cars i’d be willing to learn how to drive for: silver 2012 toyota rav4

(crossposted from tumblr and dreamwidth)

Some people will enter your life one day and will radically transform your sense of self over the course of a decade. When they leave your life, eventually, you’ll remember them by name, face, and first car.

The car I think about most from middle and early high school was not my mom’s white 2013 Chevy Traverse (that she traded for a white Equinox a couple months after my brother left for college, so it’s not like I had time to form an attachment). I can close my eyes and ask my brain to remember a morning in 2014, and what I’ll see is a silver Toyota RAV4 with the fingernail curve on the spare tire cover aligned perfectly downward, like a frown.

This was R’s car. His mom’s car, I think, that he and his younger sister rode in, to and from the air force base I grew up on. I would see it in passing leaving a neighborhood not far from my own, or pulling up to the drop off zone of the high school, and I would react like I’d been shot.

R’s car, there’s R. I wanted to see him. I didn’t want him to see me.

We were friends. We barely knew each other. I didn’t yet know how important this person would be to me, but he was still there, in my line of sight, in a car that I still perk up at when I pass one on the freeway, even though R and I are no longer friends, and last I know, he still lives in Texas.

A RAV4 from the early 2010s isn’t the most powerful or stylish of cars. It’s not anyone’s dream. The 2012 model—which I can’t confirm as being the one R had, but the year lines up with the timeline of him moving to California—has a tailgate that swings open like a normal car door, but otherwise it’s the quintessential steel death trap packaged as a small family SUV. I’ve never been inside one, but I understand its interior is roomy and has plenty of storage space. Bluetooth, terrestrial and satellite radio, and text-to-speech are all potential audio options; I hope R’s sister used them, because R was never a music guy. It’s boxy but not cubic, sleek but not trim. There’s an optional V6 engine for those who value the ‘sport’ part of their SUV, but the kind of person who would get that probably wants the model without the external spare, and for me, that ruins the charm. Might as well buy a different car.

The RAV4 is ubiquitous. You saw three of these today. You haven’t seen one in five years. You know someone who drives one, but if I asked you who, you would hesitate. This is a vehicle that has always existed. Noah had it on the ark.

I see this car in my dreams as often as I do R, which is to say not often these days. But when I do, I feel the same full-body rush that I used to when I was fourteen, curious about this guy I had math class with for three years, wanting to know anything else about him that didn’t come secondhand, from watching him interact with his actual friends. Crushing but loathe to admit it.

R wasn’t a music guy, except for video game and anime soundtracks, though he once jokingly confessed enjoying Taylor Swift and said he liked some Stray Kids songs I insisted he check out. He was the gateway to many of my longest and strongest teenage fandoms: Rooster Teeth and its various properties, Dropout’s shows, assorted fantasy and thriller Webtoons. I proofread his sister’s college application essays, and I FaceTimed his dog. His family moved to Texas at the end of my freshman year, and most of our friendship happened through text. The one time I saw him in-person during those years was for a Rooster Teeth convention in Austin when we were in college, but it was hampered by the presence of my parents and own younger sister; I don’t have a lot of regrets, but I do wish I’d insisted they leave me alone, so I could determine then whether he and I had a bond with any substance besides time.

Obviously not. We stopped texting in 2023. Our interests, or mine anyway, diverted too much. There was nothing really left to talk about, so we didn’t.

I was weird about R for nearly ten years. He saw me at my most shattered and awkward and pretentious and giddy and confused and scared. I want to tell him I’m sorry for subjecting him to all that. I want to know if he was ever sick of me. He was only a year older than me, but I bet he thought I was childish. I bet he wanted to stop being friends before we did. Did he consider us friends? I don’t know if I want to know that.

He and his sister once offered to let me visit their house so they could teach me to ride a bike. I wonder what they would think if they knew I now spend some of my weekends at racetracks, working as a marshal. I can’t pilot any kind of vehicle, but I can try to make sure some of the fastest cars on earth don’t crash.

A couple of times, I’ve let myself imagine us still being friends, so that when I get the chance to work at COTA for WEC or F1, I’d be able to give R my guest pass. We would meet in Austin once again, but this time he would be driving—maybe that silver RAV4, maybe something solely his own—and I would be his passenger. The friendship might still end afterward. But it might stay right where it is, comfortable.

I wonder, in that version of events, whether he would teach me to drive. I would be willing to learn.