Secrets from My Glove Compartment
A love letter to my Jeep.
Author’s Note: This is a long read. This is basically a short memoir. It took me a month to finish, and I’m publishing it for Labor Day Weekend as an end-of-summer treat. I’ve divided it into sections (chapters, even) for your convenience if you want to skip around, but if you take the time to read the whole thing, I hope you enjoy it very much. It’s too long for email, so you’ll have to open it in your web browser. Or the app. Or you can print it out on paper and bring it to the beach with you. Maybe bind it with some ribbons. Summer is so delicious.
The Best Summer of Your Life
I remember getting the call on a Wednesday night in January while I was hunched over my math notebook on my bed at my dad’s house. It was my mom—she was always calling me. Knowing I had hours of homework ahead of me, I considered declining her call but answered reluctantly. She usually had a minimum of 15 questions to ask me, but I needed to take a break anyway.
“Hello?” I answered.
“We have a house on Nantucket with a purple Jeep!!!!!” she cried.
“Wait, what?” I replied, dumbfounded.
My mother had just bought a second home on the island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts. Buying a house is an accomplishment in general, but it’s even more of an accomplishment for a self-made single woman with two children. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
She continued to explain.
“I didn’t tell you I was looking at a house because I didn’t want to get your hopes up. It’s small and it isn’t the nicest part of the island, but it’s a house. And get this! The owners are getting older and didn’t want their Jeep anymore, and when I told them I have a daughter, they told me I could take the car with the house! It’s a purple Jeep Wrangler! An old one, but still!”
A purple Jeep? I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Any of it.
“What year is the Jeep?!” I asked her. I loved old cars. I had been begging my dad to take me to test drive a butter yellow 1972 Ford F100 that was just an hour away from us in Pennsylvania. My dream car. (He eventually ended up going to test drive it himself and deemed it “unsafe for a 16 year old” — I can’t imagine why.)
“I’m not sure the exact year. I’ll send a picture and you can look it up—maybe 1998? But Angelina, can you believe this?! We have a house on Nantucket!” I couldn’t. I was so happy for her. I was so proud of her.
My mom is the same type of overzealous that I am, so without breathing between sentences, she immediately told me I should spend the summer working there.
She continued on the other end, “You could work in a retail store! You’d make so many friends. The summers I spent working on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore were the best summers of my life.”
I rolled my eyes through the phone. I was a sophomore in high school—nothing was more important to me than my friends here in Pennsylvania. Didn’t she know that? And besides, it was January. I couldn’t even focus on my math homework, let alone a summer job application.
“Why would I do that? I have friends here. I can work here this summer,” I said, sounding ungrateful. I immediately felt bad for saying that, a feeling I had a lot as a teenager. My mom and I weren’t the best of friends at the time, but I think that’s normal for many teenage girls and their mothers. (We have since worked this out, and today she’s my number one Substack fan.)
“At least think about it, Angelina. Seriously. It would be the best summer of your life.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and I meant it. “Congratulations, Mom. This is so exciting.” I hung up.
I opened Tumblr on my laptop and searched “nantucket summer,” as images of pretty girls with sun-kissed skin and grey houses with hydrangeas populated on my screen. It was 2014 and I was wearing a lot of Free People and had just discovered The 1975—I didn’t see how I’d fit in with these girls. (God, that sentence. To be a 16-year-old girl in 2014 discovering The 1975. What I wouldn’t give…) I kept scrolling and found more pictures of kids my age having beach bonfires, girls with white nail polish holding red solo cups and kissing boys with backwards baseball caps on the cheek, images of teenagers in Jeeps and old Land Rover Defenders with stickers tattooing the bumpers. It all looked like it was out of a movie.
I opened up another tab on my browser and searched “summer jobs nantucket.” Not much was coming up in retail yet since it was only January, but I had visited the island once and knew there was a Ralph Lauren store there. I had always wanted to work in fashion. Maybe this would be a way in.
