Selective Consequences

A Tale of Two Teens

Or, how to flee the scene badly

Same panic. Different driveway. Image created with ChatGPT.

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Teen One bumps a car in the school parking lot. He’s late. He’s sixteen. Two cars, neither brand new. His brain runs the calculus: I’ll deal with it after school. What he doesn’t know — and what apparently nobody tells sixteen-year-olds until it’s too late — is that the law does not care how minor it felt. Hit a parked car and drive away without leaving your name and number, and the word changes. It stops being a ding. It becomes leaving the scene.

He doesn’t leave the paper.

Next day, the school resource officer is waiting. Hit-and-run, official record, the whole bureaucratic hammer.

Teen Two is behind the wheel of his mom’s Tesla, sixteen and freshly licensed, same as Teen One. He botches a left turn and taps the car ahead of him. Panicking, he reverses — and taps the car behind him. Another Tesla. Two cars hit in the span of one bad turn, a feat most people fail to manage in a lifetime. Fully unraveling, he pulls over, reconsiders the entire concept of pulling over, and drives home instead.

The police show up at his house the next day. No hit-and-run charge. He gets a ticket for an illegal left turn. The Teslas get fixed off the books: no insurance claim, no premium hike, no official record. Just a quiet repair, a parental lecture, and a cautionary story to tell at dinner someday.

Teen One isn’t so lucky. Hit-and-run doesn’t disappear at eighteen. It sits on his record. His insurance company may be charging him for that afternoon long after he’s forgotten what the dent even looked like.

So one boy gets a record and a premium hike that may outlive his car. The other gets a parental lecture, a quiet repair, and a Tesla good as new. Same basic panic, same basic leaving. Two completely different price tags.

Maybe it’s the Tesla. Maybe it’s just how differently police discretion lands depending on which driveway they’re standing in. Or maybe it’s this: one of these boys is white, and one of them is not, and “scared kid panics behind the wheel” gets read as a felony on one and a footnote on the other.

That’s the question. I don’t have the receipts to prove it’s the reason. But it’s hard not to notice that two scared kids drove away, and only one of them became a criminal. The variable hardest to ignore is the one nobody official will say out loud.

Many thanks to Dave Of All Styles and It’s All Good for publishing this piece, and for making space for stories that sit in the uncomfortable places.

We love uncomfortable spaces Sunita. Write for It’s All Good

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