Crash and Burn

“This is all my fault,” Dylan repeated again and again so that maybe she would hate him as much as he hated himself. He wished he knew what she was thinking. She wouldn’t even look at him. Wouldn’t look at anything besides the car, front bumper crumpled around the tree, airbags deployed.

Dylan wished he had not made it out. Selfishly, perhaps, but it was a welcome alternative to what was coming. Any chance he had of making his life mean something- gone. He looked at Elizabeth. His Lizzie. The thing that made his life mean something.

When she finally met his eyes, something deep inside of him broke. She was gone. Not from the world, though Dylan was not to thank for that, but from his life. The unfeeling in her eyes yielded no mercy. Dylan once again wished that he had not made it out.

“This is all my fault,” his voice broke against tears. He had not cried since he was five years old but it came now, the threads that he had woven around his heart unraveling. His protections, gone. It no longer mattered.

When he was fourteen, and was told he was exceptionally good at football, Dylan got tough. He would move schools, to somewhere where students got recruited, where people made it to college. And maybe he didn’t have to be so guarded- his coaches were like second fathers, his teammates like brothers, his peers admired him- but it couldn’t hurt. When he came home, every night, battered from practices and games, he didn’t speak of it. What would a sprained ankle, or a dislocated finger matter to a kid who was going to college. He could push through. He tucked his feelings, his hurt, his anger, his anxieties, away to a place where they couldn’t affect him. It was only a few years, he would push through.

The drinking started as any normal teenager does. He was with his buddies, sitting in a basement after a hard won game, and beers were passed around. As the prodigal freshman he was, he got a few pats on the back and a few too many cold ones. His teammates laughed as he performed flips and he basked in the attention. It was good, after all. He was being cheered on. He never got enough of the applause.

He drank more, the next year, when his body hurt all over and all he wanted to do was go to his house and sleep in his own bed. He craved the presence of his teammates, and though he wouldn’t allow himself to say it, he needed their love.

Dylan was introduced to Elizabeth at one of these parties, his sophomore year. She was a junior, but only a few months older than himself, and she was beautiful. Every guy in the room wanted her and she didn’t know it. Dylan loved that about her.

There became three important things in Dylan’s life. Elizabeth. Football. The alcohol. Sometimes in that order, sometimes not. College, he thought, was a given. There were already schools showing up to games just for him, pulling him aside in the locker room and offering deals that he wanted to accept on the spot. So he allowed himself to focus on other things.

Sometimes he and Elizabeth would drink together, get so drunk that when they laid down the world spun above them and they had to race to the bathroom. He held her hair back when she threw up and thought that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

When Dylan turned 16, his father gifted him his old car as he upgraded to an only slightly better one. Dylan accepted the gift and did not ask how he managed when he knew that they should not have been able to afford both vehicles.

It was the best gift he had ever received, and Dylan treated it as such. He drove it only on the paved roads, and avoided ice and snow and salt at all costs.

He was excited, to say the least, when the first party of the spring came around and he drove himself and Elizabeth there in his very own car. He accepted the praise from his teammates with eagerness, though they praised him less and idolized him more now that he was older than many of them. He welcomed the shift. It was unlike any future he ever could have imagined for himself, before he had come to this school.

He had it all. He had the girl, he had the offers, and now he even had the car. He didn’t know what to do with this feeling. He asked Elizabeth if she wanted to go for a drive. She said yes.

He wished she had said no.

In his very own car, with his best girl, Dylan wondered what he could not do. They decided they would get food. Something greasy, Lizzie had suggested. She was hungry.

Peeling out onto the street, he rolled down the windows and felt the wind take his hair. Lizzie sat beside him, hand stuck out the window feeling the waves of cool, damp night air. It had just finished raining and it smelled fresh and earthy and slightly sweet outside. Dylan increased the speed, to feel the wind pick up. Lizzie laughed from deep in her chest as the car lurched into acceleration. It was a sound he could have heard on loop.

He pushed the speed more. He pushed it more. More. More. He didn’t know if he was doing it to hear her laugh again, or to see if the car could take it, but she wasn’t laughing. He looked at her; she had drawn her arm into the car and was frowning at the speedometer. She told him to slow down. He pushed it more.

The air was sharp and the expanse in front of him inviting. He pushed it more. In the passenger seat, Lizzie told him, once again, to slow down. He had looked over at her, to see if she really meant it.

Had he not looked over, he might have noticed the patch of leaves stuck to the road, slick from the recent rainfall. Had he not looked over, he may have moved the car to avoid it. Had he not looked over, the tires may not have slid on the leaves, jeering the car.

Dylan had tried to fix it, but he was shocked and buzzed off of the few beers he and Lizzie had split at the party, even when his teammate had advised him against it.

He spun the steering wheel aimlessly, the control already lost, the car already off the road. He heard Lizzie yell and then the car slammed- hard- into a tree. The airbags deployed, forcing him into the headrest. His ears rang and his entire body had ached, though in the moment he did not stop to think about it.

Throwing himself from the car, he ran to release Lizzie, but she was already out. Aside from a few cuts, perhaps from the seatbelt, or the airbag, she looked alright. But she would not look at him.

Dylan felt an aching like nothing he had ever experienced before. The police would come. His father would come. They would know. They would know that he had been drinking, that he had been speeding. There was nothing he could do to make it better now.

His future, that he had been handed by simply being good at football, was completely changed. Would colleges accept him, still, with this on his record? Would they still offer him tuition? The aching continued. There was nothing he could do to make it better now.

The car, too, that his father had gifted to him, with a speech about how proud he was to have a son that was going to do something with his life, was ruined. The car that his father could not have afforded without working extra hours or picking up a second job or cutting corners somewhere else, totaled. There was nothing he could do to make it better now.

And Lizzie. His Lizzie that he had spent months talking to late at night at parties, hoping that she would fall for him the way that he had her, had bought flowers and chocolates and even learned to bake cookies for. She stared at the car like it was something foreign and she could simply not figure it out. He knew that she would not forgive him for this. And he hoped that she would not. He did not deserve it. He had hurt her, and there was nothing he could do to make it better now.

“This is all my fault.”