In The Light
"Hello? My name is Eilish McKinnon. I'm on Rose Avenue, near the Walmart? There's been a crash. I think the adult driver was drunk, but the other car had six high school students in it? The car jumped the median. I was in the car behind them. The high schoolers, not the drunk. The entire driver's side is smashed in and there's a kid that dragged a few of them out of the car, but there's still one or two trapped and I can't tell. I'm sorry. I'm trying to get somebody out of the car, but the window is smashed and there's glass everywhere. I can't do it. I'm sorry."
"Alright, Eilish, there's already an ambulance heading your way. Are you injured, honey?"
"Eilish, are you injured?
"Eilish? Are you okay?"
The nine-one-one operator was talking to me. I could hear it, but I couldn't make myself answer. Neha was in that car. Bryce had just gotten into an accident and possibly killed Neha. It was raining so hard outside that I could hardly see anything except Kai moving around outside. He probably had saved Bryce by then, but I couldn't tell. The wind whipped through my hair as I stood there in the middle of a storm, in the middle of the wreckage, with the operator talking in my ear, saying words I couldn't hear.
"Eilish!" My name was screamed into the wind. It only caught my attentions for a brief moment before I was distracted again by the entangled mess that used to be Bryce's car. I'd been in that car before, ridden in the passenger seat. Hell, I'd driven that car.
"There's been an accident," I repeated into my cell phone.
The operator was silent for a moment, as though she wasn't really expecting me to speak anymore. I felt numb. "Eilish? Are you injured?"
I shook my head, surveying once more the limited area I could see. Kai was laying over one of them, like a shield from the rain. It was Bryce. Kai was screaming. "No, but four of the six that were in the car are."
I looked down to see that I had caught my hand on a piece of glass when I'd tried to open the back door. Kai had warned him not to get the tiny ass Kia. He warned him.
"How many people are outside of the car?"
"I can't see. It's raining," I told her. I started to walk around the car, but the sight on the other side was hard to look at. There'd been six of them in the car, which I knew. Neha had been drinking, I knew that, too. I knew that Bryce volunteered to be designated driver. I knew that he'd never been in a single accident, never hit a thing and never been hit, never even ran a stop sign. I knew that Bryce had been planning to propose to Kai when their group got to the beach. I knew Tim was just a few cars ahead on the highway, and that nobody will have told him why that car won't show up in a few hours at the beach house.
Bryce was lying in a pool of his own blood, but Kai was crying and screaming like it was his own. Robert was fine, seemingly, but he was sitting against a tree besides Hunter, who looked worse for wear. Hunter must have been the one I could see in the back seat whose foot had been stuck under some metal bar that was part of the front row. Sophia was there, passed out cold. She wasn't bleeding as much as Bryce was, but I could tell she'd been sitting right behind him. Finally, my eyes caught the movement of a figure near the back wheel. That was Neha. She was coughing something fierce.
"It'll be okay," I remember saying, flatly. I returned my attention to the operator. "I think all six. The driver of the other car hasn't moved in all the time I've been on the phone with you, but he's still in his car."
I moved towards Bryce, and in the process of trying to elevate his arm and shoulder, which must have gotten trapped between the seat and the door for it to be almost severed like that, I dragged Kai off of him. Kai kicked and fought and screamed profanities at me, but then subdued himself and quieted.