The Beginning
Six months later, ready for my first full summer away from home, I met my purple Jeep. And she wasn’t from 1998. She was born in 1997, just like me.
If you’ve never loved a car, this probably will read very creepily. I have always loved cars. I named every car my parents ever had when I was growing up—and I’ve been fascinated by old cars since I was a kid.
Old cars are special to me because if a car still runs, it’s a preserved part of the past still inhabited by life—a living piece of history. I love the sound of an old engine starting. I love my Jeep’s cracked leather seats and rusted doors and aged steering wheel. I love that my Jeep has an antenna on the hood that’s taller than me. I love that as much as I vacuum it, I’ll never be able to fully remove the sand that covers the floor. I love the battered soft top and the tape player that only works 72% of the time and the JBL speakers that I proudly installed myself when I was 17 and the scratches along the sides of the doors from driving through tree-lined backroads with sandy potholes.
I often wonder about the people who drove my Jeep before me and the memories they have with it. These are mine.
The Girl with the Purple Jeep
During my first month on Nantucket in summer 2014, I made friends with a few girls at the store I was working at in town. It wasn’t Ralph Lauren, but I’d get there someday. We hadn’t yet hung out together outside of work, but I’d come to learn that these girls went to fancy boarding schools dotting the East Coast and that their guest houses were bigger than my house house. What did I have to offer them?
“Let’s all go out this weekend!” someone said one day, shortly after we had all met. Perpetually the designated driver of my friend group at home, I offered to DD for the night. “I can pick everyone up,” I offered. And so that Saturday night, I picked everyone up at J’s house.
“You have a PURPLE JEEP?” they all exclaimed at once as I turned into the gravel driveway.
“This is the coolest car ever.”
“Can we take pictures?”
“I can’t wait to wave to the boys in this all summer.”
I guess I did have something to offer.
“Does your car have a name?” someone asked.
“Oh,” I laughed, “yeah, I call her Purple Mist.” In 1997, Jeep came out with a series of rare colors. The stock paint color for mine was ‘purple mist,’ so I aptly named her that.
“I love it!” the girls all responded at once. My mom was right—I was making new friends.
Spoiler alert: These girls became my best friends, and I didn’t need to buy their love. We’re still friends 10 years later, and my having a purple Jeep has nothing to do with that—but when you’re a 16-year-old girl making new friends in a new town, you usually feel the need to prove yourself. That first night that we hung out, we pulled an all nighter. We drove around in my Jeep, met a group of kids our age, and stayed up until dawn to watch the sunrise at Brant Point. As I crept into my mom’s driveway at 7 AM with the headlights turned off, I remember feeling so excited for the summer ahead. I wasn’t expecting my mom to open the door so early, but she had heard me pull into the driveway. Even though it was clear that I hadn’t slept and I didn’t have much of an explanation for why I was coming home at 7 AM, I think my mom was happy that I was making friends. It was her idea for me to spend the summer here, so I might as well have a little fun.
And the fun never stopped.
The Boy with the Green Bronco
The summers all blended into one, but each year we would collect new memories like seashells. (Or sea glass. Depending how you look at it. You’ll understand what I mean.) One day in summer 2015(?), we were standing outside of the Juice Bar, my coffee cake ice cream dripping down my hand (this is the best flavor, by the way), when we heard the song “Build Me Up Buttercup” blaring from what sounded like Madison Square Garden-level speakers. A light green 1970s Ford Bronco—with brand new speakers—whipped around the corner and pulled to a halt across the street, and a few of our friends rushed over to say hi to the boys in the car.
“Who’s the boy with the green Bronco?” I asked someone out of curiosity. I was intrigued.
It’s a small island, so naturally, we ran into these boys the next week on the beach. They had driven the Bronco onto the sand, but the driver whom I had previously inquired about wouldn’t get out of the car. What’s his deal? I wondered. I walked over to where he was sitting in the driver’s seat, as all of our other friends were drinking and playing games on the sand.
I knocked on the window.
“Hey, I’m Angelina. Do you wanna join us over there?”
