Find someone more confident than two sixteen-year-old girls who just got their driver's licenses before senior year of high school. Go ahead, find them. We’ll wait.
Now, ask them how delicious that taste of independence felt in their mouths.
Ask them about picking up friends to go absolutely nowhere and digging through the foul-smelling basement couch cushions for loose change to be turned into gas money. Ask them about mangled road trips and skipping school to go to the beach or the mall or even a pumpkin patch the week before Halloween. Ask them about cars so old that the odometer had gotten itself back to zero or seatbelts that hadn’t been used in many presidential administrations. Ask them about this quasi-adulthood.
And then, please, send us their stories.
Now, here at Anxiety Addicts, we pride ourselves on keeping every episode anonymous. We always change the geographical location and the defining characteristics of a person. You send us a story from Omaha? Instead, our listeners will be transported to a small lake town in Michigan. You share the time when your cousin started a kitchen fire during their first shift at Burger King? We’ll make it a Chik-Fil-A. So please, submit with confidence knowing that no one will trace the exploding sex toy story back to you or your hometown.
But this story is different.
Why, you may ask, do the rules not apply to this one?
Well, for a couple of reasons. One is that we want you to feel genuinely connected to these two kind of dumb teenage girls. We want you to laugh with them and appreciate them and dare we say it– love them. We want you to take a joy ride with them into their journey to adulthood and maybe hear from them again, say, biweekly for, like, the next bunch of years. Because, well, you do kind of already know them. They’re us.
And this is not the story of the dumbest thing that Morgan and I have ever done together. But it’s up there.
So tune in, tune out, relax, take that dog walk, fold that laundry, procrastinate that monthly report, and come along with us, back to Northampton, Massachusetts, in May of the year 2000.
Now, Morgan will disagree with this because disagreeing is part of her personality, but she was really pretty. She still is but that's not the point of this story. She was about 5’10 or 5’11 with insanely thick hair that she would make really shiny with her straightening iron. Forget her perfect skin and bright, blue eyes, and the shape her muscles formed running five miles a day. But these looks were interesting.
Because they were new.
In the past year, she’d left home for the first time, studied abroad, bought a shirt from someplace other than Abercrombie, and grown out the 90s bangs that had made her resemble something like a Cabbage Patch Kid’s older sister. So, now she was hot, had a job at Friendly’s as a waitress (wearing a uniform much like Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken and a pin that read, “Friendly? You bet we are!), and was making what was considered at the time, very real money.
She had gotten her driver’s license and was rewarded with her Auntie Peggy’s fifteen-year-old rusted-out blue Ford hatchback that somehow only had like a thousand miles on it. So here she was, newly hot, newly mobile, totally independent, with money in her pocket. It was either a recipe for success or disaster, depending on your relationship to Morgan and the time. And she was only half of the ingredients here.
I wasn’t as pretty or making tips. The pretty part had something to do with this being the “Rachel” haircut, Friends, era, and stick-straight hair or a long torso were not in the cards for this particular and pretty curvy redhead. The tips part of that was because I worked at a sunglass store and had recently gotten very into smoking very bad weed. So I spent less time at the gym and a little more time organizing my sock drawer by color or taking my Golden Retriever, Casey, for very, very long walks down to the Oxbow where I did a very poor job of trying to date the guys practicing on the water ski team.
I don't know why I'm telling you this...
Luckily for me, I did fine in school, didn’t get caught doing any of the dumb shit I was doing, and, because of my part-time occupation, I owned enough sunglasses to never be suspected of being high. So this was the overview of Morgan and myself when we saw in the actual, physical, newspaper that Dave Matthews Band was playing in Albany and we really, really wanted to go. Our parents did not agree.
It had something to do with us not being totally responsible, me not being a totally awesome driver (I had recently been called out for doing a horrible parallel parking job on a side street… placing my father’s metallic blue Eagle Vision, in the opposite direction of traffic. Oh god…) and also being called out on the fact that neither Morgan nor myself possessed world’s greatest sense of direction. We were offended and very, very upset.
“I’m just trying to get you through high school without getting pregnant or killed!” My mother shrieked while doing laundry and not understanding at all why going to a cool concert with my best friend was important to a 17-year-old.
“I DON’T WANT THAT EITHER,” I screamed back, not wanting that either. It wasn’t exactly the epitome of smooth sailing in our relationship at that point in time.
My mother wouldn’t budge. She angrily shook out the wrinkles in her Old Navy khakis.
“FINE.” I spun on my heel to leave.
