The Best Crash Ever

The old, beat-up black sedan cuts right in front of the silver SUV in front of our bus. The SUV slams into the back of the sedan, sending it flying off the side of the highway and smack into a huge oak tree. The SUV spins out and lands in the next lane over, facing the wrong direction.

I see the whole thing from my almost-at-the-front seat.

We have to stop. There's no choice, with both of the wrecked cars sitting in front of us and glass scattered across the road. Our driver, who'd told us, quite loudly, as we left the airport that his name was Charlie and he didn't stand for any shenanigans while the bus was in motion, moves slowly to the shoulder and stops next to a large set of bushes.

"Well, we just missed that one," he says to no one in particular. My uncle, Steve, who's sitting in the front, leans his head around to speak to the driver, then stands to look back at us.

“Shouldn't be too long guys,” he says. “Let’s just stay put.”

Groans from my teammates erupt around me. I have to agree with them- this bus is hot and uncomfortable and there's still like three hours until we get to Chicago - but I stay quiet because I can understand why the coaches wouldn't want us all to be standing on the side of the road, and soon the noise has gone down and the guys go back to their music or phones or whatever.  

I’m texting nonsense back and forth with my cousin Drew a few minutes later when I look up and notice that Steve is standing up with his back towards us, staring out the big windshield. I turn my head to look at Nate, who’s sitting next to me. He's got his headphones on, not paying attention.

I tap him in the shoulder. “I need to get up,” I tell him when he turns his head.  

“You can't get off,” he reminds me as he stands.

“I know,” I tell him. What I don't tell him is that there's something about Steve’s posture that's scaring me and I want to - need to - find out what he looking at.

Comes with the territory, I guess.

I make my way up the aisle and stop behind and a little to his right side so I can see out the front too.  

“What are you looking at?” I ask as I focus on the wrecked cars in front of us. There's a blonde woman and a girl with dark hair coming out of a black baseball cap standing in front of the sedan. I can't hear them, but it's obvious that they're fighting. The woman is holding onto the girl’s left arm with her own but is swinging her right arm around, almost hitting the girl.  

The girl’s mouth is wide open.

“These two got out the car fighting,” Steve says without looking back at me.

“Which one?” The black sedan is pretty banged up, the silver SUV not so much.

“The black one.”

“Hum.” I’m surprised anyone could’ve come out of that alive. But these two look physically okay - they’re just obviously very, very mad at each other.  

I watch as the girl’s mouth closes and opens a few more times. Then, when the woman closes the small gap that had been between the two, she starts swinging both her arms around frantically, almost shaking loose. The woman’s free arm comes right over the girl’s head though, and she ducks and twists her body towards us in an attempt to make her miss.

She looks right into the bus’s windshield. Her big, blue eyes look right into the bus’s windshield.  

Big freckles across her nose. Remnants of a scar on her cheek that had always just been there.  

Megan. 

Just as quickly she gains her footing and sprints down the side of the highway, away from us. Away from the woman. Gone.

But… That’s Megan’s face. That girl has Megan’s face.

I’m so startled I have to grab onto a seat back behind me. 

The truth is this isn’t the first time I think I’ve seen my sister’s face. Actually, there have been too many times to keep track of over the last five years - at school, at practice, at a grocery store.  

I must be hallucinating.

Hell, I think I see her practically every time I round a corner.  

And this girl just ran away from us.

Stop it. It’s not her.

I shake my head. Twice. But then Steve glances back at me and I see the look on his face.

Holy…

“Is that...”

“Do you think...”

We say the words at the same time. A thick, boulder of a feeling lodges itself in my chest. Steve whips his head back around to Charlie. “Open the door,” he demands.

It’s either my imagination or Charlie realizes there’s something wrong (or completely right - it’s kind of hard to tell), because he opens the door silently.

“She looked right at us, didn't she? She looked right at us.” I mutter the words as I start to follow Steve off the bus.

“Stay here,” he says.

“No.”

“Ryan...”

“No,” I say again, and take the last step behind him. As soon as our feet hit the dirt I turn to start running down the side of the freeway, but he grabs my arm.

“Ryan, your dad would kill me if...” His voice trails off but I know where he’s going with this.

“If anything happened to me too,” I finish for him. “I know. But I can’t wait on the bus. I can’t just... wait.”

