Cerulean Blue

It was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives.

This thought occurred to me while I lied sprawled across the pavement, blinking toward the clear blue sky. No clouds, just a vast cerulean. 

There was a light breeze moving the hair around my face, dancing with a leaf across the grass by the guardrail. It was a warm breeze, soft against my skin. It cooled the blood that puddled around my leg. 

I lifted my head up-- maybe the slowest I’ve ever moved before-- and my eyes scanned the scene around me. 

It was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives, I thought again, as clarity set in all over me. It made me feel light headed. Not one of them could still be alive. Not one of them. 

So I dropped my head back onto the road and stared into the sky.

I had walked to the car with the false confidence of someone who knew that nobody could tell they were two drinks away from having the spins. I dropped my bag onto the gravel by my car door and crouched down to sift for my keys. 

Woah.

I pressed my hand into the side of the car door and kept myself as steady as I could. 

Don’t move that fast dummy, I thought; or I said. I can’t remember. 

The sun was bright and hot on my shoulders. Everything smelled like fruit and the sharp hint of vodka. I put on my sunglasses. 

There’s my keys. Better find a mint. 

“Hey Oooo-liiiiv-iiii-aaaa!” 

I knew the voice, and I knew the familiar sing-song tune of my name, and I knew who had sung it. I popped up and turned around, making myself dizzy again. I put one hand on my hip and draped the other arm over the hood of my car and leaned against it. Michael was walking to his car, shaking his car keys in one hand. He was grinning. It was a bright, wide smile that always started a little fire in my chest and sent sparks dancing up to my face, blushing my cheeks.

“Hey Mike, my dude, what’s up?” 

“Headed out.” He stopped at his car and leaned over the hood. He was so tall. I loved that, too. “You hear from Mira?”

Mira. Mira. I had to search my foggy mind. Mira… Lang. Mira was leaving. Mira Lang was leaving for…

“About her party?” Michael finished my thought. I grinned and tried not to look so stupid, or so almost drunk. 

“Yes!” I lied. I do not know why I lied, but it was too late now. 

“Yo, me too!” He clapped one hand against his chest and I could hear his palm thud against it. He held it there, nervously scratching at his shirt and still smiling. Was he grinning because I was coming? I realized I was staring and thanked myself for putting on sunglasses. “I’ll see you there?”

“Yeah!” I smiled and tried to seem cute and coy, but it only made me feel kind of silly and embarrassed. Had I been smiling for too long? Why was I standing like this? Olivia, don’t be an idiot. 

“Okay, Olivia. I will seeeee youuuuu theeeeere.” He sang, as he looked at me almost sheepishly. It made me feel better. Maybe he felt silly and embarrassed, too.

I got in the car, head swimming. He was genuine. He was kind. He seemed to always want to talk to me. I was nothing. I couldn’t believe it. 

There was something about this semester, this whole year really, that had me feeling more at home in this place. Lately, I had felt a change in the way I walked into a room, the way I felt about myself altogether. I could belong in places and to people. Richland wasn’t just where I’d moved  for school, but where I lived. I was living now.

 I turned my car onto a narrow two lane stretch called Six Mile Road. This was the quickest way home, and I wanted to get ready as fast as I could. 

I drove, recapping the day in my mind; it had been a remarkably good one. There was something about the summer in Richland-- it was hot but always so windy. I had finished my last final and booked it over to our meeting place, The Wagon. My small group of other pharmacy tech undergrads and I sat on the patio, drinking and laughing. It wasn’t crowded yet, and we all decided to bail before the freshman crowd hit and we were surrounded by that loud wild fun we’d burnt ourselves out on just last summer. 

I could still feel the warmth of the sun on my shoulders through my sunroof, all my freckles raised and dark. The music on the radio enveloped me. I was sliding through the curves and turns thinking about texting Mira, and about Michael’s wide, bright smile. I looked down to my phone in the passenger’s seat. It was only a glance, but it lasted one one-thousandth of a second too long. 

