The rest of the date was boring, we went to a dance where no one
danced and then to a friend's house to not watch a movie while the
more committed couples made out and the rest of us sat around
awkwardly passing time. I got a single kiss and hug for my troubles,
rip-off. She was much warmer on the phone after that and she kind of
thought we were a couple. Two weeks after the date dance she invited
me to come over and hang out with her while she babysat some young
children while their parents were out of town for the weekend. Alone
with a girl in the house for the weekend? Yes, please and thank-you.
I Wanted to go and hang out but my mother might naturally ask all
sorts of silly questions about why a sixteen-year-old was going over
to stay at a house with a seventeen-year-old while the adults were
gone. I was hoping something moderately to very naughty so I threw
her off the trail with that old chestnut of duplicity – the lie. I
told her I was going to a town in the opposite direction to hang out
with boys. The double switch of place and company was intended to
throw her so far off the trail as to keep her safely in the dark. I
took the Tercel wagon and drove the shorter but more desolate and
dangerous route over the mountain to Delta. I got there okay after a
little over an hour and what I hoped would be a snuggly kissy evening
turned into helping babysit until 11 when the little terrors finally
went to sleep. Now, I thought would be the time. She thought we
should just cuddle and talk. Which we did until 1 am when I thought
I should head home to keep the illusion that I was safely and
unsneekily where I had said I would be. I walked outside only to find
that in the time I had not been making out with my sorta girlfriend
it had snowed 3 inches. We were in a rural part of a rural town on a
weekend night so the chances of the roads being cleared was roughly
nope, bordering on laughably nope. I decided to disregard the weather
and drive home any way because in the calculus of youth getting home
and staying ungrounded is more important than risking death. I got
one more fairly chaste kiss and then I was off into the still falling
snow. I drove back to town which was dark and abandoned with only a
splattering of porch and street lights to color the almost white out
snow yellow. I drove out of town and onto the forty mile stretch of
basically uninhabited and probably untraveled till morning road. The
snow had completely obscured the lines and all I could see was the
tops of the sticks that marked the sides of the road that lead to
the top of the pass and through a small town and then on through
three more small towns and then home. I had only one working
headlight and I was leaning as far forward as I could to strain to
see the markers and to keep my increasingly unsteady car on the road.
About six miles outside of town the road turned and I did not and I
drove down an embankment twenty or so feet until I bumped into
something that was covered in snow. The car jolted to a stop, stalled
and died. I had not seen another car since I left my friend's
babysitting house and I was stuck off the side of the road in a
snowstorm woefully under-dressed to spend the night in a car or
walking to find help. I had on some jeans and a long sleeve shirt
because when I had left it was a reasonable warm fall day and no snow
in sight. I was really scared it was getting cold, it was very dark
and the only person who knew where I was thought I was driving home
and would not check to see if I made it there safely. I was in a bad
way.
