Fast Forward

Sunday, 2 a.m., and we're hopped up on soda and cigarettes for lack of better options. It's early summer, school is out, and as we cruise the empty streets with the windows down I think how I love this town best in the morning, no matter which end of the day I arrive at it from.

We pass the grocery store, the furniture store, then Dunkin' Donuts, where I see the backs of three old men in three old windbreakers sitting on stools beneath a fog of smoke. As we go by GoodyGood Bakery, I glimpse the bakers in back, lights shining down on their tattooed arms, rising and falling like pistons.

We stop for a red light and a pall settles on the car-it might be time to head home-but a sudden idea is shouted from the backseat. The light turns and we make the sharp turn onto Church Street near the shuttered shoe factory, reenergized with a second wind. Our headlights slide over a man looking up from the pay phone outside the Busy Corner Store. There is always someone on the pay phone outside the Busy Corner Store, always someone slumped against the brick wall, receiver to ear, cigarette pinched between finger and thumb, listening to news that never looks good.

We cross the river by the old boardinghouse and U-turn at Saint Joseph's Church to park in front of the Spa, tumbling out of the car. The clerk doesn't even look twice when we walk in, he's so used to late-night antics and loud, stupid talk. After all this is the Laconia Spa, the only store around here still open at 2 a.m.

The Spa offers a lot for 2 a.m. spontaneous shopping-boxes of Boston Baked Beans and wax-paper rolls of Necco Wafers, thirty kinds of chocolate bars, fifteen flavors of bubble gum. The Spa sells rolling papers and tins of tobacco, potato chips, Twinkies, and bread; there are single beers you can buy-in the cold case next to bottles of soda and quarts of milk ready to turn-and even single cigarettes, ten cents each, from a mysterious hodgepodge collection that sits in a mug by the cash register, next to the plastic cup of Slim Jims and the glass jar full of pretzel rods.

There are shelves of dusty paperbacks and comic books too, plus stacks of newspapers and magazines and a long high rack of pornography that sits above a cardboard, hand-lettered "NO BROWSING" sign. The porn magazines are only partially wrapped, so the cover girls all peek out from the top of their brown paper veils, their eyes following you throughout the store.

Their eyes are following us as we discover exactly what we want-plain white chalk-so we pool our change and pay, then rattle down the wooden steps and up the sidewalk, breaking open the box and handing out pieces before rushing into the street.

I lie down on the pebbly asphalt, thrilled at the hands tracing their way around my body, tracing around my arms and legs splayed out. We take turns until there are four silhouettes left empty on the street, outlines of an accident that never was.

Monday, 7 a.m., I pull up to GoodyGood Bakery and Mr. Stone unfolds himself from the passenger seat and goes in to buy coffee. I am behind the wheel of the driver's ed car with its extra passenger-side brake and large sticker on the trunk reading "STUDENT DRIVER," in bright, humiliating red. I am bleary-eyed and tired, but I have the morning drive slot because I like to get things over with early.

I get out of the car to switch seats so my partner, Gar, can get behind the wheel for our second hour of instruction. I open the back door and look at Gar slumped down in the seat, eyes closed, arms wrapped around his wrinkled Tom Petty T-shirt. I have known Gardiner Green since kindergarten, when I was sent to the principal after smacking him on the head with a notebook and aside from being a lot taller, Gar doesn't really look too different. In elementary school Gar and I were always alphabetically linked thanks to our last names, and we also both were loud-mouthed obnoxious know-it-alls, so our kindergarten run-in was not the only time I considered him responsible for an undeserved trip to the office. But we have mellowed considerably and I like us both much better now.

Fast forward a few years and Gar will be gone, thanks to a car surfing mishap Mr. Stone could easily add to the roster of blood on the highway stories he sprinkles his driver's ed lectures with. When I hear news of Gar's death, I will immediately remember hitting him with that notebook, though the recollection will come without the mix of indignation and shock I'd felt at age five meeting my match. I will be struck instead by the insignificance of this memory when held up against the entirety of Gar's life, and by the absurdity he has died doing something I'd never before knew existed. But today Gar is only sixteen, sitting in the backseat of the driver's ed car, and despite appearances I know is he's not sleeping. Sure enough, as I stand there holding the door his eyes flip open.

"It is way too early for this," he says to me.

"True," I say, and step back as he grabs the roof handle and pulls himself out of the car. I slide into the back as Mr. Stone walks out of GoodyGood Bakery with his coffee and two white bags.

"Donuts," Mr. Stone says. "Only for you early crew. But not while you're driving," he adds, pointing to Gar before tossing both bags to me in the back."Donuts and driving don't mix."

This is so completely unexpected from Mr. Stone—whose name always seemed an apt description for his stern demeanor—that Gar and I look at each other in speechless amazement, grins on our faces. Finally Gar says in a goofy voice, "Thanks for the treats!" and Mr. Stone smiles and shakes his head as he gets in the car.

I put on my seat belt and roll down the window, the cool breeze of early summer morning blowing through the car. I pull off pieces of donut one by one, licking my fingers after each honey-glazed bite, happy to be done with my driving shift. Perhaps inspired by the unexpected gift of a donut, it occurs to me Mr. Stone is a pretty good teacher. His voice is calm even when he's had to slam on his emergency passenger brake, forcing the car to an abrupt and jarring stop. His voice is calm even when I am in a panic, stuck in the middle of an intersection, traffic coming straight toward us.

Long after class is over, I hear Mr. Stone's calm voice in my head as I drive, telling me to make sure I have enough braking distance, to turn into a skid, to remember my blind spot and be aware the road is most slippery in the first few minutes of a rainstorm. I remember Mr. Stone's instruction long after forgetting so many other things from high school-the quadratic formula, my German vocabulary, all but the ending of Catcher in the Rye.

I wonder now if Mr. Stone remembers us too, if he ever scans the paper for accident stories, relieved when he doesn't recognize names. But maybe he's learned to put us out of mind as soon as we're out of the classroom, knowing there are endless limitations to what he-or we-might ever be able to prevent.

It's only when the second hour is almost up--when we turn onto Church Street to head back-t hat I think to look out the window for the bodies we traced Sunday morning. We had pictured families emerging from Saint Joseph's early Mass, crossing the street for the paper at the Spa, and pausing with sinking wonder at the ghosts of our four bodies splayed across the street. We thought it was hilarious-thought we were so clever-we laughed the whole way home.

But there's nothing when I look out the window, just blank asphalt where the bodies had been. I crush my empty donut bag, thinking how easily chalk is erased from a blackboard, and I look out the window as Gar drives on-past the Spa and Saint Joseph's and the old boardinghouse-only stopping when he reaches the red light at the Busy Corner Store. I am surprised to see that for once there's no one on the phone. The receiver is swinging from its cord, rather than nestled in its cradle, as if someone had stepped away in the middle of a conversation, fully intending to come right back.