Black Tuesday

by Susan Colebank

Jayne hazarded a glance at the clock. 4:02. Crap! “Sure. I’ll call Grams later tonight.”

  “Great. You’re the best oldest daughter I’ve ever had.” Her mom hung up. Gen Thompkins wasn’t big into saying good-byes.

  Jayne was about to put the phone down when it rang again. This time she looked at the caller ID. Ellie. She flipped open the phone. As annoyed as she was at Ellie, taking the call was an automatic reflex. Like breathing.

  She looked up from the caller ID and a cold sweat broke out over her body. The intersection was ten, maybe fifteen yards away. The light was red.

  She was barreling toward it.

  And the red sedan in the middle of the intersection.

  5

  OH MY GOD.

  Oh. My. God.

  Jayne’s head was resting on something weird. Actually, her head resting on anything right now was weird. She slowly sat up and realized it was the car’s air bag.

  White dust moved in slow motion around her. The smell of burned rubber filled her nostrils.

  She felt like she was watching a bad made-for-TV movie. And some stupid girl answering a cell phone had gotten into an accident.

  A pain shot through her wrist. The girl wasn’t on TV. It was her. Her, Jayne Thompkins, the girl who never even got so much as a detention. She was the stupid girl in the crushed car.

  She turned to watch the dust from the air bag float through the air and took a deep, quivering breath.

  “Oww!” Her nose throbbed, like a brick had slammed into it.

  She followed one of the dust particles with her eyes and tried to remember what had happened. Everything had been such a blur, followed by screeching brakes, shattering glass, crunching metal.

  She sat in the car and waited for the ringing in her ears to stop. Jayne heard a voice coming from below her. Why would a voice be coming from that direction? She tried to make sense of it, but her brain felt like it was in a bowl of really dense Jell-O.

  The cell phone. She’d hit TALK right before she’d seen the red light. The red car.

  Then black as her face smashed into the air bag.

  Where was the red car? It wasn’t in front of her, or to her left, either.

  It was to her right, locked together with a black luxury car. The black car’s hood had mangled the red one’s. Both front air bags were visible in the red sedan.

  Jayne’s heartbeat sounded abnormally loud in her ears, and it felt like her stomach was being wrung like a wet dish towel.

  She closed her eyes and the images replayed in her head.

  Her white Jetta plowing into the red sedan. Pushing it into oncoming traffic. A black blur smashing into the sedan. Head-on.

  Jayne opened her eyes, even though she just wanted to keep them closed and rewind time. She scanned the distance between her and the other two cars. About thirty yards separated her from the destruction she’d caused.

  Oh God.

  “Are you okay?” A man with a Diamondbacks baseball hat was tapping on her side window, his eyebrows high and his eyes wide with concern. Jayne pushed the button to lower the window, but it didn’t work. That’s because the car’s dead, idiot.

  “Just unlock it.” He pointed at the door.

  Jayne nodded mutely and did just that. He opened the car and crouched down beside her. She numbly looked at the small tear running along the bill of his cap.

  “Just stay here and try not to move. My wife’s already called 911 for you and the other cars.” He pointed to the Circle K behind him. “We were filling up and saw everything.”

  She took a shallow breath through her mouth so her nose wouldn’t hurt. As she sat there, hearing everything but not really understanding anything, she heard her name being called from below her. Again, and again.

  Numbly, not really thinking about what she was doing, Jayne started to reach down again. But her seat belt didn’t have any give to it and kept her immobile.

  “My cell phone.” She forced herself to form the words. Had talking always been this hard? “Could you get it for me? It’s under my feet.”

  Once Mr. Diamondbacks found the phone, he handed it to her.

  “Jayne! Jaynie, are you okay? Please, Jaynie, please talk to me!”

  “I’m here, Ellie.” Jayne closed her eyes, every single pore in her body aching.

  “What happened? It sounded like you crashed.” Ellie was sobbing through the words. “Did you crash?”

  Annoyance washed over Jayne. She usually felt this way when someone asked a dumb question in class. And Ellie’s question definitely qualified as a dumb one. Jayne reached for the words she needed to say. It was time to come out of this waking coma. “I’ve been in a car accident. I need you to call Mom and Dad. Use their cell numbers.”

