Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

as Debbie’s mind. It took her by surprise, so that while her instincts told her the right answer would be “No,” they couldn’t think right away of why not.
    “Are you kidding?” she said. “What if I wrecked it?” This seemed like a pretty obvious reason why not.
    “We’ll just go back and forth in the driveway,” said Lenny. “First and reverse.”
    “I bet I could still wreck it,” said Debbie. She was sticking to this while she waited for reinforcement reasons to arrive.
    “You won’t wreck it,” said Lenny. “I’ll show you how. It’s not that hard.”
    He had been surprised by the idea, too, at first, but it was making a lot of sense to him now. It was something he knew how to do. And it was fun. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it sooner.
    “Your dad doesn’t want me driving his truck,” said Debbie. She was pretty sure about that.
    “He won’t care,” said Lenny. “But I’ll ask him.” He got out of the truck, walked over to the screen door, and called in, “Hey Dad, is it okay if I teach Debbie to drive the truck, just in the driveway?” He put his ear to the screen door.
    “Hold on,” he said over his shoulder, “he must be watching TV.” He went inside. A minute later he reappeared.
    “It’s okay,” he told her. “My dad said as long as we stay in the driveway.”
    The pickup had a stick shift. That’s what was so hard to resist. The Pelbry family always had automatics. A stick shift seemed … adventurous. And exotic. Europeans and cowboys (well, at least the ones in Marlboro commercials) and race car drivers (she thought) used stick shifts. Her cousin Dick drove a car with a stick shift, a little sports car with a convertible top.
    And it might be an emergency life skill a person should have, along with knowing how to be a waitress or how to resuscitate someone who has been dragged out of a river or a lake. Say, for example, you were riding in a car, a car with a stick shift, and the driver had a heart attack in the middle of nowhere. It would be irresponsible not to know how to drive to a hospital. Especially when someone had offered you the chance to learn.
    Maybe she should do it, learn to use the stick shift. If she didn’t, she might be sorry someday when a situation like that came up.
    “Are you sure your dad said it was okay?” she asked.
    “Oh, yeah,” said Lenny. “He said it was a good idea.”
    This wasn’t exactly a fib, he thought. It was more like a loose interpretation of something his dad often said while driving, which was “If God hadn’t meant people to fly, he wouldn’t have invented Chevys.” He glanced at the clock on the dashboard.
    “We have to do it now, though, because he said he needs the truck in about an hour.”
    So he taught her to drive the truck. Not everything, just first gear and reverse. If she were in the emergency situation with the heart attack-stricken driver now, she could take him slowly, very slowly (forward or backward) to the hospital. With any luck, it wouldn’t be very far away and she could get there by going in a straight line. The picture in her mind was of a desert scenario, with no large objects between her and her destination.
    Lenny was a good teacher. First he sat in the driver’s seat, showing her how it was done, the clutch pedal and the gas pedal going up and down like opposite ends of a seesaw. He was good at explaining it. He understood how things worked, and he made it seem simple, so that when Debbie slid across the seat and behind the wheel, the truck didn’t seem any more mysterious than her mother’s sewing machine, which was also operated with a pedal. A large sewing machine moving back and forth in the gravel driveway.
    Lenny had demonstrated what would happen if she gave it too much gas or not enough, or let the clutch out too quickly, so Debbie was prepared and didn’t panic. She just tried again and again, and after a while she started to get it. She was driving a truck. With