“I’M GOING TO MORGAN’S.” And then, as an afterthought and not at all threatening, I yelled in the same voice, “AND I’M TAKING CASEY.”
Casey was our nine-year-old Golden and didn’t mind the yelling since she was mostly deaf minus for the word, “walk” which encouraged her to bound off of the couch and directly to the back door. This is where she stood impatiently for ten seconds wondering why I wasn’t already there.
I was fuming on my drive to Morgan’s house on Emily Lane. It was all the usual teenage angsty stuff that I am absolutely positive will haunt me with my own girls in a dozen years. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t go to a concert with my own money when I had really gotten into barely any trouble lately.
Yeah, there was the time that we smoked a bunch of weed in the basement next to the central air vents and circulated marijuana smoke all over the house. But that was like, basically it. I was very, very good at not getting caught. So, as far as my parents knew, yeah, one time I got high. Otherwise, both Morgan and I were good kids. We each worked, got good grades, we babysat, we volunteered. If you didn’t take into account any of the bad stuff that we were doing, we were basically perfect. I couldn’t wrap my head around why going to see Dave Matthews, which was not even some crazy band like people of my mom’s generation followed, with my best friend and Mapquest directions to Albany was such a big deal. But, apparently it was. In Morgan’s house as well. Her parents also said no freaking way.
If I had been a better driver, I would have sped up angrily to her house and slammed on the brakes. But, I wasn’t. So I crawled down her street at five miles under the speed limit and stopped gently for dear, old Casey’s sake.
Because Morgan was on a health kick, I was high, and our Golden Retrievers were Golden Retrievers, on that beautiful, soggy Spring day, we decided to go for a walk and re-assess our plan for action. We were hell-bent on seeing Dave Matthews. For anyone under 30 listening, he was a guy with a band who sang very popular songs that didn’t rhyme. I don’t know how else to explain why this was so cool so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one here.
We left the house with Morgan’s two dogs, Murphy and Riley (which are now common children’s names and make me laugh,) and my not-super bright Golden, Casey. We walked through the woods behind Morgan’s house, discussing our course of action on how to get the green light to go to the concert. We were pretty surprised that our parents were being so rigid on this one. It was an hour and a half drive which really didn’t seem that long. We’d even printed out the directions on MapQuest and we basically just had to get on Interstate 91 and follow it to the capital of New York. We would stay with some cousins, go to the show, and come home. How were we going to prove to our parents that we were responsible enough to handle this?
We left Morgan's back yard and decided where to go.
“Let’s just take them on the path behind my house,” Morgan suggested. Mind you, we were rebelling, against our parents, by taking our elderly dogs for some exercise.
“Great.” Casey had been involved in a pretty rough car accident when she was a puppy. This resulted in two things: metal plates in her two front legs and the inability to go very far from me very quickly. I don’t even know if our family owned a leash.
The day seemed to be just as annoyed as we were. The sky was blanketed in an irritating cloud cover that seemed determined to mist just enough to make you want a raincoat but also be warm and humid enough to make wearing such a layer grossly unappealing. Even the bird’s song seemed to be one of general irritation and frustration while the maple leaves hung soggily from the trees, immobile in the wet and stagnant air. The Golden Retrievers did not notice any of this.
They hurried down the path that led right from Morgan’s backyard into the woods.
“Should we call them back?” I asked Morgan, feeling responsible for the pups before I launched into my parental complaints.
Morgan shook her head.“My dad takes them out on this trail like every day,” She was also feeling quite huffy. “They know where to go.”
So all twelve furry legs of Murphy, Riley, and Casey scrambled through the trees, very clear on their destination. And Morgan and I got INTO it.
How did our parents think we were going to survive at college next year if they wouldn’t let us go away for a single night? What had we done to make them mistrust us? WHY WERE THEY SO OLD AND UNREASONABLE?
We whined, we moaned, we bitched, we complained as we got our steps in. The day was showing no sign of letting up, seemingly an accomplice to our foul moods.
Now, neither Morgan nor I remember when we realized that we were lost but we do remember it as being a long fucking time that we last saw her house. The dogs sped through the trees, no longer following any semblance of a trail, dodging, ducking, diving, and dodging around Elms, Pines, and skinny Birch trees whose limbs reached out at just the right height to smack us in the faces.