  Jayne continued to list what needed to be done. Feed her dog, Britney. Call Coach to tell him she wasn’t going to make practice. Call Brendan with Key Club to tell him she couldn’t make the meeting tonight. She turned the phone away from her mouth. “Sir, what’s the closest hospital around here?”

  “Camelback Regional.”

  Jayne put the phone in front of her mouth again. “Tell Mom they’ll probably be taking me to Camelback Regional.”

  Ellie was sniffling and didn’t answer.

  “Ellie, are you listening?” Her sister was never good in a crisis. Just like the time Ellie misplaced her freshman lit take-home midterm and she dissolved into a puddle on the kitchen floor. It was Jayne who found it ten minutes later in the middle of a stack of Vogues in Ellie’s room. “Camelback. Regional. Write this down before you forget.”

  Jayne heard a snot-filled sniff and then, “Camelback Regional. Got it.” Another sniff. “God, Jayne, what happened?”

  For an instant, another flash of annoyance streaked through Jayne. She didn’t have time to hold Ellie’s hand. “I need to go now. Remember, feed Britney. Call Coach. Call Brendan. And tell Mom and Dad Camelback Regional.”

  She hung up before Ellie could ask anything else. For a second, she felt like her mom.

  She hadn’t wasted time saying good-bye.

  Jayne dropped the phone onto the passenger seat. Stupid friggin’ phone. I would’ve seen the light if I hadn’t answered it.

  Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve.

  “Hey, you still with me here?” The guy in the baseball hat was leaning into the car again. For the first time, she realized he smelled like BO.

  “The people that are in the other cars. Are they okay?” Please. Please.

  Please.

  “My wife’s checking on them.” The guy pulled up the hem of his T-shirt. “You have some blood coming out of your nose. I’m going to wipe it away, okay?”

  She nodded and leaned back in the seat.

  He hesitated. “You don’t have AIDS or anything, right?”

  She shook her head and looked in the rearview mirror. Her nose seemed different. And not just bloody. “Do you think I broke it?”

  Did anyone else break anything? The thought shot through her brain.

  “Yeah. Looks that way.”

  Jayne took the news in. She grabbed onto the idea of a broken nose. It seemed a lot less scary than the other thoughts scrambling through her brain. “Do they always hurt so much? Broken noses, I mean.”

  “Afraid so.” He pointed to his own nose. It hooked to the right. “I’ve had three breaks myself.”

  “Tim! I need you over here!”

  Jayne looked over the inflated air bag in front of her and saw a thirtyish mom-type waving for the man next to her.

  “I’ll be back in a sec, okay?” He dropped the hem of his shirt, Jayne’s blood peppering the bottom, and made his way to the other car. Hesitantly, Jayne focused again on the cars entwined in front of her.

  A gray-haired man had gotten out of the black car and was on his cell phone. He looked like a business guy in his black trousers and blue button-down. He seemed fine. His voice certainly was, based on how loud he was talking about “the god-damn accident I’ve just been in.�
��

  One down. One to go.

  Over in the red car, a woman still sat behind the steering wheel. All Jayne could make out was a messy ponytail and two inches of black roots. The woman was leaning down to look at something in the passenger side—the side that Jayne had hit.

  The woman’s head rose for the span of one raspy, mouth-inhaled breath. The woman’s eyes spanned across the passenger seat, the passenger-seat window, and the crumpled hood of Jayne’s two-month-old car.

  The woman looked back down as quickly as she had looked up.

  But not before Jayne saw terror.

  Panic—way worse than anything she’d ever felt before a test or driving to tennis five minutes late—started eating away at Jayne’s stomach. She unclicked her seat belt and tried to pull herself out the open door. What was in the passenger seat? Who was in the passenger seat?

  The air bag pressed her against the seat, though, and she shifted her body to get by. The movement jarred her left arm, and it felt like a red-hot poker had been shoved through her wrist. Nausea washed over her and tears filled her eyes.

