What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
SOLVED: Other
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Looking for a short story about getting a driver's license, probable spoilers included
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Thank you! This story really stuck with me - it pops into my head with relative frequency for something I read because I had to in school. It's been killing me that I couldn't remember what the story actually was or who wrote it. :)
Placemarker post. "The Test" by Theodore Thomas.I read this in one of the big 3 mechanical magazines years ago.
I remember reading this short story in a high school English class, so it would have been the early '00s that I read it. The story was about a kid who was driving, I believe s/he (I don't remember the gender of the main character, or honestly even if it was told in first or third person though I *believe* it was third) was taking the test to get a license. S/he ends up in a car accident and kills folks that were in the other car. I do remember specifically that the driver that caused the accident noticed that the other car had a sleeping child in it before the accident happened.
Fortunately for the driver (view spoiler)["it was all a dream" - basically, the people who administer the drivers test had a hallucination part of the test where anyone attempting to get their driver's license went through this experience of causing a fatal accident. The kid, realizing it hadn't really happened, tried to proceed with getting his/her license, at which point the licensing folks stopped him/her (and, if I remember correctly, took him/her away to a jail or a hospital or something) because anyone who could experience causing a fatal accident like that and then be emotionally okay with having a license handed to them clearly had major issues and shouldn't be allowed to have a driver's license (hide spoiler)]. It was a sort of a Catch-22 situation, I guess.
Any ideas? I feel like it's probably a really obvious story, one easy to figure out (again, we read it in English class, the same year we read "A Modest Proposal" and "The Lady or the Tiger?" which are relatively common, and I'm pretty sure it was in our textbook as those two were and not just a print-out so it was probably widely read), but I have done a bit of Googling to no avail.