“Where are we?” I asked Morgan. I had come to the startling realization the second that I was behind the wheel of my father’s shitty car for the first time that, even though I’d lived in this small New England town for literally my entire life, I had no idea of how to get anywhere. My sense of direction was (and still is) an absolute contradiction in terms. As a new driver, I was almost always lost, always going the wrong way, always confused. And being always stoned probably didn't help with any of this.
Being geographically confused wasn’t a new feeling to me. I was used to relying on other people’s knowledge of street signs and directions and maybe the North Star to get me to where I needed to go. And, somehow, even after all these years of friendship, I hadn’t realized that Morgan’s was only SLIGHTLY better.
This was before smartphones. We didn’t even have cell phones with us. We had three geriatric dogs and two senses of indignation.
“It has to be that way,” Morgan declared, pointing in what was probably not the right way.
“How do you know?” I was genuinely asking. I had zero clue where we had come from.
“We have to follow the dogs.” Morgan was always quite logical. She was also very confident. “They do this all the time.”
So we did. We followed Murphy, Riley, and Casey. We chased squirrels towards tree trunks and birds flitting across the underbrush. We even followed Riley to the other side of a large bush to take a giant dump. This went on for well over an hour. Were we higher than we thought? Had we entered some sort of Stranger Things time warp? Were we just really dumb? Like how many licks would it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.
But we were lost for hours. We must have been walking in some kind of concentric circles. The town wasn’t that big. And who knew the acreage of these woods? Eventually, as you may have guessed, because we made it out to tell this story, we found a road, and the road had houses on it. And that road had a street sign and Morgan recognized it. We had (and we still don’t know how) made it somewhere close to the middle school which was miles away from Morgan’s backyard on Emily Lane where we had started our journey.
“Someone has to pick us up,” I gestured to the darkening sky. We’d managed to avoid any serious rain up until this point but the clouds look ready to burst.
“Not our parents. Not a freaking chance.” I wasn’t going to argue with Morgan on this one.
That’s when we decided to call her cousin, Melissa. Which was a great idea, minus one important detail. Remember: we didn’t have a phone.
This is what two teenage girls were willing to do who’d managed to get themselves and their dogs lost basically in their own backyard would do to save their asses, their egos, and the chance to go to a Dave Matthews concert in Albany: we knocked on the door of a modest, split-level home with a handmade Easter flag hanging outside. The older woman who answered seemed wary of us. Maybe we weren’t as cute as we thought we were.
But she agreed, much like recently arrested people, to let us come in and make one phone call. She led us through her living room, passing her husband watching the news on their brown, paisley sofa, and brought us to the rotary phone mounted on the wall to the left of her refrigerator. And that’s when we got lucky.
Because Melissa was home and answered her phone. We weren’t officially off the hook. We had to stand, utterly embarrassed, in this stranger’s kitchen for a solid two minutes while Melissa laughed her face off at our predicament. Yes, she was willing to come get us. Yes, she knew what street we were on. No, we were not going to put our three wet dogs in her car.
“Melissa,” I begged, feeling the woman’s judgemental stare scorching holes through my shirt. “Go to Morgan’s… take my car… and please, please come get us.” At that perfectly timed cinematic moment, the thunder rolled in, vibrating through the sky, causing all three dogs to scratch furiously on the woman’s front door. She was not exactly pleased with the situation.
“Just go!” one or both of us yelled frantically into the phone. Now the rain was really coming down. As much as we would have loved to have gotten the hell out of Dodge and never seen the Easter Flag Couple again, we were forced to sit on their front porch with our stinky and confused fur babies while we waited for Melissa to take her sweet-ass time rescuing us. But she did.
Pulling up to the curb in the blue Eagle Vision, she started her laughing fit again. She rolled down her window and leaned out,
“I am not sitting in the back seat with those smelly dogs.” Mrs. Easter Egg Lady stood on the porch, her arms crossed over her chest. She was not amused.
As Morgan and I tried our best to be positive and polite, thanking the couple and smooshing the pups and ourselves into the car, an old, gold, Volvo hatchback slowed down coming the other way. It was Bob, Morgan’s dad.
“Step on it!” Morgan yelled to Melissa who did, indeed, step on it, screeching a hard right-hand turn on the immediate side street, away from the main road. She glanced in her rearview, clocking a sort of confused Bob Walsh. All three of our hearts were pounding. Only Melissa was laughing.
“You two are idiots. You would never get yourselves to Albany.” But she was wrong.
While we were out on our adventure, our parents had apparently spoken and agreed that we were, in fact, mature and responsible enough to go to the concert.
So we did. And even with our Mapquest directions, we got lost six times… in both directions.
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