It was the summer before my senior year. The windows were down and the sunroof was open. My dog and I were the only ones in the car. I had driven this same road everyday to school and was comfortable going fast, maybe a little too fast sometimes. The only thing around us were cornfields and trees. I drifted into the middle of the road, my grandfather had explained to me once that it was safer to drive in the middle when there are no other cars so I just relaxed as the sun beat down on my arms. My radio was turned up loud and I did not have a care in the world. We were on our way to the beach to meet some of my friends.  The actual road that led to the beach was long and curvy. I was five minutes away when my best friend Kayla called. She asked where I was and if I had remembered my sunscreen. I checked the back seat and said yes. I hung up after telling her I was almost there. I laughed to myself as I leaned down to put my phone in my beach bag on the passenger side floor because I do not ever wear sunscreen but yet she asked. As I looked up I saw another car but it was not coming toward me it looked parked. Before I could make sense of what was going on I saw the guy laying in the road. Everything after that is a blur. All I remember was trying to swerve so that I did not hit him.
At least that is what I told the officer who arrived at the scene. I was not injured but as for the guy, he may have trouble walking for awhile. Once I was cleared by the EMT’s I stopped by the beach to tell Kayla that something came up and I could not stay.  I decided it best not to call on the phone to tell her this, because look where it got me the last time I was on the phone and driving. Since this was my fault I went to the hospital to check on the guy. When I got there I learned that his name was Lucas, the nurses didn’t give me a last name. He was already in surgery when I arrived so I sat in the waiting room and played games on my phone, which were not that entertaining.
A few hours passed and I began to get hungry so with the few crumpled dollar bills I found at the bottom of my purse I went to the vending machine. As i was looking at the different snacks I thought I saw my mother’s reflection in the glass. I just shrugged it off because I had not told her I was here, so why would she be at the hospital. I felt a hand on my shoulder and nearly jumped out of my skin. I spun around on my heels and was face to face with my mother, which kind of freaked me out. The first thing I thought about was, how did she know I was here? Before I could ask she was already asking what I was doing at the hospital. Stunned I just blurted out that I was in a car accident. She asked if I was alright patting my head and flipping my hair out of my face as I said yes, but the other guy might not have been so lucky. Doctors are saying he is still in surgery which makes it a total of five hours now. We both went back to the waiting room to sit and eat the snacks I had bought. After a half hour my mom greeted a man at the hospital doors. She introduced him as her boyfriend, of only a month, that is why I had not met him yet. Since it was not me who was hurt I wondered why he was here. He asked the front desk where Lucas Gray’s room was, I thought it must have been a coincidence but how was I supposed to know it wasn’t. We went back with him to visit his son who had been injured on the road earlier today. That got me thinking, maybe it wasn’t a coincidence at all, maybe I had ran over my mother’s new boyfriends’ son. I almost peed my pants when I walked into the hospital room. There he was, the guy who I had hit with my car, lying in the hospital bed with a cast hip to toe on his right leg.