I once came upon a small girl. She seemed ageless… sometimes she looked like she had barely reached her teenaged years, and other times she looked like she had seen decades. Her hair was commonly straight, the same shade of red as mine, and she had large, colorless eyes. What made me notice her was the large scar on her face, twisting like an ancient road over the ridge of her nose and cutting into the gully of her cheekbones… I tried not to stare. I didn’t pay attention to her at first; I always passed her on my way to the bus stop. I could see her sitting there in a wheelchair, like she was waiting. She was simply a shadow in my peripheral vision. Insignificant.

The day I finally acknowledged her was a rainy one, in April. Other than having woken extremely late and prepared myself for school in a matter of breathless, rushed minutes, it was a normal morning. My homework was stuffed somewhere… somewhere in my backpack, and something inside of me was whispering something about a test. Great, something else I had forgotten. I shuffled along the gum-studded street, my book bag nearly bursting at the seams. Then, I waited.

“Excuse me.” It was a tiny voice, so at first, I did not answer. My imagination was poking at me. But then, I heard it again. There was a tug on the end of my sleeve, an expectant, diffident tug. At first I thought that a five-year-old was responsible for the gesture, since it was so immature, and weak. But no, it was the girl I had seen.

I looked determinedly at her right eye. The other was too shiny, and fixed in a staring pose: artificial, right near that terrible scar. I also noticed a tube snaking from her nostril like a white worm, taped on the “normal” side of her face. Her hair looked quite rough up close, and her hairline seemed slightly odd… the roots did not seem to sprout from her skin… a wig, perhaps? If the deformities were mentally removed, she looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn’t place her with anyone I knew. I absorbed these details in a matter of seconds, and suddenly, that pimple on my forehead didn’t seem so tragic.

She stiffly held out an arm, and held out a thin packet of papers, laced with my handwriting. I took it, and a warm rush of combined relief and embarrassment washed over my face. “Thank you so much,” I said. My voice sounded strained, like the voice I used with the preschoolers I babysat on the weekends. I hoped with another tinge of bright red humiliation that she wouldn’t notice. She was crippled, not deaf.

When she smiled at me, it was such a real smile that I received a chill. Her grin affected the entirety of her lopsided visage, pressing into her eyes, bulging out her cheeks. I could see that several of her teeth were fake, but she seemed so genuine. “What is your name?” she asked me.

“Emily,” I responded.

Her expression did not change. “Mine, too.” She nodded, her eyes flickering. Her tone suggested that she had met many other people who shared her name, but my eyes widened.

“Cool! I’ve never met anyone with my name,” I said. My voice was becoming less awkward. “So, how old are you?”

She looked down into her lap. Her clothes were baggy, the way I liked to wear mine. “I—I d-don’t know-w.” Her speech suddenly slurred, and she began to stutter and trip over her words. I fixed my eyes upon a bronze-colored beer bottle cap on the street while she scrunched up her face, trying to remember her age. Finally, she spoke again. “It’s been a while,” she whispered, “since I paid attention to my birthdays.”

I bobbed my head and arranged my face into something as neutral as possible, as if people forgot their age on a regular basis. “Oh.”

I thought she would say more, but with a huff and a creak, she scraped her wheelchair away and slowly made her way into a curtain of foul city smog. I was surprised to see that no one took a second look at her, or assisted her as she crossed the street. An oncoming car didn’t even brake, and I gasped with a swooping feeling in my stomach as she barely avoided meeting the front bumper. I watched, shaking, as she eventually disappeared behind a funeral home.

“What were you looking at?” My friend, Casey, tapped my shoulder.

“That girl in the wheelchair,” I replied, pointing to the empty edge of the funeral home. Its windows were dark and streaked with rain. “You didn’t see her?”

Casey shook her head. “Nah. I’m still asleep. I just look like my eyes are open.” She laughed.

While I was at school, working diligently on my various painful assignments and guessing through a whopper of a test I had managed to overlook, the girl did not enter my thoughts. Once the afternoon stumbled upon the day, however, I remembered her for a brief minute, and tried to think of what might have happened to her. All curiosity became forgotten when evening came, and I went out to enjoy my perfect Friday with my friends.

Casey pulled up beside me at the curb in her purring red Mustang, and rolled down a tinted window, exposing the deep, cluttered blackness of the leather interior. I was hit instantly with the thick, hot stench of cigarette smoke and alcohol. Music blasted and pulsed from the speakers, thudding the pavement below my feet. I could hear whoops and yells from the backseat, and the clinking of glass on glass. Cheers.

“Get in!” Casey said. “Come on; we’re going downtown. There’s an awesome party.”

I glanced past the sleek roof of the vehicle to see Emily, sitting in her wheelchair on the opposite side of the street. She seemed terribly anxious, her hair tousled around her eyes. Even at a distance, I could see that her eyes were the same green as mine.

The thoughts and reminiscences of those cheesy junior high movies opposing drunk driving and partying swarmed into my head. I knew Casey had been drinking… heavily. Her voice was warped, and she laughed at some of the really dumb things the boys in the backseat were saying… things Sober Casey would probably scoff at. I backed away. “I completely forgot… I have to baby-sit,” I stammered, feeling like a chicken and feeling childishly proud at the same time. It was Emily’s fault!

“Whatever,” Casey giggled. She pressed her foot into the accelerator, and I froze, standing as straight as a pole on the safe and grimy sidewalk as the car raced forward, slicing through a bright, glaringly obvious red light….

crunching metal

shattering glass

screaming

horns honking

blood

music gone

people running

9-1-1

paramedics

sirens

blue light

blood everywhere

so much blood

ground moving quickly closer

don’t want to faint….

The crash made local headlines. “TEENAGER TRAGEDY”, one title yelled. “DRUNK DRIVING DRAMA”, screeched another. But I didn’t believe it. A part of me was thankful that I had trusted my conscience and not climbed into the car. Casey was dead, and so was one of the three boys. The other two were in the hospital, saved from immediate jail time by their comas. I was aware that one had snapped his spinal cord, and was paralyzed from the neck down. I gagged at the sight of the black-and-white newspaper photos. The windshield was crunched down into what had almost been my seat, the metal skeleton of the car bent inward like a paper clip.

I still remember the red most of all… the horrible red paint of the car, flaked in little metal sheets, floating around in the crimson, alcoholic blood of my friends. The asphalt glittered terribly, and always sparkled in the spot where the gore had unfolded. I felt numb. I was supposed to scream and cry and ask God to return my friend to me, but I was still stupidly grateful for my own life. I held my other friends while they sobbed, pleading, begging time to turn around. But my apathy wasn’t the weirdest thing. Something was missing. Since the night of the horrible, ear-splitting accident, I hadn’t seen Emily.

And I never saw her again.