Celestial Page 2

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  Lila was the first to learn to drive, but then, she was the first to do most things.

  We were fourteen and I had gone to Aunt Izzy’s for the night. My aunt is a nurse, and sometimes she’s called away for an emergency night shift. When this happens, Lila almost always has a number of friends on call to make the most of the lack of parental supervision. During our mid-teens she was the master of sneaking out of windows and keeping boyfriends a secret from my aunt.

  That night we were picked up by Lila’s then boyfriend and his older brother. The older brother wore a baseball cap and drove with one hand on the wheel, changing gears with loud revs of the engine.

  “Wheredjer wannago?” he asked us. His slurred speech and the way his eyes lingered on me gave me the creeps.

  Lila sipped on a bottle of beer and looped an arm around her boyfriend. “To the stars!”

  “’Ow much as she ’ad?”

  “Can I drive?” Lila asked, leaning forward and pressing her cheek against the driver’s seat.

  “Only if yer sit on me knee.”

  As Lila climbed over into the front seat, I gripped the arm rest harder than I’d gripped anything before, so tight that my knuckle bones shone through my skin, and my fingernails left half-moon marks on the leather. I remember her high-pitched laugh as she took the steering wheel, and the screeching of brakes as she worked the pedals, all the time with my stomach churning and Lila’s boyfriend’s hand on my knee.

  Somehow we made it home safely that night, but we never went to the stars.