It was always a good day when my dad picked me up from school. Sitting in the car every day with my mom was perfectly ordinary, but singing along to classic rock songs was my dad’s and my thing. The few times a month I saw that silver Volvo cruise into the horseshoe, I ran straight to the car. I couldn’t put my backpack in the trunk and fling myself into the front seat fast enough. A cozy warmth always spread through me when he greeted me by asking: So what was the best thing that happened to you today? Tell me all about it.” I breezed through the summary of my day and knew exactly what to do next: hand my dad the auxiliary cord.

Smirking as he picked a song on his phone, my dad’s head nodded as he began to whistle to the tune of the familiar lyrics from our favorite Queen song. Without a moment’s pause my head shot up, and I began to belt out every word I could possibly remember. Unfortunately, my high note in “Bohemian Rhapsody” was interrupted when I was suddenly jerked forward. My dad let out a slew of colorful language to insult the car in front of us for stopping so short at a red light, and my heart leapt out of my chest as I looked in my side mirror to check how quickly the cars following us needed to stop. A lump formed in my throat when I realized the red pickup truck behind us was accelerating instead of breaking. I gasped, and my body froze as my dad shouted,  “HOLD ON!” With barely a second to realize what was happening, my dad’s car was projected forward.

My head felt like a wrecking ball being smashed into the side of a building as it slammed into the back of my seat and bounced forward. My locked seat belt kept the lower half of my body secured, but my flailing arms and neck seared as glass from the shattered windshield made its way throughout the car. Smashed in between two cars, we stopped moving, and I felt a dam preparing to overflow behind my eyelids. Smoke was billowing from my dad’s ears as he told me to get out of the car and stand on the curb. The seventy-six year old man who was driving the truck stumbled out, and my dad, with his eyes so wide they were bulging from his head, approached the man. Without paying much attention to them, or anything else at the moment, I sat down on the curb and stared expressionless at the mess before me as bystanders and spectators ran up to the scene of the accident. Feeling none of the pain flooding through my body, I sat still and listened to the sound of police sirens in the distance.