  She blinked her eyelids like hummingbird wings. Stop crying. Stop. You caused this. No one here needs to see you in “poor me” mode. She licked her lips and tasted the tears that had made their way there.

  Salty. Tears are made of salt, right? She plundered her mind for the answer. Her anatomy class during her freshman year had covered the composition of tears. She tried to remember the list of ingredients. Salt is sodium. So sodium. What else . . . potassium? Yeah. Potassium, glucose . . .

  Jayne had made it as far as “glucose” when two motorcycle cops rolled up to the intersection. One started directing traffic while the other one darted a look at Jayne. He took a step in her direction, but then hesitated when the Diamondbacks couple called him over.

  He gave her a thumbs-up, a question in his eyes. Are you okay? he seemed to be asking. Jayne attempted a smile. He nodded and headed for the red sedan.

  “Honey, are you okay?”

  Jayne jerked, hearing the words she’d just thought in her head being said aloud. She turned to see a middle-aged woman with a red visor. The logo in the center matched the gas station’s behind her. “I saw the accident from the store. It looked like a bad one.”

  State the obvious much? Whoa, where’d that come from? Jayne struggled to get her emotions under control. This woman was trying to be nice. She smelled like hot dogs and stale cigarettes, but that wasn’t her fault.

  Well, maybe the stale cigarette part.

  “Do you know how the people in the red car are?” The question kept rearing its head, and now Jayne got to ask it again. She hadn’t talked to anyone since the guy in the baseball cap, and now here was a lady with big, brown, puppy-dog eyes pooled up with sympathy.

  “It looks like it’s a mom and her little girl in there.”

  “Little girl?” Jayne started taking more shallow, shaky breaths. The sympathy in this woman’s eyes was putting her over the edge. Not the throbbing in her nose and wrist. Not the stiffness settling into her neck. Not whatever was happening in the other car.

  Jayne tried to look into the next car, but she still couldn’t see anything. The driver now stood beside it, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun. She was shifting from one foot from the other, chewing on an acrylic thumbnail on her other hand. The cop who’d given Jayne the thumbs-up was now leaning over the driver’s seat and concentrating on whoever was in the passenger side.

  Not whoever, Jayne. A little girl. A little girl is sitting there. Or lying there.

  Or suffering there.

  “Yeah. I’d put her at maybe five, six years old.” The woman attempted a comforting smile, but it didn’t quite work. The tears in her eyes were the giveaway.

  Jayne continued taking shallow breaths through her mouth as the tears ran down her cheeks. She didn’t even try to stop them.

  “Is sh-she okay?”

  The clerk looked past Jayne, avoiding her eyes. “I don’t think so, hon.”

  6

  ROOM 208, RIGHT?”

  Jayne opened her eyes as she heard her mom’s no-nonsense voice in the hallway. She’d been dozing on and off thanks to whatever drugs they were pumping through her IV, and her mind was fuzzy around the edges.

  The fuzziness was a good thing. It was helping her forget about the sound of squealing tires, breaking glass, and crunching metal. The smell of burned rubber. The tiny flecks of dust from the air bag.

  The red car and the woman with the look of terror on her face.

  The paramedics had arrived soon after the motorcycle cops. They’d put Jayne into the ambulance before she had had a chance to figure out what was going on with the red car. Or the little girl.

  Jayne pushed the memories aside. The neck brace kept her from looking anywhere but straight, thanks to a slight case of whiplash. A splint was taped to her nose, which had been reset by the docs here. Her left arm was immobilized from her fingers to her elbow thanks to a broken wrist.

  She looked disinterestedly at the tray that had been placed at the foot of the bed. It held a bowl of green Jell-O and a yellow plastic cup holding a straw and what had to be lukewarm water.

  She hadn’t touched either. She had no appetite. And she wasn’t thirsty enough to want to move and test the effectiveness of the pain meds.

  Gen Thompkins pushed through the door, her face perfect in its on-camera makeup and the dim light of the room. Her face had a studied look of concern, like the kind she wore when she talked to teenagers who drowned their babies.

  For a second, Jayne wondered if she was now in the same league as baby-drowners.

