by Angela V.Mitchell
“Matt will be here soon. We have to think of something to do.” My friend Steph sprawled on my bed with her head against the wall.
It was Friday night, our first year of college. My phone rang. That’s when I started drifting into dangerous circumstances without making responsible choices.
“Jessie, come and visit tonight.” It was my brother, Eric, already a sophomore in college. We usually talk once or twice a week. “Bring some friends along,” he added.
“Do you want to go to see my brother?” I asked Steph. “It’s 75 miles to get there.”
She nodded and said, “I can drive.”
Amy, who lives next to us, wanted to go, even though she had to work the next morning.
The four of us didn’t even get to my brother’s dorm until almost midnight, circumstance one. We played Outburst until almost 4:00 a.m. We decided to crash on the couches and drive back in the morning.
“We’ve got to leave by 7:30,” Amy said. “I can’t miss work.” Circumstance two.
“I’m setting my brother’s alarm for 7:15,” I said. The next thing I remember is the alarm beeping. When I woke up, I saw Stephanie and Amy sitting on Eric’s old couch laughing. “We didn’t exactly get any sleep,” Steph said when she saw me staring at her. Circumstance three.
“Wait until I get to work,” Amy said. She pulled her eyelids open with her fingers. “I can just see myself.” She flashed a fake smile, “Hi, I’m Amy and I’m your server.”
“Steph,” I asked, “do you want me to drive?”
“Not my new car. I’ll stop for caffeine.”
We took off. Stephanie pulled into a gas station to get a Mountain Dew. Matt was already asleep in the passenger seat.
“Steph looks tired,” Amy said.
“I’ll keep talking to her if you want to sleep,” I said.
Amy shut her eyes. Steph came out, put her billfold in the glove compartment, and touched a prayer cross she had stuck on the visor. It made me smile. Everyone had seatbelts on except me. I sat forward, so I could talk to Steph. It started snowing lightly after about a half hour. Nothing is as hypnotizing as snow swirling at the windshield. Circumstance four.
“Why don’t you pull over at the next exit. I’ll drive the rest of the way,” I offered.
“We’re almost there,” Steph said.
I turned around to look for a sign or landmark to figure out exactly where we were. When I turned back to the road ahead, Stephanie was coming up fast on a car driving much slower than us. “Steph, do you see that car?”
She jerked awake and braked but the car had too much momentum. We hit a patch of ice and skidded to the right. I looked back. There were no cars in the three lanes to our right. Then the right front of our car hit the hard packed snow piled on the side of the road. It flipped. It flipped again. I remember saying to myself, “Don’t tense up, or you’ll really get hurt.”
The car stopped. I heard silence for one long moment before Stephanie started screaming. Matt got out and went around to the driver’s side to help Steph.
Amy found her cell phone. “I’m calling 911,” she said.
I went to check on Stephanie with Matt. Matt said his knee hurt a little.
“Stephanie? Are you all right?” I questioned.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“About 10 miles from school,” Matt replied. “We’re on the interstate.”
Steph looked confused. “What happened? Why are we here?” she kept asking between sobs.
“She’s in shock,” I said. “Steph, can you walk?”
Steph nodded and we took a few steps. Amy joined us and immediately screamed, “Jessie, o-my-gosh! There’s blood running out of your ear!”
I found a piece of glass that had made a small cut. I wiped the blood away. The EMTs arrived. Matt talked to them.
“Steph should be checked out,” Matt explained.
“Is anyone else hurt?” the EMT asked. “We’ll check each of you out.”
The rest of us were all right. Stephanie was crying. “I have to call my mom.”
“We will call her for you,” the EMT assured her. “Right now we are going to take you to the emergency room. One of your friends can go with you.”
Steph grabbed my hand, so I went with her.
I climbed in the ambulance with Steph. I will never forget how tightly she held on.
“What’s my dad going to say?” Steph said as the EMT examined her in the ambulance and the siren sounded overhead. “He is going to hate me. I am so sorry.”
“He’s going to be happy we’re all alive,” I said.
“I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me, Jess. I’m so sorry.”
“Steph! I don’t hate you, you’re my friend. Don’t worry. No one is going to be mad at you.”
Steph had a fractured clavicle and missed a few days of school. Amy never made it to work. I saw the wrecked car that afternoon with Matt and Steph’s dad. We were lucky.
Four days later Steph came back to school and Matt came over.
“It’s weird, Jess, how we came out of the accident so well,” Steph said. “You know I rubbed my prayer cross on the visor before we started. My grandma gave it to me when I started driving.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I seriously believe God was with us.”
“I seriously do, too, but not because of the visor cross.”
“That’s superstitious,” Matt added. “What if you hadn’t rubbed it, or what if we’d been killed? Would that mean God wasn’t with us? Or would it have been your fault that we were killed because you didn’t rub the cross?”
“I’m serious,” Steph repeated.
“You rubbed the cross, but you got hurt,” I said. “I didn’t rub the cross and didn’t have a seat belt, so I should have gotten hurt, but I didn’t. What if you had chosen to let me drive? Or, what if it hadn’t started to snow?”
“It’s not about the visor cross,” Matt agreed.
“My dad says it’s about being responsible enough to be in college,” I said. “God would have been there if the accident was bad, too.”
It just happened that the Thursday after the accident was Thanksgiving.