Been riding around with my friend, Marilyn so she can get her driver's license and it's bringing back lots of memories. I was kinda late getting mine. All my friends were already driving. I lived in a farm community and kids learned to drive tractors, some even drove them to the drive-in movie theatre. Imagine trying to watch, "Deathrace 2000" with a combine parked in front on the screen.

Marilyn also makes me think of her mom when she was around her age. They aren't really alike, but I think about driving over to pick her up to go to the movies or whatever. Her mom, Jessica was always very sweet, but Marilyn, while being sweet, can be very dangerous. She has very dark sensibilities. She won't put up with any shenanigans unless they are her shenanigans. She reads books on murder, serial killers, crime... So she is driving. I'm in the passenger seat. It's dark out because she wants experience driving in the dark. We are winding through streets of the small southern town in which she lives. Suddenly she gets excited and yells, "I found it!"

Seems she's been trying to take me down to the river. It is darker than dark. Darkness beyond the beyond. Spanish Moss swings in the breeze from the trees on the banks like ghosts illuminated in her car's headlights. I look over at Marilyn. Her head is tilted forward. Her smile is a grimace. The music from her cracked and troubled iPhone is skipping and the sound is slow, disturbing, deep, full of bass and dread. We slowly approach a foreboding under part of a bridge. I admit I began to get scared. She might just floor it and send us off to our death in the river, or wrap us around a concrete support beam of the bridge. I ask, "Marilyn, are you bringing me down here so you can kill me?"

Her eyes roll up and her lids flutter briefly. Her smile is gone. She says nothing. Maybe she didn't hear me. I repeat my question and she exhales, "No."

No, as in not now, not this time? Is she thinking about it? Did I ruin a moment for her? Was it her plan and I blew it?

I feel a little bit relieved. I love being with her, she really is for some reason, one of the coolest people I've ever known, yet imagine teaching Wednesday Addams how to drive.