He explained why he was sitting in the car. He was worried about something bad happening to it. It was old. It required special attention.
I laughed. “Yeah, I honestly get that. I have an old purple Jeep—well it’s not that old. It’s from 1997. Not 1970. But still.”
“Oh, so you’re the Girl with the Purple Jeep,” he responded. The Boy with the Green Bronco knew who I was.
He asked me on a date later that week. He taught me how to drive stick in the golf club parking lot and I made him listen to the Beach Boys and we kissed in the green Bronco.
I learned later that his best friend was, what some might describe as, ‘bad news,’ and by mid-July, the purple Jeep and the green Bronco were involved in a high-speed car chase from the highest point of the island to the main downtown area. (I can’t make this up.)
I had driven some friends to Altar Rock—the best place on the island to view the stars from—and J had a friend visiting. The Boy in the Green Bronco’s best friend, whom I’ll simply call Bad News, was taunting J’s friend for being gay. J’s friend got upset, as did the rest of us, so he threw a glass bottle at their car. At the green Bronco.
Bad News started screaming. He was seething. The Boy in the Green Bronco wasn’t that bothered about the glass bottle—he was still the good guy—but Bad News egged him on, so I peeled away, scared for my life. Bad News had a temper, and I wasn’t sure what he would do. As I was driving as fast as possible down the hill, I noticed the green Bronco trailing behind me, and Bad News started throwing glass bottles at my car. The green Bronco was inching closer and closer to us and I was genuinely worried that we’d get into a car accident. I had put my friends in danger.
“JUST DRIVE, ANGELINA!!!” my friends were all screaming at me.
I drove us straight to town where I knew we’d be protected by the Presence of Others, and we immediately ran into friends. I parked my car next to the Juice Bar, where we had first encountered the green Bronco, and the boys parked behind me. Bad News got out and started yelling at me. He told me and my [slur] friends to stay away from him. No problem, babe. I told the Boy in the Green Bronco I didn’t think this was gonna work out. (He apologized for all of this later.)
I don’t know where Bad News is today, but I can’t imagine it’s anywhere good.
Car Problems
Every summer to this day, there’s a problem with Purple Mist. There’s actually never not a problem with her.
One year, I drove her onto Nobadeer Beach on the 4th of July—the biggest party day of the summer—and this was arguably the Biggest Mistake of My Life. As I was driving off the beach that day, a collegiate male (my eloquent way of describing a fr*t bro) sat on the hood, putting a full 32”-waist-sized dent in it. I was driving around that summer with a hood that looked like a flattened basketball. Eventually my mom decided we needed to do something about it, and we had a mechanic take a hammer to the inside of the hood, reversing the dent. It’s back to normal now.
One summer, the speedometer stopped working, which would be an issue anywhere else but Nantucket. The highest speed limit is 45 MPH, and I’ve gotten pretty good at gauging what that feels like. Speedometers can be totally optional.
One year, the front tires were off kilter so I drove with the steering wheel turned to the right for a few weeks. It wasn’t until my mom’s friend smelled burning rubber that it was decided this was unsafe and an issue.
Sometimes—this one’s my favorite—the headlights shut off. At night. While you’re driving. I remember the first time this happened when I had a friend in the car and she started screaming. I did what I always do:
Beep the horn so any nearby vehicles are aware of my presence.
(Optional) Pull over.
Flick the high-beam switch a few times until the headlights come on.
A few weeks ago when we were at the beach, my mom took a quick phone call—interrupting my silent reading time—and I couldn’t help but ask who it was.
“A mechanic,” she answered. “The rearview mirror fell off this morning.”
And in case you’re wondering—no, the air bags don’t work.
A Secret Beach
On top of the plethora of car issues, there’s never been a shortage of adventures. During my first summer, I was determined to explore as much of the island as I possibly could.
One day—and I had totally forgotten about this story until my mom reminded me the other day—I was trying to find a secret beach that my mom’s friend had told her I should check out. It was my day off from work and the weather was perfectly sunny and warm. The top was off the Jeep, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. I drove to what I thought was the secret beach, following the oral directions I had been given through a secondhand account, but somewhere along the way, I made a wrong turn.