The crash was instant slow motion-- a complete contradiction of reality. It lasted endless eternal seconds, pain and numbness collided and then exploded in a flash of ice cold twisted metal and hot black smoke. 

I could see him; we were face-to-face in the first century of that eternal second. 

He was probably eighteen, nineteen at the oldest. His eyes were widening-- the same terror that I had just met was visiting him for the first time, too. It was a new fear. It was the certainty of an inevitable disaster. His arms were tense and straight, his knuckles white from his hands forming a vice grip on the steering wheel, like he was trying to push everything in front of him away. 

Beside him, I saw in this same flashing moment, a girl. His age. Her eyes were cast down, looking at her phone, and then they darted up at me in a wide shock. The glitter all around her eyelids sparkled in the sun, her lipstick was bright red and framed her widening mouth as she must have let out a scream. She had no idea what was happening until it literally hit her.

In the back seat, just behind her head, a faint expression caught my eye in the last act of my drudge through this horror film. A pale face shadowed by an odd square hat, smiling behind a dangling red and white and black tassel. The smile stood out in my mind; it was so misplaced and ghoulish. 

He was the last to know. 

As my front fender hit theirs, my face hit the piping hot airbag that exploded in a puff of blinding white canvas. I saw that tassel swinging in front of that ghostly smile just behind my eyelids. It was the red, white, and black of the high school nearest my neighborhood. A piece of information, stuck in the back of my mind, rolled to the forefront. I read it as it flew by:  an early-morning Facebook post about a friend’s brother graduating. They were proud of him and excited to celebrate. 

The car ahead of me was full of kids who had just graduated.

But I’m just a kid too, my heart cried while my car spun on all four wheels like a top into the guardrail. I’m just a kid and I… 

A deafening screech howled in my ears like a monster in a movie-- two big wings wrapping around me and drowning everything but the bright flash of sparks, flying off the metal in a direction I couldn’t hope to find. I was lost in the movement, swimming like when I’d left The Wagon, loose and limp. My shoulders hit the inside of the door like a ragdoll, my head followed and smacked the window. Then there was a blue flame of pain burning across my leg. 

Suddenly, it was all still. The screeching monster left quicker than it had appeared, and the sparks were gone. I was there in the silence, waiting for another round that never came. My heart beat loudly in my ears. 

I opened my eyes and looked around without moving my body. The moment seemed to last forever. This quiet nowhere was nice, I realized. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t care to know-- and then a jolt hit me and brought me back to Richland. Back to Six Mile Road. To my car crumpled against the guardrail and my thigh cut wide open by a piece of metal from the gear shift. I was there. Those kids were there. We were all here at this moment, in this very place, because of me. 

I shoved against the door in a panic and pushed my way into the open air, not fully realizing that my walk was stilted. The sensation was searing and numbing, too-- little pieces of pain prickling me all over in every direction. I walked a few steps, then collapsed on the edge of the road, hitting my knees and falling onto my back. 

From there I stared into the vast cerulean blue sky, cloudless and warm. Richland was beautiful in the summer. The trees were a bright green, they swayed lazily in the wind and moved my hair around my face. I breathed out slowly, I could still smell the fruit and vodka on my breath. Never did get that mint.

Michael was driving to Mira’s. My final exam for the semester was sitting in a paper tray on my professor’s desk. The pants I was wearing were almost definitely ruined for good, I’d only just bought them. I was still drunk. The car I’d hit when I veered into the other lane was upside down and burning like a bonfire of red and black flames on the other side of the road, crackling quietly just down the hill in a ditch. 

This was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives.

I could imagine myself not having left The Wagon and driving home. I could envision myself getting my grades in an email over the summer, and graduating next year. I could see those kids spending their graduation night at the pool or at the lake or eating dinner with their families or kissing their high school loves. I could see all of these things like a movie of my alternate reality. There was a door that I could have walked through instead of the one that led me here. I could see it, and I could see all those things happening if I had. 

I could see it all from where I lied sprawled across the pavement. But by then, it was too late.