I’m not joking. I already feel like I’m going to throw up.

That girl could be Meghan.

He sighs. “Alright. Just be really careful, okay?”

I nod, trying to look even more serious than I feel, and then we bolt down the side of the freeway together.

We stop short side-by-side around the bend. The woman is there, in a little clearing, turning in circles. There’s another girl standing to her side. Her curly brown hair frames her face, and she glances at us through wide green eyes before quickly turning away.  

My head spins. She’s not Meghan.

What the freakin’ heck?

Maybe Steve senses that I’m about to lunge at the woman. He puts his arm out across my chest and holds it there. “Where is she?” he yells at her.

She stops moving and looks at us. “Who?” she asks, all innocent. Her voice is scratchy. It’s like hearing my Grammie Betty, here all the way from Seattle.

“The other girl,” Steve answers calmly. How can he be so calm right now?

I'm so sure I've seen her. I'm so sure she’s seen me. But where is she?

The woman shrugs. But out of the corner of my eye I see the younger girl move her arm ever so slightly and point her her finger down the road. She’s still again before I know it.  

My heart thumps. I don’t know if Steve saw her. More importantly, I don’t know if the woman saw her. I move back around Steve to his other side. 

“Wha,” he starts as he notices me. But I’m already behind the woman too. I sense, more than see, him grab onto the woman’s arm as I pass her.  

“Ryan!” he shouts. “Do not get run over by a car!”

“Yeah, I know... don't get lost in the woods either. I got it!”  

I don’t even look back to see his reaction. I run a little further down the side of the road until I see a small opening in the trees. I turn here because, well, because I don’t see her - or anyone - ahead of me, and it’s the first option I see.  

I realize as I run really don’t feel like I have any idea what I’m doing and it’s scaring the hell out of me. This looks like a huge forrest - she could be anywhere.

If it’s even her.

It isn’t really a path but I follow a line of trees, screaming her name over and over. “Meghan? Meghan! Meghan?!”  

Nothing. My heart feels like it’s going to jump out of my chest.

I have to make a decision so I turn to my left, leaping over bushes and pushing through trees. What if the police don’t show up in time? “Meghan!” What if Steve isn’t able to hold that woman back?  

If it’s even her, I remind myself again.

It’s gotta be her though. That was her face.

“Meghan!” I have to find her first. “Meghan!!”

Finally I notice something black sticking up in the bushes, again to my left. A baseball cap. Her baseball cap? Adrenalin still pumping through my body, I force myself to stop short.

“Meg?” I ask again, quieter this time. “Meg, it’s me.”

If she knows who me is. I almost start running again, but a second later a figure moves out from behind a tree.  

Holy…

A feeling of mixed relief and astonishment washes over me. She can’t not be my sister. That dark hair, now whipped around and messy, but still hers. The freckles. The big, blue, pleading eyes staring right at me.

Same gray hoodie we saw from the bus. Now I notice it’s too big for her.

She’s gasping - over and over again like she can’t catch her breath. I see, more than hear, her say my name before covering her mouth with her right hand. There’s something sticking out from under her sweatshirt sleeve.  

“Holy shit,” I say before I can stop myself. My dad’s voice pops into my head, his every-time-I-swear “Ry-an, Lang-gauge” comment loud and clear even though he's thousands of miles away.

I think he probably would've let it pass this time.

“It’s okay.” I move forward slowly, not wanting to scare her. “You okay?” 

She nods. One short, quick nod.  

I wait until I’m a few inches away, but then everything happens fast and I grab at her arm, pull it away from her mouth, shove her sleeve up, and find the bracelet. Her bracelet. The bracelet she’s had literally forever. Its blue, silver and black football-shaped beads are so familiar it’s almost sickening.

I look up, into her eyes, still staring into mine, then back at the bracelet and back into her eyes. “Say something?” I finally ask. Her mouth is already open - it was like that when I pulled her hand off of it - and I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t sound like I remember.

“Did... did the police get her?” she asks. She struggles to get the words out, but her voice is, most definitely, I don’t have to think twice about it, Meghan’s.

Holy hell. I’m sure why or how this is happening right now, and I don’t care. My disappeared, gone, probably dead, much less able to walk, talk, and fight, sister… isn’t. 

I nod. And swallow. “That’s the idea anyway,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice steady. “Steve will... make sure they do.”

