All my problems started with a simple sacral stress fracture—a tiny break in the triangle-shaped bone at the base of my spine. This was September of my senior year of high school, and the recommended treatment was eight weeks of rest—right at the start of cross-country season. It was bad news but not a complete disaster. The injury was common among young women runners, easily treatable, and wouldn’t impact my offer from Penn State. The doctors prescribed OxyContin for the pain—a single forty-milligram tablet twice a day. Everyone said I would be fine for winter track in November.
I still went to all the practices and I lugged around equipment and helped to tally everyone’s scores—but it was hard to watch my teammates from the sidelines, knowing I should be running alongside them. Plus, since I had more time on my hands, my mother expected me to do more around the house. More cooking and cleaning and shopping and looking after my sister.
Mom raised us single-handedly. She was short, overweight, and she smoked a pack a day—even though she worked at Mercy Hospital, as a billing administrator, so she knew all the health risks. Beth and I were always after her to quit, always hiding her Newports under the sofa or other places she would never look. She would just go out and buy new ones. She said they were her coping mechanism, that we needed to get off her case. She was always quick to remind us we had no grandparents, no aunts or uncles, and there was definitely no second husband on the horizon—so the three of us had to show up for each other. That was our big refrain growing up: showing up for each other.
Three or four Saturdays a year, the hospital would summon my mother for “Surprise Mandatory Overtime” to plow through all the outstanding billing disputes that nobody could make sense of. One Friday evening Mom got the call and told us she had to go to work the next day. Then she told me I had to drive my sister to Storybook Land.
“Me? Why me?”
“Because I promised I would take her.”
“Take her Sunday. You’re off Sunday.”
“But Beth wants to bring Chenguang, and Chenguang can only go Saturday.”
Chenguang was my sister’s best friend, a weirdo with pink hair who drew cat whiskers on her cheeks. She and Beth were in some kind of anime club.
“I’ve got a meet tomorrow! In Valley Forge. I won’t be back until three.”
“Skip the meet,” my mother said. “You’re not running. The team doesn’t need you.”
I tried explaining to my mother that my presence delivered a huge psychological boost to my teammates, but she wasn’t buying it. “You’re driving Beth and Chenguang.”
“They’re too big for Storybook Land! It’s a kiddie park!”
“They’re going ironically.” My mother opened the back door, lit a cigarette, and exhaled smoke through the screen. “They know they’re too big for it, that’s why they want to go.” She shrugged like this was a perfectly rational thing for people to do.
The next morning—Saturday, October 7—Chenguang arrived at our house wearing a yellow shirt with a glittery white unicorn and faded jeans. She was eating a bag of sour spaghetti gummy candy and she offered me some. I shook my head and said I would rather die. Beth came downstairs and she was wearing the same unicorn T-shirt and the same jeans. Apparently they had planned the matching outfits in advance, and it was all part of our weird freakish adventure.
I insisted on leaving the house at 9:00 A.M. My plan was to be on the highway while my teammates were running, and then call to hear the results as soon as we got to Storybook Land. But Chenguang had a spider bite that wouldn’t stop itching, so we had to stop at a Walgreens to get Benadryl. This set us back a half hour and we didn’t cross the Walt Whitman Bridge until nine thirty, didn’t merge onto the Atlantic City Expressway until nine forty-five. There were three lanes of cars hell-bent for the Jersey shore at eighty miles an hour. I had the windows rolled down and Q102 turned up loud so I wouldn’t have to hear Beth and Chenguang giggling in the backseat. They chattered nonstop, they were constantly interrupting and talking over each other. My phone was resting on the console between the front seats. I had it charging in the cigarette lighter adapter. Over the music, I could hear the chirp of an incoming text message—and then another and another. I knew it was likely my friend Lacey, who never sent one text when five would suffice. The lane ahead of me was clear. I looked down at my phone, at the incoming notifications scrolling up my screen:
HOLY SHIT
OMFG
!!!!!!!!
you wont believe who placed 3rd
The clock on the dash read 9:58. I realized that the girls’ race must have ended and Lacey was dutifully sending me the results. I checked the road again, then lifted the phone with one hand, entered my password, and carefully typed my reply: tell me.
There were three blinking dots on the side of the screen, signaling that Lacey was typing a response. I remember Ed Sheeran on the radio singing about the castle on the hill. And I remember glancing into the rearview mirror. There was an SUV tailgating me, the guy was right up on my bumper, and without really thinking, I accelerated, to put a little distance between us. Through the mirror I saw Beth and Chenguang sharing a single strand of gummi spaghetti. They were eating it from both ends like the dogs in Lady and the Tramp. They were giggling like lunatics, and I remember thinking: What the hell is wrong with them? How is this normal teenage behavior? And then the phone pulsed in my palm, signaling that Lacey had replied.
And then it was Wednesday and I woke up in a hospital in Vineland, New Jersey. My left leg was broken, I had three cracked ribs, and my body was tethered to half a dozen monitors and machines. My mother was sitting beside my bed, clutching a spiralbound notebook. I tried to sit up but I couldn’t move. I was so confused. She started saying things that didn’t make sense. There was a bicycle on the expressway. Some family was hauling beach gear on the back of their SUV, and then a mountain bike came loose, and all the cars swerved to avoid it. I said, “Where’s Beth?” and her face just collapsed. And that’s when I knew.
The driver in front of me broke his collarbone. Everyone in the SUV behind me had various minor injuries. Chenguang walked away from the accident without a scratch. My sister was the only fatality, but doctors said I was a close runner-up. Everyone was quick to say that I shouldn’t blame myself, that I didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone blamed the family with the mountain bike. A few police officers came to see me in the hospital, but there was never any real kind of investigation. At some point during the barrel roll my cell phone went out the window. Either it was pulverized by the crash, or it vanished in the tall purple wildflowers growing on the side of the highway. I never found out who placed third.
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