Still, there were those in town who wondered: Could a 16-year-old EMT (someone who had only recently learned to drive a car) really help at, let alone handle, the worst accidents? It became our job, then, to be overdiligent and professional so as not to let anyone down.
Mine was spent with my girlfriend, so I missed the pre-party and then the ride to the real party.
For us seniors, it was a free night with no school the next day, a holiday from everything, including our cursed college apps. When the news reached my family that night, in that orbit of calls, my parents, perhaps like other parents among our friends, presumed their child might have been in the car, which wasn’t the case, though might have been, had I made a different decision earlier that evening. Given our own shock, we couldn’t imagine the parents of the victims hearing those first words: There’s been an accident. It left one friend injured and one dead, and for a while afterward the whole thing seemed so surreal and impossible that all we could do-friends, family, anyone connected but not in the accident itself-was try to re-create the simultaneities of that evening, the first person at the scene, the shock of the couple at the nearby house from which the call was made for an ambulance, and then: who called whom, and who was where when they heard. The accident-the first one-occurred on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving of my senior year in high school.
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