Tinsley had always been a free spirit, until one side of her face and body got badly disfigured in an accident that killed her best friend. She has always blamed herself for Becky's death, as she had been the one behind the wheel. Now twenty-five, s...
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I WAS ALWAYS a daddy's girl, a dubiously pretty girl, with hair like rays of sunshine, and a spirit and temper as hot as mama's favorite chili pepper. I wanted to be an opera singer. I always loved being loud and the center of attention and life was colorful, a finished page from one of my Color Me Happys. It was a fairy-tale right up to the moment everything changed.
Friday night. Two girls singing in a car. It was Daddy's car, a black Malibu. "My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble! Hey-la-day-la, my boyfriend's back!" we sang, giggling freely under the moonlight. Becky was blond and fun and all the boys thought so. She was my best friend. I told her everything, she never judged me, and I always felt the freest around her. We were so close we were practically sisters.
We were on our way back from William's party and it was around one a.m. I had five cans of beer in me and she was strictly vodka cranberry. I had no idea how much she had but I knew she was pretty plastered herself. So, when she screamed that I should stop the car, I thought that whatever she saw was some vision she'd invented. She invented things a lot during her drunkenness. Aliens, imaginary boyfriends, arguments. Even an enchanted tree once. It had fairies!
So, silly me dismissed her. Plus, I was so messed up I guess I felt that nothing could go wrong. After all, I was just one of the bubble wrap kids from our small town. And nothing sinister ever happened in London, Ontario. Only when I heard the explosive crunch and felt the car whipping us around as it flipped did I realize we were in serious trouble. The sound was incredible and I thought I went deaf.
A man struck our windshield that burst almost at once under flames as sizzling metal from his van bent around Daddy's Malibu. Blinding light took over every inch of the vehicle and I saw it was from the tongues of fire that would quickly start the most terrible pain one could ever feel in their life. I didn't yet see the gash in Becky's head. I was just screaming for help, hollering wildly inside this dragon lung turning in on itself.
Getting burned alive had always been one of my biggest fears, and now fate had brought it to me like a self-fulling prophecy. The pain was unbearable. Only seconds in and it would leave me scarred for life. Not the fire. The pain, I mean. But the fire, too. I was fourteen then and now twenty-five I can still feel the heat that melted off my skin, that turned the right half of my face into cobwebbed scar tissue. I can still hear the sparks, the glass popping, see the metals melting like some surreal painting. I can still hear Becky choking on the fire, squealing as it cremated her alive.
I smell her charred skin each night. Or was it my scorched skin, peeling and crackling as I somehow managed to crawl from the blazing, overturned car. Or was it both of us, that awful nauseating smell. Worse than the butchered pigs in Chinatown and wet animal pelts in the countryside. Becky's side had gotten the most of the flames' attack. Still, my hand and my back, my face, were badly ruined.
