Summer of Us

Chapter 8

At the end of eighth grade, dad and I were driving home from the theater. Some action movie dad had wanted to see with lots of explosions and cheesy one liners, but I loved it anyways. Mom has never been much a movie buff, but dad always wanted to go, and that last weekend of school we had gone to see the blockbuster and get pizza after. We had talked about my friends, plans for the summer, what we should get mom for mother's day. All around, it was an uneventful and normal night.

And then on the way home, some guy ran a stop sign and t-boned our car to a tree, killing my dad instantly.

I lost consciousness after the initial impact, though the only injuries I suffered were from some broken ribs and a concussion. Guess it was a way of my brain of protecting itself, clocking out from the horrific aftermath for a blissful few minutes.

When I wake up, my door is a crumpled piece of metal under my arm, and it takes a few moments for the pain to settle in. There was another car's windshield too close to mine, or what used to be the passenger window. It's shattered, and there's a man standing outside of it. He's on the phone and now he's yelling, repeating over and over again, "Are you ok? Are you ok?"

My right eye had been useless, because it's covered in blood from my head injury. Looking to the left, the driver's side, sits my dad, but something is not right. His body was slumped forward, his face smashed against the wheel. There's so much blood covering his face it's hard to tell what color his skin is. What I remember mostly is the twitching, the phantom-ness of his body shutting down for the last time. The most disturbing sight is his eye, the one that isn't swollen shut against the wheel—it's veined and protruding, like it had nearly popped out of his head upon impact. It was fixed forward, on the radio, but glazed over, unmoving like they would be if he were dreaming in his sleep.

I was screaming. And I didn't stop screaming. Not when my right side started to hurt mercilessly because of the broken ribs. Not when the strange man just outside the car tried asking me a million more times if I was ok. Not when the fireman who extracted me from the car finally arrived and saved the one person in my dad's Mercury who had survived—me.

The following weeks were a blur of hospital beds and funeral plans and family that had flown in taking up every inch of our house. All the kids from the block had come to the reception after, all asking the same thing—how are you doing?

There was no defining moment that ended CJ and I's friendship. No fight or argument that made me think, well, that's the end of that. But after the funeral and family leaving and the house was quiet again, I remember him fading away. He had football camp or was out with friends from school or away to the Laurens' annual trip to Florida. When we got to high school in the fall, he was a stranger, sitting beside me on the bus without anything to say. And what could be said, really? He was normal, and I had become the unstable girl with crippling anxiety and a new prescription to Valium.

In some ways, I used to think I deserved losing his friendship. After all, why would a kid like CJ be friends with a kid like me?

CJ gives me so much shit when he finds out Monty spent the night. I lie and say we had slept apart, for a bit of damage control, but still. He goes on and on about how Monty has no business spending all that time with me now that he has a girlfriend, that he's a creep and a scrappy weirdo and yes, he'll take me up to Lancaster after he showers.

"Don't get too excited," I say, finding Monty's contact to call him. My thumb trembles from adrenaline. How pathetic do I look, calling him up after just seeing him this morning? "We have to make sure he's home first."

"Who cares if he's home? Let's go by and chuck the damn thing through his window."

"You're being a jackass again," I inform him, putting my phone up to my ear. He rolls his eyes and stalks off into the house.