I pulled into a lot where I saw other cars parked and assumed I had found the beach. As I walked down the pathway and found the ocean, I noticed two women wading into the water who looked topless, but I assumed that maybe I just couldn’t see the string from their bikini tops. I surveyed the beach for a spot to sit, and as I looked over to my right, a 70-something-year-old man unwrapped his towel from his waste to reveal his…
(Can you talk about penises on Substack?)
I had accidentally gone to a nude beach.
As a teenager, this was very alarming, and I hopped into my Jeep and peeled away as fast as possible. Would I have had that reaction now? Who’s to say—but it was a harrowing experience.
Stolen Bikes
The morning after my 21st birthday party is one I’ll never forget.
I had thrown a party at my mom’s house the night before, and it was a total hit. (See also: You’re Invited) The morning after, I awoke to my phone vibrating on the wooden nightstand next to my bed. We were in a new house that summer, and I had introduced myself to all the neighbors before the party and gave them my number in case there were any problems.
“Hi, this is John, the neighbor from next door. Sorry if I woke you up, but it looks like my wife’s bike was stolen from our driveway and I’m guessing your party had something to do with it.”
I shot out of bed, shaking my best friend Emily (high school Emily, not Substack Emily — I have two wonderful best friends named Emily) who was fast asleep next to me. Half-talking to my neighbor and half-talking to Em, I said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to find that bike right now and get it back to you.”
“Get dressed,” I said to Emily.
We opened the sliding door of my bedroom, which was on the first floor, and walked out to the backyard to find my friend Ellie putting red solo cups into trash bags. She had come over early to clean up. As I started explaining the situation to her, she interrupted me, saying, “Wait, I just heard your neighbors on the other side saying two of their bikes were stolen, too.” Shit.
Ellie continued cleaning up (saint), and Emily and I hopped into my Jeep on a mission. “I’M GOING TO KILL THESE BOYS!” I exclaimed, knowing exactly who did this. Even though this was a stressful situation, Emily and I put on music and were laughing on our drive around the island to find the bikes. The party had been so much fun, and Emily and I—both very optimistic people—were confident we’d get those bikes returned to my neighbors.
I pulled up to the main culprit’s house and rang his family’s doorbell. It couldn’t have been later than 8:30 AM. His parents answered, both in their pajamas, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. “Good morning,” I said smiling to introduce myself, “your son was at my birthday party last night and I hate to accuse him of this but…” I explained the situation.
“I’ll go get him,” his mother said to me, and she didn’t seem to doubt that he might have done this.
As my friend came outside not muttering a word, I knew I was right. “It’s over here,” he said, leading me to where the bike was strewn in a bush. One for one.
“Since you stole my neighbor’s bike, you’re going to take all the garbage and recycling from my party to the dump for me later today. Okay?” I told him. He agreed without hesitation. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any information on where the other bikes were.
We hoisted bike #1 into my backseat and contemplated what to do next. It was almost 9:00, which is what time the fudge shop in town opened, so I decided we should buy fudge for the inconvenienced neighbors while we thought about our next move. If we couldn’t return the bikes, we would at least plead for forgiveness with fudge.
We stopped at Aunt Leah’s Fudge and got 2 boxes of assorted chocolate fudge, which probably cost a small fortune. Driving back into my neighborhood, we returned bike #1 to the first neighbor, along with a box of fudge for his troubles. As he was explaining that there was an unidentified bike across the street, I put it together that this was bike #2 from the other neighbor. All that was left was…
…the third bike, which Emily spotted in a bush a few houses away. I guess the boys were so drunk they didn’t even get a chance to fully steal the bikes. Three for three.
We returned the other two bikes to the second neighbor, and they were (A) impressed by our sleuthing and (B) delighted by the fudge. We finished cleaning up from the party and let my crime-committing friend take care of all the trash bags later that day, as deserved.
