By Molly Donnelly
Previously I have written about my trouble getting my
license. I had lots of practice
before I took those horrible horrible tests. Shortly after getting my permit my parents went away for a
day and left my dads big red work truck at home. It had a dump on the back that
was controlled by a push button cord in the cab. Many times Dad would pile 3 or 4 of us kids in the
front. Sometimes the dump would mysteriously
start to rise up in the back and Dad would shout, “Someone is sitting on the
dump button!” Lots of scrambling would ensue and then we would pull over to use
the metal lever in the back to lower the dump back down. On this particular day when mom and dad
were safely out of town I had my friend Crystal over and we decided to use the
truck to drive 4 miles to her boyfriends house. The truck was a stick shift. Not a problem.
We decided to work together.
I did the steering and the pedals and she worked the stick. I would tell her when to shift and we
puttered along in 2nd the whole way there. It took us about and hour there and an hour back using only
dirt roads but we did it and no one found out.
Shortly after that adventure Crystal and I were spending the
night at our friend Brieanne’s house.
Brieanne’s parents worked odd hours leaving us with a little freedom we
like to take advantage of. This
one night we sat on the phone with a few boys from our grade who were all staying
about 5 miles out of town at a sleepover.
They kept urging us to find a way to get out to them. Someone, I’m not really sure which one
of us it was, threw the idea out to drive out there in Brieanne’s mom’s
car. Around 1 am we had enough
courage to try it. Her mom’s car
was a huge red manual that seemed much easier to drive than my dad’s work
truck. We all piled in and since I
had a permit it was decided I would drive. We backed out of the driveway and started down the
road. We made it 2 blocks before
someone approached on the road from the opposite direction. When we drove by I saw that it was a
cop car. I got really scared
and turned at the next intersection to head back to the house. The cop car turned around and started
to follow us. Suddenly it flipped its lights on to pull us over. Crap. I pulled over and tried to act cool.
The cop approached us and tapped on the window. I had no idea where the automatic widow
switches were so I just opened the door.
He asked me why he had pulled me over and I said I don’t know. He said that I had passed him with my
bright lights on. I said, “Oh, ok,
I’m sorry”. I made no move to shut
them off because I had no idea what bright lights were. He said, would you shut them off? I asked him to show me how. He reached in and with a quick flip,
flipped the brights off. He then
asked us all our names, we told him and he asked us where we were coming
from. I lied and told him that we had
all been babysitting a few blocks over and were on our way home. He asked Crystal what she was drinking
and she held up her mountain dew. Amazingly
he told us to drive right home. I
couldn’t believe it. He let us
go. We drove straight home then
started to really freak out. We
had given our names so we were sure he was going to call all of our parents and
tell them what had happened. Maybe
he would charge us with a crime.
We held a séance of sorts on the kitchen floor. We lit candles and prayed that we
wouldn’t get arrested.
For the next few weeks every time the phone rang I would
jump. This is it I would think,
this is the police calling to tell my parents. Thankfully, that call never came. I am forever thankful for
the officer for realizing we were just young dumb kids trying to drive.
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