I woke up to Jerry jabbing me in the ribs. “You awake?” he whispered. We shared a room in a house not far from campus.

“Now I am. What is it?” It was two-thirty in the morning. Seven hours earlier, a committee of teachers, provosts, fellow students, and the president of the college, had ruled to discontinue Jerry’s education. Due to poor academic performance, he would not be returning next year.

“Come here,” he said. “Look.” He stood on his toes, skinny legs pushing his eyes up to the circular attic window. He was making sure that from this vantage, we could see it there in the driveway, through the trees and the humid night.

“How am I going to look with you in the way?” I said. He moved, and I looked out and I saw it. A carnival green colored ’56 Chevrolet, a convertible with the canvas roof stretched open like a mouth that could swallow the sky, the body of the car shining under the yellow street light.

The car belonged to Arthur C. Daily, the 17th president of Geneseo University. Every Sunday, on his way home from church, he and his wife drove past our house. He waxed it every week, taking better care of it than anything we’d ever taken care of in our lives.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Get dressed,” he said.

If one person saw us, or it--parked stupidly in front of the house--they’d know.

“We’re just going for a little ride,” he said.

I’ll never forget the leather seats, how smooth and cool they felt, and how they smelled; the crunch of the tires on the gravel, the overhanging trees, the stars, the streetlamps, the houses all lined up and pressed together and asleep. We drove north and when we passed the edge of town I stopped worrying about the police. At the field with the wooden bubble of the astronomy observatory, he opened her up. The engine dropped a gear and we sped off. We went one-hundred and ten miles per hour between a cornfield and a manure farm. The world around us, the sky above us. He cheered. He had a high pitched, girlish cheer, ecstatic and unforgettable. The wind screamed back, alive and wailing.

He left sometime in the early morning. I found out a day later, in the paper, that he had abandoned the car in the center of Main Street, parked neatly against the other town landmark, the concrete bear fountain. He had ditched the keys into a sewer drain, and hitched a ride to the bus station. “A Mysterious Joyride,” the paper called it.

“We have some suspects in mind,” the sheriff was quoted as saying.

The next morning I woke up to a car door slamming shut. The sheriff and another stood in the driveway, bent over a car track with a measuring tape. I denied everything. Since I didn’t know where Jerry went, I had nothing to tell them.