  The click of her mother’s stilettos sounded loud in the small, sterile room. Jayne looked at the clock by the wall-mounted TV. It was 9:02. Shelly from the morning show must’ve been filling in for Arizona’s number-one Emmy-winning newscaster.

  “Good, you’re awake.”

  In the dim light of the room, her mom looked like the local celebrity she was. Her face was poreless, her eyes were enhanced to be greener, and her lips were perfectly plumped—just enough to make viewers wonder whether they were natural or not. (They were not.)

  The only difference tonight was that Gen’s eyes and the edge of her nose looked a little red. Which was weird. Jayne’s mom was usually really good at making sure her foundation and powder covered the telltale signs of her spring allergies.

  “Hi.” Jayne smoothed a strand of blonde hair behind an ear. Her hand brushed the ponytail at the nape of her neck. She slipped off the elastic band and smoothed out the tangles. There was no point in keeping it in. It wasn’t like she was going to tennis practice today. Or tomorrow. Or the rest of this season.

  Based on what the doctor had told her, she’d be sidelined for the next six weeks. She’d be getting her cast off just in time for summer vacation. Or, in Jayne’s case, summer school.

  Jayne listened to the clock ticking across the room, letting her thoughts drift. Summer school. It seemed so far away. So . . . not important.

  “The doctor told me your broke your nose and your wrist.” Her mom sat on the bed, unbuttoning her turquoise blazer as she did so.

  “Yeah. The air bag did that.” She slowly lifted her good hand and touched the neck brace with her fingertips. Her eyelids felt heavy. Sleep sounded good right now. “Whiplash, too. And the car. I broke the car.”

  “We’ll talk about the car later, when you’re more lucid. They’re still giving you pain medication, right?” Her mom’s eyes narrowed, as if to gauge the truth for herself. Ever the vigilant journalist; that was Gen Thompkins.

  “Yeah.” They’re the best invention ever. But she didn’t say that. Not with her mom scrutinizing her like she was a frog with its guts pinned open.

  She concentrated on a strand of hair that was flipping out from her mom’s blonde bob while all the others flipped under. Gen Thompkins is going to find you and tame you, little hair. “Is Dad with you?”

  Her mom pulled th
e covers over Jayne’s waist, folding them back and smoothing the edges over her lap.

  “He’s on his way up from Tucson.”

  Jayne tried to figure out what day of the week it was. It felt like a week had passed, not just—she looked at the clock by the TV and slowly did the math—five hours.

  “That’s right. Today’s Tuesday. Teaching that herb class down in Tucson.” Jayne pictured her dad in his hybrid, speeding toward Phoenix. Scratch that. He always drove ten miles under the speed limit.

  Jayne pulled the blanket away from her mom’s hands. Enough with the blanket rearranging already. She took a minute to catch her breath. Exertion was not a good thing with these pain meds coursing through her system. She was getting sleepier by the minute. “Where’s Ellie?”

  “At home. She fought me tooth and nail about coming, but I told her that you’d probably be out of it with the drugs they’re pumping into you. Looks like I was right.” Her mom got up and took the water cup from the tray. “Have some water, Jayne. If your dad was here, he’d tell you it makes a body heal faster.”

  Gen smiled at this last part. It was a weird smile, though. Like her mind was on other things. Like trying to figure out how to smile without cracking her makeup.

  Jayne obediently took the cup. It would’ve taken more energy to argue with her mom than to just take a quick sip of the plastic-flavored water.

  “Please don’t. Bring Ellie here, I mean.” She handed the cup back to her mom. For a second, she thought she saw four Gen Thompkinses. She blinked and they merged back into one.

  Jayne really didn’t want to think about Ellie. She didn’t know why. Maybe . . . maybe . . . She tried to swim through the fog in order to figure it out. The answer was just out of reach, but her gut told her: Keep Ellie at arm’s length.

  She trusted her gut; it was usually right.

  Her mom fiddled with the straw in the water cup, tapping the end against the sides of the plastic.

  “Jayne.” Her mom stopped to clear her throat. She put the cup on the nightstand and met Jayne’s eyes. “I spoke to one of the police officers who was at the scene of your accident.”

  Jayne struggled to keep her eyes open.