I’m hooked on a feeling… Esme laughs as the music pulses through her, obscuring all other noises of the chilly april night around her. The wind wreaks havoc with her short brown hair as she shifts into drive and eases out of the tight parking space she still doesn’t know how she managed to find. She cranks the music up as high as it will go and sets off down the street, passersby turning and staring as they hear the music blaring from the open windows of her Audi. Tonight is a night to drive.

She doesn’t think about where she’s going. It’s the same route she took last week, through downtown and the residential neighborhoods out to the hills. Sometimes she changes her destination but it’s always the same idea, to drive for as long as possible with the music up and the windows down. Sometimes she takes a friend with her, sometimes she doesn’t. Tonight is one of the latter, just her and her car.

She named the car Antigone after her favorite character from freshman English class, and even though it isn’t really hers she likes to pretend that it is. Her music lives in the CD player, her spare change on the back floor. This car is her ticket to freedom and she takes full advantage of it.

The music is Esme’s life, a collection of memories of moments and people. She’s always associated songs with dates and friends and crushes. Listening to them brings back everything that’s happened that she never wants to forget. There’s always a song.

She drives with one hand on the wheel, dangling the other carelessly out the window. The music and the endless night make her feel reckless, and slowly she urges the car to go faster and faster down the nearly deserted roads. The adrenaline rush of going seventy, then eighty begins to make her feel slightly lightheaded, and she knows that this is where she’s meant to be, that she never wants to go back.

At the top of a hill she slows and uses a cross street to turn around. She stops, turns the music down, and looks back at her city, a city of rich kids and sold-out yuppie greed. From a distance it’s simply an assortment of lights, and she likes it much better this way, far away from the hypocritical population of her upper class prep school. She is a rich kid in the disaffected way, the kind that doesn’t let you know instantly she’s rich. She doesn’t make a big deal out of the fact that she has a hugs house and attends a fancy school and has her own Audi to drive, not like the girls who spend all their money on extraneous clothes and makeup to show off that they can.

No, Esme uses her money to make other people happy. Every holiday she figures out what exactly would make everybody happy, no matter how simple it may may be, and proceeds to give them just that. Maybe all someone wants is to come along on one of these late-night rides.

This crazy freedom is what she lives for. After finishing all her homework like the good girl she pretends to be, she slips off into the night to destinations unknown, caring more about the trip than the final result thereof. One day she wants to keep driving until the sun comes up, to drive through the night to the top of some hill and watch the sky near the horizon slowly lighten from black to pink and then go up in flames as the day begins. She wants to drive and drive far away from everything she’s known to something new, taking only her memories and her closest friends. One day they will all go on a road trip, she knows it.

As she sits at the top of the hill, a crazy idea comes to her. Why not wait for the sunrise tonight? It’s as good as any. There’s school tomorrow but she can sleep in her car as long as she wakes up in time for the sunrise. Her mind made up, she pulls out a cell phone and a travel alarm.

“Mom? Hi. I’m going to stay at Ellie’s tonight. Yeah, I know. I’ll get myself to school tomorrow. Okay. Bye.” She hangs up, surprised at how easy it’s become. All that remains is to set the alarm and wait. She turns the engine off, leaving the music playing, and stares through the windshield at the lights on the horizon. Peter Gabriel sings softly and she turns it up, realizing how perfectly everything fits together. Climbing up on Solsbury Hill, I could see the city lights... he sings softly, echoing Esme’s life. The wind is blowing and time feels like it’s standing still, all she needs now is an eagle to fly out of the nigh and start talking to her for the song to come true. It’s the kind of night when it feels like something like that could happen. She opens the door and climbs out of Antigone, looking first t the horizon, then at the sky. Up here, beyond the reach of the city lights, the stars hang closely in the night sky. Leaning against her car, she stares up and searches for her points of reference. There’s Orion, her link to reality. The only time she couldn’t find Orion in the night sky was a night that felt like a dream anyway, a surreal night when she needed a point of reference to prove she was still real so she stood in the middle of a deserted intersection and tried to find Orion for half an hour. Her failure proved to her that she must be dreaming, because not being able to find Orion was way too weird. Tonight is not that night. Tonight Orion hangs above her reassuringly identifiable as she moves on to identifying the big dipper, Cassiopeia…all things she remembers from her childhood stargazing in the backyard with her father. He no longer points out Betelgeuse and Rigel every time they are out at night, but Esme still remembers. It’s a link back to those days long ago.

In case of impromptu picnics and nights like this, she always carries a grey fleece blanket in the trunk. Now she takes it out a spreads it on the spring grass growing on the side of her car away from the road and lies down on it, staring up at the sky. She lies there until the night gets too chilly for comfort.

The back seat is easy enough to sleep in, just long enough to fit her comfortably curled up in her blanket, and sleep she does.

She wakes up right before her alarm was supposed to sound to wake her for the sunrise. Ever since she was a child she’s hated being woken up by artificial means, so she always wakes herself up so she can turn it off before it wrecks the feeling of the early morning. Outside the car the night is still nearly black, just beginning to lighten at the horizon. She turns the music back on, but she can’t think of a single song about sunrise. Instead she settles for a song about sunset as she stares out across the city and the bay beyond it, slowly lightening as the sun prepares to come up.

The sun sets quietly over the bay leaving red glowing smog and me in disarray…

Allette Brooks was her accidental discovery one day last year when she was looking through the CDs at Borders for something else entirely. There was music playing and she suddenly realized that it was live and tried to track it down. Slowly she climbed the stairs to the upper floor, where a woman was playing her guitar and singing for a small crowd. Esme was in love at once with her voice, her music…everything. She’s gotten everybody else hooked, too. Allette goes everywhere with her now, living in her car stereo, on her computer at home. It always seems to fit, whatever the situation.

Allette sings about waiting to get over someone, and as Esme looks out at the edge of the sun, just peeking over the horizon, she realizes that she’s finally managed to do just that. It’s been almost a year now, with only one letter in that whole time. A perfectly nice letter, explaining that there’d been not time to write, and it made her insanely happy. She couldn’t stop smiling for days. But even then she no longer felt like that about the sender. That was last year, and things have changed so much since then. She still has all the letters, the song. The person.

No, I am not still dreaming about you…

Esme shifts into drive and slowly drives down the hill back to reality. |