Teenage Dream

The air whooshed through the windows amidst the swerves and slides of the curvy road. I was going fast. The wind was loud, but it was no match for our music. The volume was as high as the system would let it, but we still amplified the lyrics with our voices. Thank God we weren’t in a neighborhood.

“You make me,” my friend and I screamed. “Feel like I’m livin’ a – teenage dream, the way you turn me on”.

We reached home at about 10:45. Sheesh, I thought. We cut it close to the curfew. It was so fun, and I really wanted to do it again, but something felt wrong. I remembered the night before I got my license; my dad and I were huddled in front of my laptop, listening intently to the spokesperson giving us the required informational session about teen drivers’ safety. A restricted license consists of a curfew and the ability to have one other person with you in the car. I’ll never forget what the instructor said— “Each extra person in the car is an extra distraction, so the more people you have, the more dangerous the situation becomes.” I brushed it off when I first heard it, but after a few months of driving, I realized he was right.

We were at brunch when my friends told me a funny story. I passed my friend the salt and she passed me a fork. “One day, me and four of our friends were in the car, and my boyfriend was driving,” she drizzled a disgusting amount of ketchup on her eggs. “And the song ‘Party in the USA’ was playing. You know that part where Miley goes ‘So I put my hands up’? We were all vibing and putting our hands up, but my boyfriend put his hands up too! And we were on the highway!” The table erupted in laughter, and so did I, but it stood in the back of my mind. Why are we pretending like it’s normal? While it’s funny to laugh at small mistakes… that’s terrifying. The instructor’s words started to make more sense after I heard that story, and I started to pay more attention to the number of people I took in my car and how loud we played the music, even after I got my unrestricted license. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to control how many people you take.

The day of our senior picnic started off sunny. The mechanical bull was easier after eating a whole thing of cotton candy. A few hours later, it started getting ominously darker for some reason. Looking in the distance behind the bleachers, I saw a huge cluster of dark, heavy clouds coming our way. Everything after that happened lightning fast. A blaring alarm replaced Kendrick Lamar as our principal instructed us to leave immediately. That was the first (and last) time I ever felt sad that school got out early. With no time to sulk, I ran to my car when I got a call from a friend. She told me her parents wouldn’t be home until 5:00 PM and her bus comes at 4:00 PM, so she asked I could drop her and another friend off. Part of me wanted to say Good luck finding someone else! and peace out, but I knew I’d feel bad if I went straight home.

By the time they got in the backseat, it had already started pouring. And it only got worse as I dropped both off; it started coming down in sheets. I couldn’t even see at one point. While we weren’t in such a joyous mood to be blasting music through a tornado, the side conversations worried me as a potential distraction, so I kept it to a minimum. Thankfully, all of us got home safe, and I’d still take them home through a storm again, but it doesn’t change how I felt driving in a high-stress situation with friends.

“I can’t sleep, let’s run away and don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back,” we belted the lyrics from our hearts. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always wanted to live that song. I wanted to know what it was like to feel the exhilaration of freedom in a world you consider yourself the king of. It’s dirty, it’s messy, and wholly amateur. Driving with the windows rolled down and the music turned up is probably as close as I’ve gotten to that feeling, and it hits even harder when it’s on empty roads at night. A friend and I were coming back from a party on all kinds of roads: wide, narrow, single lane, smooth, rutted, ones with the lines freshly painted and ones with the- oh, where’d the lines go?

There must’ve been a split second between when I looked up to see the red light and when I hit the brakes.

We stared at the signal with wide eyes. I turned the music down and rolled the windows up. Was I actually about to run a red light? We drove in silence for a bit before I interrupted: “I’ll be more careful next time.”

The truth is, though, that this taught me what my instructor meant more than any other story or experience. Even with an unrestricted license, I’m a teenager. And it’s important to note that accidents caused by distractions are not exclusive to teenagers. Distractions don’t care if you’re 16 or 60. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the age group with the most distracted drivers was the 25-34 age group. These types of accidents are the most preventable and yet they are one of the most common causes of crashes.

My advice to all the drivers out there is to be more mindful. Luck was on my side that night; I saw the red light in time, my car was working well, and the roads were empty. But it’s too risky to make experiences like these normal. To make them a habit. The normalization of these topics can seem harmless and even funny, but it’s important to remember that drivers should always stay vigilant. Anything can happen at any time, so keep living your teenage dream, but turn the volume down a little so you can at least hear traffic around you. Use your turn signals. Keep a safe distance. And don’t almost run red lights.

Last summer, I spent a week at a program that took me to Nissan headquarters where I spent the day learning about new careers and technology being developed today. One of the coolest projects we got to work on was an AI that could detect whether someone was distracted while driving. We trained it ourselves– we took various pictures and defined what it meant to be focused and unfocused, and in the end, our model worked! It was an amazing educational experience, and it taught me more about distracted driving, its dangers, and the ethics of AI. While AI models that check for these sorts of things are already being implemented in some types of cars, they’re far from perfect. With this scholarship, I will further my education in data science to one day be able to decrease preventable casualties. I hope to build ethical, economical, and effective tools to make safe driving a common reality in any situation.