It was 9:50 when I arrived at the road test site in Fresh Meadows this morning. My appointment was scheduled for 10. We had just gotten our car washed, and I had then squeezed in some last-minute practice, doing some parallel parking (which I was very anxious about) and three-point turns. My father pulled up behind the last car on the surprisingly short line. There were five cars ahead of us.

Nervousness set in. My hands were shaking and I felt like I was going to throw up. I kept visualizing the correct way to pull away from the curb: signal, check the mirror, check the blind spot, step gently on the gas pedal. If I did that right, there would be no problems; I was prepared. I’d been driving for two years, and had been practicing every day for the past two weeks, perfecting my technique.

It was ten o’clock. There were three DMV workers there. One got into the car in front of us. However, shortly after she did, one of her coworkers, a strange-looking man in ugly sunglasses, beckoned her out of the car. They joined the third off in the distance, under the shade of a tree. They then got into a small red car and drove away.

Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Then thirty. I watched the intersection ahead of me, watched the cars stop at the all-way stop sign and then go again, observed the interactions between the drivers, how some of them barely stopped at all and some of them stopped for so long that the other driver got impatient and went ahead. The triumvirate had not yet returned. I imagined some sort of DMV-themed “Thelma and Louise”; the three of them, speeding down the highway, throwing their fake leather clipboards out the window and unbuttoning their light blue DMV-issue oxford shirts as the wind tousled the pencils tucked behind their ears. My nervousness had subsided in exchange for annoyance; I’d been on time, so why weren’t they?

Finally, after forty minutes, they parked their little red car in the shade under the big tree, and they all climbed out. They walked incredibly slowly (”If they were walking any more slowly, they’d be going backwards” said my father) back to the testing site. The woman got back into the car in front of us. The man with the ugly sunglasses got into my car. After he had looked at my learner permit and my prelicensing course certificate and chatted with my father long enough so that my nervousness could build up to heights I didn’t know it could reach, he closed the door, buckled his seatbelt, and said, “Okay Elsie [sic], pull away from the curb.”

I signalled. I checked the mirror. I looked behind me. I turned the wheel. And I stepped on the gas pedal far too hard, causing the car to jolt forward. I felt my heart drop into my stomach. “Whoops,” I said quietly. But, I reasoned, it was only probably a few points off, which meant I could still pass quite easily.

Three seconds later, while silently reassuring myself that I hadn’t really screwed up, I went straight through a stop sign.

“That was a stop sign, Elsie,” the man in the ugly sunglasses informed me.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

I won’t even bother recounting the rest of the test. For one thing, it only lasted about a minute more, and for another thing, I was so crushed that I don’t even remember what happened. My heart, not satisfied with its already-misplaced location, burrowed its way out of my stomach and flopped about on the floor of the car for a while as I, completely miserable and not even attempting to pay attention to the man in the ugly sunglasses’ now-incredibly-condescending orders anymore, executed a jerky three-point turn and pulled over to the side of the road by the testing site.

“Elsie,” the man in the ugly sunglasses said, “you didn’t pass.”

It’s Elise, I mentally screamed. Jesus fucking Christ, it’s ELISE. How fucking hard is it to read a fucking name? I sobbed silently as my dad drove home, and then went straight to my room and sobbed not-so-silently. I think I’m going to need a new pillow because I beat my current one up so much that it resembles Sylvester Stallone’s face. I do not take failure well (when it is not a social studies test). I do not take humiliation well, especially when it’s my own fault. And for the love of god, why can no one read my name?

A few hours later, however, as my dad was driving me to my orthodontist appointment, I suddenly started laughing hysterically, realizing that I had quite possibly set a new record for road-test-failing aptitude, especially for someone who actually knows how to drive decently well. I managed to fail my road test in five seconds, simply because I choked.

I plan to schedule another test for mid-October, when I’ll be home from college for the weekend. In the meantime, I plan on not driving at all. In fact, I plan on not even looking at a car, if I can help it. If I drank, I would get quite drunk tonight, but I guess I’ll have to settle for massive amounts of ice cream instead. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take a nap, because while I’m going to find this hilariously funny in a few months, right now I don’t want to think about it.