What Happens When an Angsty Teen Turns a Lyft Driver into His Unwitting Accomplice?
Looming trees lined the sides of the wide unlit road, their gnarled and leafless branches shaking furiously in seeming opposition to the passenger’s defiance
The ship is slowly sinking / they think I’m crazy but they don’t know the feeling / they’re all around me, circling like vultures / they wanna break me and wash away my colors…
These lyrics are from the song “My Demons,” sung by the Columbus, Ohio band Starset. Wikipedia describes them as “blending the progressive aspirations of Muse with the open-hearted approach of emo and muscular power of bands like Breaking Benjamin.”
And at this moment they are blaring from my car’s speakers.
Passenger Damien likes his angst music, and he likes it loud.
Let’s back up to a few minutes ago, though.
After I pull in to the dark-cul-de sac, a teenage boy waiting at the curb approaches my car dressed in a baggy black t-shirt, his black-grey sports cap emblazoned with the insignia of a marijuana leaf. Opening the back door, Damien deposits his skateboard on the floor before joining me up front.
The angst in his life becomes apparent pretty much instantly.
“My mom’s gonna freak when she realizes I’m gone,” he warns me.
Uh-oh. What have I just unwittingly walked myself into? I wonder.
Damien tells me we’ll be making a pit stop to scoop up the girl he’s been seeing – his “something like a girlfriend” – before we head to our final destination.
Removing his cap, he runs his thick pale hands through a head of cedar-brown and slightly damp hair that looks as if it’s been shampooed using a bucket of melting Samoa Girl Scout cookies.
As I reverse the car and pull out of the cul- de-sac, he takes a peak back at his house a couple of times before it disappears from view.
Looming trees line the sides of the wide unlit road as we drive, their gnarled and leafless branches shaking furiously in seeming opposition to Damien’s parental defiance. I wonder if his mom put them up to this (more likely, it was just the wind).
Our ride is absent of conversation but full of noise. For most of it Damien looks down at his phone, occasionally scream-singing in unison with Starset as he converts my glove compartment into a set of drums, tapping at the upholstered rubber in rhythm with the music.
As we near his destination he momentarily leans over them the way professional bike racers posture themselves above their handlebars when focused in on the final stretch of their race. Anticipatory excitement accompanies his drumming.
About three blocks away now, we drive over a speed bump. For reasons unknown to me, Damien chooses this arbitrary moment to ask me a question about my life, which comes out sounding more like a statement: “What do you like to do in your spare time.”
Less than a minute remains in our ride, so I toss out a condensed answer that I’m not sure he hears. Finally we pull onto a road that’s just black pavement sans sidewalks, lined with single-story houses and slightly unkempt lawns.
A picket fence painted red perimeters the house on the corner. An orange cat scurries across the unlit road. Coral and yellow slides – tubular and enclosed, like the ones you see at McDonald’s or Chuck E. Cheese, only taller and longer – coil and contort ominously at the playground across the street.
Damien gets out of the car and says be right back. I wait as he bullets toward the front door of the country-style home, then rings the bell. I watch as a middle-aged Latina woman, who I later learn is the girl’s aunt, answers the door. From inside, Sara (his something like a girlfriend) peers through the drawn curtains of the living room window.
“It’ll just be another minute,” Damien tells me when he returns. “Sara just has to talk to her aunt.”
Sara never ends up joining us. A middle-aged man with a ponytail and rolled-up red sleeves lumbers toward our car instead, his facial expression bordering somewhere on stern and livid. I roll down my window, feeling suddenly implicated in an ordeal I hadn’t signed on for.
“You guys gotta leave,” the man insists. “She’s only fifteen.”
Not giving Damien a chance to argue back, I concede and drive off. Damien says I can take him back to his mom’s house; mission aborted.
“The guy’s a prick,” he mutters, his demeanor markedly different than it had been on our way over. Forlorn sighs have replaced his angsty ones. Dejected, I might even go so far as to call them.
His playlist comes back on– this time set to a Lana del Rey track (the kid’s eclectic in his musical tastes) to match the new mood as we drive.
We’re one freeway stop from his destination when Damien looks up from his phone.
“Shit. Sara just texted. She’s gonna sneak out. We’ve got to go back now.”
I can only hope his description of me was kinder than the one he used for the girl’s older male relative when I too said no.