1 The Accident

This is a ghost story without a ghost.

It was a beautiful night, a perfect night to die.

Alcohol was flowing, the lights were so bright, and the world glowed with the future. Anything was still possible and there was an entire world left unexplored. It was the high of being young, to never know what it's like to suffer.

You would think that a night that completely altered the course of my life would be seared into my head in painfully bright detail, but it's all just blurs until it happens.

Every day, I wish I saw him walking across the street. Every day, I wish I could say there was something more I could've done. There wasn't though. There was just the idiocy of getting behind the wheel when I had no business doing it, and after that, there was nothing more I could do to reverse the past.

He rolled right over the car, smacking against the windshield and leaving a nice crack in it. I could see in my rearview when his body hit the ground, and just laid there, cars behind me slamming to a halt. I thought to stop, only for an instant, before my foot slammed on the gas pedal, speeding off down the busy street. There were muffled screams, but none of them matched the white noise blasting through my head.

Other people came pouring out of the bar that the man had walked out of, checking out the commotion. Everyone is attracted to tragedy, even if they'd never like to admit it.

I focused my eyes on the moon, still not paying enough attention to the road to prevent another accident. I sped over the bridge back to the town I called home, hoping that nobody could write down my license plate, or grab a photo of it. Everyone on that street had been coming from the bar it seemed, and the motor skills required to grab your phone and take a focused picture of a license plate didn't seem doable from their drunk stumblings.

The screams and the tears didn't come on that drive home. They would come later.

It was only fifteen minutes later that I came storming up the driveway, throwing my car into park. I had no idea how I was going to explain away the clear damage to the car, but I was going to have to come up with something.

I'm the kind of monster who worries about how to hide the fact that I might have murdered a man rather than bother to worry if that man could actually be okay.

I had only been months away from escaping this town, this town where every familiar face had a painful memory hidden beneath every familiar smile. I lived in a town where every smile meant something other than just a friendly greeting. I know that every teenager thinks they live in a town where every other teenager is a wolf in sheep's clothing. That doesn't mean that it can't be true.

As my knuckles turned white from gripping the steering wheel, all I could picture were the newspaper headlines, the articles, the arrest, the trial, the lonely, lonely future in a bleak cell where they slip your meals through a slit at the bottom of the door before they throw you back into darkness, where you rot for the rest of your life and even when you leave there is no future for you. You don't go to college, you don't get a job, and nobody associates themselves with the teenage drunk who mowed an innocent man down and drove off.

So what do you do?

You let go of the steering wheel. You stumble your way out of the car, into the house, up the stairs, and into your room. You avoid any greetings or questions from your parents because you can't bear the thought of the looks on their faces if you told them the truth. Also, you have no way to explain why you drove home drunk instead of ordering that Uber. If they had no idea that you were drunk, then they get to keep sleeping in their nice comfortable beds in their nice comfortable house in the suburbs, dreaming nice comfortable dreams that their son isn't a murderer.

That's what you do because it's an easier existence than the truth.