The disco ball lights up, the tiny mirrors shooting photons of light around the car.
Then, impact.
My body is thrown forward. I feel the burn of my seat belt as it clenches around my chest, so tight it pushes the air right out of my lungs.
Everything registers slowly but in unison.
The car spinning.
The blare of a truck horn.
Headlights showering light across the windshield as we careen into an oncoming truck, a solid wall of metal that races toward us.
Time stops just long enough for me to look at Kimberly, her cheeks dotted with little freckles of refracted light, her eyes wide with horror. She opens her mouth to scream, but all I hear is twisting, shrieking metal.
Then darkness.
2
It hurts to breathe.
Everything is bright and out of focus, voices and faces coming in bursts of color and sound. I want to close my eyes, to sleep. But I’m in some sort of constant motion.
“Severe head trauma.”
“Depressed cranial fracture.”
White ceiling tiles blur. Machines beep. Gloved hands touch me.
“Kyle? Kyle. Look at me.”
I zero in on the voice and see it’s coming from a woman. Her red hair is tied into a rushed, messy ponytail, strands falling around a pair of intent blue eyes that quickly come into focus.
“Good. That’s good. I’m Dr. Benefield. I’m a neurosurgeon,” her mouth says, and I focus on the movement of her lips to try to grasp on to what she’s talking about. “I’m going to take care of you, okay?”
There’s a halo of light around her head, blazing, the red of her hair on fire. I stare at it as another voice calls out.
“Fractured femur and intrascapular lacerations…”
“Talks a lot, doesn’t he?” she says, giving me a quick, confident wink.
Her blue eyes study my forehead as she begins to ask me about what kind of music I like. An overwhelming exhaustion tugs at me as I talk about the genius that is Childish Gambino, my words getting harder and harder to say.
I force everything else to go quiet except the doctor. Something about her calmness reassures me in all this chaos. The yelling voice, the beeping, the tearing sound of my clothes being ripped off me, fade. There’s nothing but the ring of burning light encircling her hair. The smile on her face.
I start to smile back, but then I see…
Oh my God.
In her glasses, I see my reflection.
Blood is painted across my nose. A flap of my forehead lies open like an envelope, exposing the white bone underneath. Cracked white bone. My skull. Broken.
I start to panic, the sounds all pouring back as a wave of fear crashes into me. “Is that…？ Is—that’s my…？”
“You’re okay,” she says with a smile. I can’t imagine how bone sticking out of my face is okay, but her expression remains as calm as ever. Why is she not freaking out at this? She reaches up toward my face, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s touching my forehead, my jaw, my cheekbones.
“I can’t—I don’t feel that. Am I supposed to feel that?”
I think I see her smile falter for a fraction of a second, but then I’m sure I imagined it because she just continues on, her hands constantly moving.
I’m still trying not to freak the fuck out when the double doors into the emergency room slam open behind Dr. Benefield, and another gurney is wheeled in.
I start to close my eyes, the last of my energy pouring out of me, but then I see it. A shock of blond hair coated in a layer of blood.
No.
No, no, no. It all rushes back to me. The pouring rain. Our fight. The seat belt locking across my chest.
“Kimberly,” I try to scream, but it comes out weak, my eyelids heavy. Everything is so damn heavy.
“Stay with me, Kyle,” the doctor’s voice says. “OR three. Now,” she calls to the other voices in the room.
I fight to keep my eyes open, fight to keep them on Kimberly, but suddenly I’m moving, the fluorescent lights blinding me as they flash overhead, one after another, after another, faster and faster and faster. Flash flash flash flashflashflash…
No! I want to yell. Go back! But I don’t have the strength to form the words and everything around me keeps moving.
I see a doctor carrying a child.
Flash.
An elderly woman getting oxygen.
Flash.
A girl reading a book. She looks up just as we round a corner.
Flash.
Then Dr. Benefield, her white jacket whipping ahead of me, blurring and expanding into a glow that consumes the entire hallway, until there’s nothing left but the blinding white light.