A Home Is Not a House
Over the years, I’ve had so many memories with Purple Mist. Her name is a bit cringy to me now, but I’ll never change it. That would be like changing your dog’s name after it already has a personality. If you’ve ever met my Jeep, you know this makes sense.
My mom decided to sell her Nantucket house at the end of the summer in 2021. It was a good time to sell, and she had already been using the house as a rental property for tenants. Smart businesswoman, that one.
I couldn’t fathom the thought of selling the Jeep, of seeing someone else drive it, of watching some other girl and her friends pile in as sandy limbs and beach towels spilled over the edges of the car. So many songs are central to my memories with my Jeep. Every time I hear “Supercut” by Lorde, I think back to a night when I was driving home from my crush’s house at 2 AM, giddy with the promises of a fun summer ahead, with that song blaring from those speakers I had installed myself. (The headlights were flickering on and off, but I made it home safely.) Every time I hear “Love My Way” by the Psychedelic Furs, I think about the time some woman (with a New Jersey license plate, but that’s beside the point) (I love the state of New Jersey, but it breeds some crazy drivers) nearly T-boned my Jeep as she was pulling out of Bartlett’s Farm, which legitimately would’ve killed me. Every time I hear “Rock the Cashbah” by The Clash, I think about the time when Anne, Mac, and I drove out to Sankaty Lighthouse in the middle of the night because we had nothing else to do and Mac made me change the song because it “wasn’t the vibe,” and I was mad because it’s always my vibe.
I begged my mom to let us keep the Jeep. I couldn’t imagine my life without it, and my friends couldn’t imagine their lives without it. Because of this, my friend Clare generously offered to let me keep Purple Mist in her dad’s garage until we found a long-term solution. I couldn’t believe the offer, and neither could my mom, but when she wrote to Clare’s dad asking if he was sure this was okay, he responded, “I can’t imagine Angelina driving anything other than the purple Jeep.”
Because of Clare and her dad, I could still be the Girl with the Purple Jeep.
The day that our house went to the new tenants, I vividly remember not feeling sad. I drove away from the house in the Jeep by myself, headed for the beach, with my music blaring from the speakers and a content smile on my face. I realized it wasn’t any house that was my home there—it was always the Jeep.
August
Purple Mist is still mine and she still has her problems but she still is very special to me. I went to Nantucket for a long weekend earlier this month when Hurricane Debby was parading the East Coast, and of course on my very last day on the island, the sun was shining brightly and the weather was perfect. Even though we had a ferry back to the Real World at 11 AM, I decided to seize the beautiful day and woke up at 6:30 to jump into the ocean before the chaos of leaving a rental house started.
I tip-toed into my Jeep barefoot and popped the folklore cassette tape in. (This was a big part of summer 2021 for Anne and me. Regardless of your thoughts on Taylor Swift, folklore is a special, whimsical, wonderful album that deserves to be the soundtrack to an early-morning drive to the ocean.) You already know which song I played. (Hint: Track 8)
On my drive to the beach, seeing the sun for the first time in days, feeling my bare feet on the gas pedal with the ocean in the distance, I started to cry. I wasn’t going to include this in here because my brother said I’m So Dramatic, but I felt so at peace that morning of August 11. It felt ceremonial.
I was home.
If you read all of this, thank you! If you read 6 words of this, thank you just the same! I hope everyone had an AMAZING summer!!!!! I spent a lot of time offline and wasn’t super active on here, but it was truly wonderful and I don’t regret it. I’m excited for September and back-to-school time and fall and HALLOWEEN and everything that comes with all of that. I expect to be writing a lot more on Substack once my Children’s Book Writing course ends in a few weeks, and I’m giddy at the thought of connecting with people on here again.
Happy long weekend<3 xoxox
absolutely howled when you opened up tumblr to google “nantucket summer”
This felt like reading "The Summer I Turned Pretty" but better, because it's real. Love this, and love how you included photos of Purple Mist! What a special car.