short story

Have you ever been reckless on the roads and it got you into an accident? Well that was what happened to me at the start of this year. On the night of January 6, 2009, my sister, Amy, my boyfriend, Alan, his two brothers Justin and Andy, and I left Alan’s house around 9:00 p.m. to go back to my house. When we first walked outside, I remember my sister sliding down the driveway and saying, “Whoa! It’s so slippery!” I then noticed that it was freezing raining pretty hard, so we all ran into Alan’s 4x4 and he started driving. I have a bad habit of not putting on my seatbelt when I am in the car with friends, so this time I did not think much of not putting on my seatbelt. As we were driving, the freezing rain pelted the car and made small clicking noises as it hit. The music was turned up really loud, and we were all singing along to it. While we were driving, we slid a couple of times and had a hard time braking because of the freezing rain but we did not think it was that big of a deal. It took at least fifteen minutes to get to Cherry Hill, which is the main road my house is by, and I remember how hard it was to stop at the red light.

As we turned onto Lotz at the red light, I turned to talk to Andy and Justin, who were also in the backseat with me. Alan and Amy were in the front seats and they were both still singing along to the music. None of us were really paying attention to how fast we were going until I looked up and saw the street sign. By then I noticed that we were going too fast to be able to stop in time. As Alan pressed the brakes to turn, the car slid and the brakes did not work because of the ice on the ground and because of how fast we were going, and the car only turned halfway before we crashed into a telephone pole. A split second before we crashed, I remembered I did not have my seatbelt on, and my first response was to grab onto the seat in front of me. The sound of the car hitting the telephone pole was the loudest sound of metal crunching I have ever heard in my life. It sounded like someone had taken a giant hammer and was smashing the front of the car with it.