Riding In Cars With Boys by Beverly Donofrio

for weeks. Why aren’t you having fun?”
    “If we stay longer you’ll get drunker.”
    “I promise. If we stay another two hours, I won’t drink anymore. Maybe one beer.”
    “One hour.”
    “All right.”
    One hour later I couldn’t find him. An hour after that, I found him lying on his back on top of a picnic table by the lake. Drunk. I told him I wanted to go home.
    “I want to go home. I want to go home. You know who you sound like? What’s her name in The Wizard of Oz.” He thought that was a riot.
    “You said only one beer.”
    He sat up and swayed so far to the right he almost fell off the table. I felt like hitting him. “Give me the keys,” I said.
    He dug in his pockets, then shook his head up from his chest. “What am I doing? No way. You’re really something.” He pointed his thumb at me. “The big boss. Everybody thinks I’m pussy-whipped. That’s why I got drunk.”
    “I’m going,” I said, and started walking toward home, which was fifty miles away. The road was dark and deserted. I passed the little stand, closed now, where the year before I’d sat on a picnic table and flirted with some college guys who’d asked me if I was a nonconformist, a word I’d never heard. I’d walked nearly a mile and was not only getting cold but scared, because the trees made an arch over my head and blocked off the moonlight, when Raymond finally pulled up with Virginia and Bobby in the backseat. “You walked far,” he said.
    “I’m freezing,” I said.
    “Get in, baby,” he said.
    “Let me drive.”
    “Please, Bev?”
    I felt sorry for him. I could be a bitch. Plus, I didn’t want to make a scene in front of Virginia and Bobby, who’d seen too many already, so I got in and ignored his weaving all over the road. About ten minutes later, Raymond nodded out and our VW flipped like a pancake. Sand chimed around me and time slowed down as I thought, Now, at last, I’ll lose the baby.
    Then everything was still and silent. Virginia said, “Bobby?”
    “I’m all right,” he said.
    “Beverly?” she said.
    “I’m okay,” I said as I squeezed myself out of the upside-down car. Bobby and Virginia looked dazed standing a foot apart staring. The only sound was the whir of wheels spinning. “Where’s Ray?” Bobby said after a minute. It was strange we’d forgotten him.
    We walked like zombies to the other side of the car. Raymond was lying on the ground, unconscious, with the car door resting on his shoulder and a big blob of blood gelling on the asphalt under his nose.
    “Do you think it’s his brain?” I said.
    Bobby put his ear to Ray’s chest. “He’s alive,” he said.
    We walked across the street and banged on a door. A woman’s voice yelled, “Get out of here before I call the cops.”
    Bobby said, “Fuck you, lady.”
    At the next house, the woman called an ambulance and we went back to the car to wait.
    “Goddamn!” Bobby kicked a fender.
    “Bobby, don‘t,” Virginia said, because Bobby could get crazy.
    “That’s my buddy,” Bobby said. “Look at him, man.”
    I couldn’t. Neither could Virginia.
    At the hospital they wheeled Ray away, then a doctor examined me. He listened to my stomach with a stethoscope and said the baby seemed fine. Then he bandaged my knee and my forehead where it had hit the windshield and told me I could go home. Bobby and Virginia got picked up by Virginia’s father, and I hung around to wait for Ray to get out of X rays. His eyes were black-and-blue and opened. When he saw me, he started crying.
    “His collarbone and his nose are broken,” a nurse told me.
    “I should’ve let you drive,” Raymond cried.
    “It’s all right,” I said.
    “I could’ve killed you. I love you so much.”
    “I love you too. Don’t cry.”
    The nurse rolled him away sobbing.
    “You all right?” my father said when I called home for a ride. I’d been praying I’d get my mother.
    “Yes.”
    “Him?”
    “Broken collarbone and nose.”
    “Was he