You hit the gas pedal and the car accelerates, faster, faster, and faster, like it’s egging you on in some weird way. I glance over at the needle on the speedometer and it’s right in between 70 and 80. I’m kind of nervous, kind of scared, and kind of wish you would just slow down a little. But at the same time, I think, this is harmless teenage fun and I should be enjoying this. I’m sixteen for God’s sake. So I just sit back, and look out the window quietly, while you hold my knee in a slightly protective manner. I close my left hand over your right hand on my knee, realizing how much larger your hands really are in comparison to mine. It makes me feel like I’m a kid again, where everyone and everything is so much bigger than me. The car ducks into a two-lane tunnel, and I fix my eyes on the lights illuminating the dark concrete walls. The lights blur into a single streak because of how fast we’re going, and after a while, my mind blurs.

Soon, I get confused and everything around me swirls into a big mess for a little bit, sort of like when I was in elementary school art class, learning about primary and secondary colors and how blue and red mix to turn into purple, how blue and yellow mix to turn into green, and so on. In the second grade, I tried to mix green and yellow paint together, thinking that it would turn into blue, but it just turned into an ugly brown color that reminded me of the geese poop that I would see at the park sometimes. That’s when I learned that some things just don’t work like that.