"Go-Kart"

Every teenagers dream is to learn how to drive, have their own car, and being able to drive wherever and whenever they felt like it at a young age. That was also my dream, but with parents like mine it seemed as if I would never learn. My father was always too busy and my mother was simply too scared to be in a moving vehicle with me. I felt like the real reason why they didn’t want to teach me is because I would be in the streets too much, but I didn’t care. I was going to learn one way or another.

“Get up, you big fat chicken! You have to help me with this or I’m never going to learn!” I yelled at my mother as I tried dragging her heavy body out of the couch and onto the brown hardwood floor. Although, she would much rather prefer me dragging her around the house than for me to drive her around in the street. As she picked herself up, she looked up at the crazy cat clock with the big eyes on our wall to see that it was 5:15 p.m. “Okay fine, but only for a little while. I do not want to catch traffic, understood?” she said with an ‘I’m going to regret this’ look on her face. I ran to my mother’s 2005 white Ford Escape and turned it on before she could change her mind. Beautiful day, the sun was sunny, the sky was cloudy, and the smell of roses from my mother’s car told me that this was going to be great, but I ended up having an earache by the time I reached my second stop sign. I never heard my mother yell so much or looked so frightened before in my life. “This was a bad idea, let me drive us back home and you can wait for your father to do this with you because I just might have a heart attack.” It was just a minor setback for me and I was definitely not going to give up that easy.

I have a twenty-four-year-old sister, who learned how to drive and had her own car by the age of sixteen. I was seventeen at the time and still didn’t know which way I had to pull the signal stick when I had to turn left. “Driving is easy, it’s like driving a go-kart!” she used to always tell me. “Teach me how to drive! It’s not the same thing stupid because a go-kart is super tiny!” and this would go on and on about who’s right and who’s wrong for about thirty minutes. She basically taught herself how to drive so I thought I could do the same thing, although I probably didn’t choose the right time to do that. It was a Friday night, and my sister & I were at a house party. One thing led to another and before I knew it she was passed out drunk on her friends couch. I couldn’t call my parents to come get us because it was about four in the morning so I thought to myself “I should just drive, I mean why not? It’s like driving a go-kart, right?” I was wrong. As I was driving home, going at about 25 mph, I see a dog jump in front of me and it freaked me out. I try swerving to the left because I didn’t want to kill it and I end up hitting a tree. Not only did I hit the tree, but I hit the dog too! There I am standing, alone in the cold, my sister passed out drunk in the backseat, the car smelled like disappointment mixed with dead dog. I didn’t go near a steering wheel for months after that, so much for ‘driving like it’s a go-kart.’

One day, my sister comes up to my room and says “get ready, I’m going to teach you how to drive the way I learned how to drive.” I felt my face turn red and the room seemed to have gotten a little hotter. I wasn’t too thrilled to be in the same vehicle as her again, not since the last time, but she was the only one that sounded willing to help. “Oh, um, okay just give me five minutes!” or five days. I step outside and walk towards my sister’s car to find her already buckled into the driver’s seat. “But I thought I was...” and she cuts me off “just get in the damn car!” Ten minutes of driving and we arrive to our destination, a blue building that read “Speedy’s Fast Track.” The grin on her face when I realized where she had taken me was priceless. As we both go into our carts, she tried explaining some of the basic stuff like where to put my hands, how to make the turns, how to have control of it, and how not to hit anybody. The ride was smooth and having my sister next to me giving me tips as we went along was great. When we saw one of the riders stop in the middle of the track she taught me the amount of distance I needed to start pressing on the break. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I was ready to take on the real thing.

I enrolled myself into driving school, which is probably what I should’ve done from the start. I advised them that I had little to no knowledge about driving other than go-karts and about the incident I had with my sister and they understood me perfectly. The first time again behind an actual steering wheel and there was no screaming, no drunken people in the backseat, and no panicking whatsoever. It was just me, the little blue car, the open streets, and the instructor of course. She was amazed at how good I drove, and to be honest I was pretty amazed at myself. The thing that helped me most was hearing my sister’s voice in my head telling me what and what not to do while driving. “Are you sure you’ve never driven a car before?” she said with a suspicious look on her face. “No ma’am, I haven’t, but it feels really easy and simple, like if it was a go-kart.”