Free Driver's Ed by Caroline B. Cooney

utterly lovely.
    Rob was thick, stern, and heavy lidded.
    Sports were handled by Chuck, who grinned steadily; he knew he had the best job on earth.
    Weather was Irene, a confused middle-aged woman who worried so much about the possibility of snow thatMorgan assumed she had no life, but spent her existence staring at weather patterns and feeling desperate.
    â€œAnd now a new dimension to vandalism in our city,” said Anne, smoothing her papers and looking kind and sweet. Anne’s hair was neither blond nor gray, but truly silver, as if she had come off a starship. “The smashing of mailboxes is well known to us; there have been five sieges of this destruction since the opening of city schools on September second.”
    Starr moaned. “Tell us how kids today are responsible for everything,” she said to Anne.
    Eleven-ten, thought Morgan. Too late to call Remy now. The weekend is shot. And now Remy’ll be mad at me and by Monday she’ll hate me.
    He tried to reconstruct the feeling of her lips and hair, but he seemed to have no touch memory. To know it again he would have to do it again.
    His mouth was dry.
    â€œAnd now, a spate of sign stealing has hit the suburban areas, with terrible results.” Anne looked gravely into Morgan’s eyes.
    Sign stealing.
    What terrible results? That sounded like media hype to Morgan. How could there be terrible results from taking a street name?
    He was not nervous, exactly. He was a plane that was not landing. Waiting for permission to come down. Holding-pattern tense.
    â€œLast night,” said Anne, “a fatal car accident occurred at the corner of Warren Street and Cherry Road.”
    His mother passed a wicker basket filled with skinny stick pretzels. Starr made pretzel-stick people on the coffee table.
    The camera panned over the intersection Morgan had left twenty-four hours before. His mouth got drier and then his eyes dried, too, as if he were evaporating.
    â€œA car driven by twenty-six-year-old Denise Thompson was hit broadside by a truck. Denise Thompson was killed instantly. Police say this is a particularly dangerous intersection. There is supposed to be a stop sign on Cherry Road. But when Mrs. Thompson, driving home after dropping her baby-sitter off, came to the intersection with Warren Street, there was no stop sign.”
    The camera slipped slowly over a blue car so completely crushed by a mason’s dump truck that Morgan could not tell if it was a sedan or a wagon, old or new, American or foreign. The front door had been cut off to extricate the driver. The opening bore no resemblance to a door’s shape. It was a twisted cave.
    â€œToday, police tried to reconstruct the incident,” said Anne, and now on television, the wrecked car was gone. Towed away. Traffic flowed on Warren. Life—except Denise Thompson’s—went on.
    Morgan was screaming on the inside. It was soundless, yet so loud that jet engines might have been taking off in his brain.
There is supposed to be a stop sign on Cherry Road
.
    A reporter on the scene addressed a policeman. “Do you have any idea who did this?”
    â€œKids,” said the cop, shrugging. He had seen it before, he would see it again. “They don’t think. They like the shape of stop signs, you know. We hafta replace ’em all the time. Kids probably figure whoever’s driving here will figure it out. You know, stop whether the sign’s there or not. Kids don’t stop to think. They forgetthat eventually it’s the middle of the night. No traffic. No clues. This Denise Thompson, she’s a stranger to the road, she needs that stop sign.”
    The stop sign that stood on its side in Morgan’s garage.
    His veins and arteries were expanding as if he were going to explode.
    â€œWhen do you think the sign was taken?” asked the reporter.
    â€œNeighbor said it was here when she got home from shopping around nine,” said the cop.