels unfamiliar, refreshing.
By the time I’ve crossed into Delaware my car is starting to sputter sporadically, and I’m temporarily concerned that it’s going to die right in the middle of the road. I haul into a gas station and check my phone for the first time in a few hours (it’s been on Do Not Disturb).
I only have one notification. From my mom. You good honey?
Yeah, I respond. I can’t be near her, but I don’t want her to be mad at me. Besides, maybe if I’m nice to her I can get her to change her mind on the whole nose job matter.
I pay for the gas and get back in the car where I check my phone to see if my mom’s responded. She hasn’t, and I’m met with a bright red circle around a matching exclamation point indicating that my message to her didn’t go through. I hit the resend button but it immediately bounces back. Fuck. No service.
Honestly, it freaks me out, being all alone out here, but I’ve reached a point where I don’t know North from South so the only logical option seems to be keep going. So I do.
I pay attention to the license plates as I drive and after another hour or two the only states I haven’t seen are Idaho, Alaska, and New Mexico.
But soon enough, it’s too dark for me to make out the letters on any license plate, and it hits me that the bat mitzvah party is probably starting. Lily’s friend probably thinks she’s a woman now, and her mom probably spent the day showering her with praise on her half-decent Torah reading and just right now she thinks she’s unstoppable. Little does she know, in a few short years she’ll just be driving and driving, nowhere in particular, but paralyzed.
As the last bits of sun fade, I notice my eyes starting to get heavy, and I don’t try to keep them open. I can’t find a good reason to.
I don’t even notice the hit. I just notice that the car stops. It’s not that dramatic. It’s not like what you see in movies, the airbags don’t blow up or anything like that, the front just gets all dinged up.
I get out to check for the damage, and sure, I know nothing about cars but it seems fine. It’ll need to be repaired but not replaced.
Fuck it, I tell myself, I can spend my nosejob money on the car. Maybe I deserve it at this point. For half running away or whatever.
As I edge around the median to turn towards what I think is the direction of my home, I consider the worst part of it, which is that my nose wasn’t the reason I crashed. It was my own stupidity.
Which is fine, I tell myself, I still accomplished something today, I still got myself out of the house and, I don’t know, rebelled or something.
As the sounds of the night settle in around me—birds, crickets, the clanging of the tail pipes from long haul trucks onto the scuffed up roads—my eyes adjust to the darkness, enough that I notice a sign indicating that I’m back in Maryland. Seeing the sign that I’m back here, one state line from home makes my stomach churn in a way such that I can’t tell if I’m feeling butterflies and anticipation about being back near my own bed and family or nausea over the same things.
Thoughts of just how close I am to what I was running from, running for reasons that I still can’t quite explain but I know were necessary, ricochet in my head and feel like a bunch of tiny hammers pounding at my skull.
I can’t stand it anymore. I take out my phone, careful to keep at least half an eye on the road. I’ve already survived an accident today.
I open Spotify but quickly realize that I don’t want to listen to Crime Show. I don’t want to be sad. I don’t want to listen to music either, though. I need something less unpredictable than someone’s voice going in somersaults and backflips.
I put on Behind the Bastards. It’s a podcast about, well… bastards and just generally throughout people in history. The hosts are kind of annoying, but I like how friendly they are with each other, and maybe it’s fucked up, but hearing them talk about literal Nazis and stuff (this episode is about Coco Chanel. Who would’ve thought?) makes me feel like a better person than I probably am.
It hits me as the episode plays that I don’t have this show downloaded. That I have cell service. I click the red button again so my message to my mom goes through. But as I read it over, Yeah, I feel my chest tighten and my breath quicken into sharp stabbing inhales—the same scary dizziness that hit me a couple years ago when I was analyzing myself in the mirror, as Mean Girls had taught me to do, and I realized just how wrong my nose looked. I work hard to keep my eyes on the road, but I can’t help my vision from closing in a bit.
I realize, scrunching up my nose just to keep myself from getting distracted and letting my eyes wander, that the message is a lie. And I’ve never thought before that there was anything wrong other than a little white lie, but this is more than that.
Not even thinking about the defeat implicit in what I’m doing, mostly because my brain is foggy and my vision is closing in so much so that my nose is almost all I see, I pull over and call my mom.
“Hi honey.” Her voice comes out sweeter than I’ve ever heard it before and my breathing immediately slows and I can see again and I definitely recognize this part of the highway.
“Mom,” I say, voice quivering and not even trying to make it sound put together and smooth because I’m not, “I got into an accident. I’m okay. But I need you to come pick me up.”
She stays on the phone with me as she kisses Lily on the forehead, tells her she’ll meet her at home after the bat mitzvah, and sneaks out of the party. She stays on the phone with me as she gets into an Uber to meet me, and for most of the time we don’t even talk. I just listen to her breathe and try to sync my breath with hers.
And I hate that I want to sync my breath with hers, but there’s something so peaceful about it. About the two of us, working in some sort of harmony.
After I’m not sure how long she says, “I’m here,” and before I even process what she’s saying her Uber has pulled up beside the car and I’m hugging her and I’m feeling my nose bump into her shoulder and her freshly manicured nails digging into my back.
We get back into the car and she sits in the driver’s seat.
“I’ll pay for the damages,” I’ll tell her, even though she doesn’t seem mad. She doesn’t respond. She just nods.
In the moonlight I can see her hair bouncing, and I can see the way my curls are the same S shape as hers, but I can’t make out my nose in the mirror.
In the dark, this awful, freeing day falls away. In the dark, my nose is a problem for another day. In the dark, I am home.
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