Fly With Me

1- In The Women's Bathroom

Rules and I never mixed well. We were like oil and water, fire and ice—totally incompatible.

When I was seven years old, my mother told me never to slide down the stair banisters. I, of course, completely ignored her and managed to break my arm after I had slid down just a bit too fast.

At age ten I had been instructed to stay where I was until my mother got back. As soon as she was out of sight I skittered off to a nearby park to talk to some friendly ducks. When she came back and I wasn’t there, she freaked out and called our neighbors to help her look for me.

Three days after I turned sixteen, I snuck out of the house while my parents were taking an afternoon nap and streaked my hair in four different colors. Let’s just say my mom and dad weren’t especially thrilled about that.

As I got older, I got more rebellious, and my mistakes became worse. I drank while I was underage and drove past my curfew, all in addition to developing a smoking addiction. I made bad choices, and the repercussions were horrible.

The night of my seventeenth birthday I had gone out with my friends and gotten drunk. It was well past one in the morning by the time I even thought about going home. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that my parents were worried sick about me and had probably started up the car and were driving around town looking for me—at the time they seemed like overbearing and overly protective parents, and I thought nothing of it. At half past two I decided that it was time to go home.

My eyes were practically crossed, and I couldn’t walk in a straight line. Any words that came out of my mouth were slurred and probably made no sense anyways. When I look back, I wonder what possessed me to think I was sober enough to drive home; I was quite obviously inebriated. My headlights moved unsteadily between lanes and it was hard to focus on keeping the steering-wheel from sliding from beneath my hands.

A car’s headlights appeared out of nowhere in front of me. With great difficulty, I pulled the steering wheel so that my car was in the correct lane…or at least, what I thought was the correct lane. The lights ahead got closer and closer, and at the last second, I realized my mistake. I jerked the wheel sharply, sending the car spinning away. The car opposite me, unfortunately, did the same. I swerved into my own lane, the other car, however, was not so lucky.

It drove off of the road and hit a nearby tree. At the sound of metal crunching, my foot instinctively slammed down on the brake pedal, making my car come to a screeching halt. I pulled off onto the shoulder and pulled my seatbelt off in a frenzy, heart pounding in my chest and breathing erratic. I shoved the door open and stumbled across the pavement, scared of what I would find.

No one had yet exited the car, and that worried me. As I got closer, my stomach constricted at the thought that I may have killed the car’s occupants.  In the dark of the night, I couldn’t make out the car’s color, nor the license plate number. With a rapidly beating heart, I peeked in the driver’s side window.

A bloodied face that looked eerily like my father’s stared back at me.

I screamed and stumbled backwards, landing on my rear in the wet grass surrounding the accident site. The belated thought of needing to call 911 occurred to me and I pulled my cell-phone out of my pocket. I punched the number in with shaking fingers, and let the operator know what had happened. Once the call had finished, I returned to the car and hesitantly pulled the car door open.