One of my best friends has a 1973 Pontiac Firebird.

For as long as I've known him, he's been a classic car fanatic. Knows more about cars than anything I know. For holidays we buy each other matchbox cars, and possibly the most daunting part about moving to college is choosing which cars I want to bring with me. It's his birthday today, actually.

Junior year was when he started searching harder for a car — it was the year we got our licenses, after all, and for him I think it was a sign that everything would open up. Actually buying that muscle car — feeling the steering wheel under his hands — would cement for him that life would get better after high school. I thought of him going out west, flying down into the sunset in some decade-bending teenage cowboy tribute to Cannonball Run. He shopped around for a bit — sent me pictures and videos of cars all different colors, white and red and black and gray.

Then, finally, the summer before our senior year. He chose a car from New York state: a blue 1973 Pontiac Firebird, two white stripes down the hood, white interior. He named the car Bluebird. He has a matching baseball cap. Bluebird is his baby.

I got to see it before anybody else. It was a late summer day, August sucking the life out of all the trees. The garage air was thick and saturated with the smell of gasoline. Bluebird took up space in both a literal and metaphorical way, tangible in a new and dazzling sense. Under my hand it was solid and comforting, not thin like my humble (but worshiped) 2002 VW Passat. My friend pulled open the door and let me sit. It was sort of like entering Wonderland; the world got so much bigger, and I got so much smaller, dropping into those beat-up white leather seats.

Now, I did ask permission to write this piece. The caveat, my friend said, was that he wanted me to say how many times this car has broken down on him. And I would be such a liar if I didn't report that (although I’m bad with the specifics). The first time he took Bluebird out, it was leaking gas all over the road — one of the problems I remembered (without asking him) was that there was a hole in the gas tank. He’s taken it for a few other spins. Most of those ended with a dead battery and a call to AAA. He had to wait a year to get it to a mechanic, and it took up all the free space in his mind. I introduced him to another friend of mine, and the two of them took up the free space in my mind talking nonstop about their cars that they were fixing up.

I had an image of Bluebird fitting flawlessly into our senior year, as I think my friend did. I thought he'd become a legend in that thing, cruising around our small town, pulling us up to prom like a couple of movie stars. We never really got that, but the 20 minutes I have gotten make up for that.

He always told me I would be the first person he drove in that car. And he kept his promise, texting me the day after graduation, to let me know that it was time. I wanted to write about how difficult springtime had been for me. We had undergone so many big changes — we’d just graduated high school, I turned 18 about ten days before. For the entire month of June I had been wasting away as I fell for a girl who hardly gave me the time of day. Earlier that morning we had dropped my grandma off at the airport, and now there was nothing to distract me.

And then came the text from my dear friend.

The garage door opened, and it was just as it was a year ago, when I got to see the car for the first time. This hulking, beautiful, powerful machine. I excitedly slid into the seat, rolled down the window, discovered there was no working seatbelt. He revved up the engine. Slowly, energy and excitement fizzing around, he began to back out the driveway, me craning my head to see the best I could if he was going to hit the curb.

And then we were off. I had been nervous that the car would break down, but those worries quickly dissipated as he maneuvered the car around construction and we went up to a circular neighborhood (one of suburban condo hotspots). I couldn’t help but laugh out loud; my mom had no idea I was being driven around in a muscle car, playing the Beatles from my phone, the wind in my hair. To this day, it is one of my most fond memories. I can’t imagine the triumph I assume my friend felt as we drove around.

He took me home after in his normal boring  modern car and I expected it to be somewhat anticlimactic, but the feeling stayed. That buzzing joy of riding in his 1973 Pontiac Firebird.

Author’s note:

It’s been hard for me to write this piece. The only thing, it seems, that has gotten me out of that rut is the song anything by Adrianne Lenker, and the swell of love for my friend that I get every time I saw this challenge. It’s his car, but he’s my friend, and I think the two are inevitably linked. I’m submitting this largely unedited. It is all from the heart, from the mind.