“We’re taking the party to Lucian’s,” Teddy said. I punched him in the arm. “Ow, why’d you do that?”
I didn’t want a bunch of people hanging out at the house. Us five was one thing, because they knew what my house was like. I didn’t invite a lot of people over, because it was embarrassing. Kip was my friend, but his family had money and a nice house. Hank, I didn’t know all that well.
“Hey, let us bum a ride. I can’t drive, and he certainly isn’t in any shape to drive either,” Kip said as he thumbed over his shoulder at Hank who was swaying slightly as he stood there.
“I have my truck. We won’t all fit,” I said. I’d bought the fifteen-year-old truck with money I’d scraped together from doing lawn work and odd jobs around football practice. It wasn’t fancy, but it was solid and it ran.
“We’ll ride in the back,” Kip said.
Blowing out a frustrated sigh of resignation, I nodded. “Get in.”
Todd, Mike, and Jerry piled in the extended cab, Teddy got in the passenger seat, and Kip climbed in the bed with Hank. We were going down the dirt road flanked by trees with Hank Williams blaring from the speakers and the windows down.
I heard the crack of a can being opened, and I glanced in the rearview to see Mike taking a drink of a beer.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I reached back and snagged it from him. Some of it spilled in my lap, and I threw it angrily out the window. “You got more of that?” I demanded as I looked at him in the rearview.
He sullenly shook his head. Jerry smacked him on the back of his shaggy mop of hair.
“Dumbass,” Jerry muttered.
“That was alcohol abuse!” Kip yelled through the open slider in the back window.
“Shut up,” I hollered as I glanced back at him.
When my eyes hit the road, I panicked. Two deer had jumped out of the trees, and I tried to swerve to miss them. I clipped one and overcorrected. My tires caught the loose edge of the road, and I lost control.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion.
The truck fishtailed before sliding. The ass-end came around until we were perpendicular with the road, and then we were rolling.
During one of the flips, my head hit the frame around the window, and I blacked out.
When I came to, there were flashing lights everywhere and more people than I knew existed out there. I tried to look around to see where the rest of the guys were, but my chest screamed in agony, and a plastic-and-foam collar was around my neck. Something warm was running down my face.
“Fuck,” I muttered as I tried to sit up but was quickly pushed back down. I hurt so goddamn bad.
“Son, don’t move. You’re in bad shape, and you might have fractured your neck,” a paramedic said to me as he shined a light in my eyes and started asking me a million questions. Then they prepared to load me up.
“What happened? Where is everyone?” I asked, confused as hell and feeling nauseous.
The paramedics glanced at each other but didn’t answer me.
As I was being lifted into the back of one of the ambulances, I saw a long black bag sitting on another stretcher. Horror filled me, and I prayed that I’d wake up from the nightmare I was stuck in.
On the way to the hospital, I died three times.
Crazy, huh?