She blinks, and I’m not sure if she believes me. I’m not sure if I believe myself. “I hate her. I hate Leigha so so much.”

“I know. Me too.” Her name is Leigha. The she that was hurting my sister has a name. I want to ask more - I want to know everything. I open my mouth. 

“How… how are you guys here?” she asks before I get a word out.

“Some sort of weird miracle. But mostly a football trip.” Suddenly I can’t stand the short distance between us and I let go of her forearm and instead wrap my arms tight around her upper back, pulling her towards me.  

She lets out a sound that’s like half a sigh, half a laugh, then sinks into my chest as if she can’t stand up by herself anymore. Her face burrows into my t-shirt. The top of her head comes up to my collarbone and I realize I can’t remember ever being this much taller than her.  

“Cool,” she mumbles. “I love football trips.”

I know. I know you do. Relief washes through me again. When we were younger football trips with everyone were a regular occurrence, whether it be for one of our school’s games or for a college or pro game.  

“I know you do,” I tell her. “We all do.”

“How come I just saw you and Steve on the bus?” She says the words fast, so fast I’m not sure I understand her.

“What?” I ask.

I hear her suck in her breath. “Is it just you two now?”

Is it just you two now? This time I get it, and it hits me hard. Does she mean, like, forever? She probably does mean forever. She doesn’t know what’s happened with us over the past five years. Just like we don’t know what’s happened with her.

I hope she’s okay. Like really okay.

I shake my head several times. “Everyone’s... fine. Coming. We just had some issues with logistics. We were all supposed to fly straight to Chicago. Not drive there on a bus.”

Again, I wonder how convincing I sound to her, but she nods again. More this time - up, down, up, down. Her nails dig hard into my back. And I just keep going. I want her to know what’s going on. I tell her about all the issues we’ve had with the flights and where we’re going, what we’re doing. Who’s coming and when they’re supposed to be there. It takes a few minutes and she doesn’t move.  

“So, here we are, half the team on a bus in the middle of Indiana,” I finish.

“That’s... crazy,” she mumbles. 

“Yeah… But this part is crazy good.” I suddenly realize that the pit in my stomach that has seemed to be there constantly for five years is gone. “Really, really, really good.”

Her head moves up and down against my chest. “I knew you guys weren’t dead.”

“That’s what she told you?”

“She tried. Every single person I mentioned was in the accident.”

“The accident? Like one?”

“One massive car accident. It was was just so… unbelievable. I knew where everyone was that day.” 

“And none of us were together,” I finish the thought for her. Images from the day she didn’t come home from school dance in my head. Steve showing up in the middle of basketball practice saying we had to go. Sitting at her best friend’s parents’ dining room table for hours on end, knowing, if they’d just let me go look, I could find her. Finally seeing my dad that night when Steve dropped me off at home way past my bedtime. Way past Meghan’s bedtime.

“We’ll find her,” he’d told me, his voice shaky. “We will find her.”

“Right,” Meghan says now. “I knew right away she wasn’t telling me the truth. I just… had to figure out how to get away.”

I see her with the woman all over again in my head. Screaming. Fighting back. “I know you tried. You were trying back there. We had to figure out how to find you too.”

She sighs again. Her body’s going limp in my arms, but its like it’s a good type of limp. A limp full of relief. “What happens now? Can I just go with you? To Chicago?”

We were going on this trip without her and I start to feel bad about it all over again. Dad and I had talked about it practically every other day while we were planning it. We haven’t been anywhere further than San Diego since she’d been gone, and that was once - and quick. So even this five day trip would be a long time to be away from the only three places Meg knew to come home to. And we would all be gone.  

Dad finally said it wasn’t fair to the team to not go, and there were enough other things to worry about.  

“We’re not going without you,” I tell her.

That’s the truth now anyway. We aren’t going without her. I don’t really know what’s going to happen right now, but I’m a hundred percent sure we aren’t going to Chicago without her.

“Okay,” she says, and suddenly starts balling. Loud, heavy gasps make her shake. I try to tighten my grip but I’m already holding on as hard as I can. I can hear my own hard, heavy breathing and I blink as tears well up in my eyes too.

And, after a few seconds, I can’t help but whisper into the sky. “Thank you, God. Thanks an awful lot.”