Ashley Brantley had been fighting with her friend Jayna Rosenfeld all day. (This is Bryce Handler’s version of the story.) The problem was Jayna’s favorite hoodie, which Ashley had borrowed and kept for over a month and which Jayna made her swear she’d give back in time for the big New Year’s party at Courtney Robbins’s house. Naturally Ashley forgot. So that afternoon, Jayna drove over to Ashley’s and actually walked into her house and into her room and into her closet and took it back. She did this while Ashley was standing right there, talking to Bryce on the phone.
Ashley followed Jayna out of the house (while still on the phone with Bryce) and accused Jayna of stealing Jayna’s own hoodie. Jayna accused Ashley of being a stupid bitch. Other, similar insults were exchanged. The battle was on.
Later, when they were both at Courtney Robbins’s New Year’s party, Rachel, who was Ashley’s newest friend, was sent by Ashley to tell Jayna she was still a stupid bitch, and also a liar, a thief, and a skank, and that their friendship was over. Rachel was probably thrilled to deliver this news. Rachel had been scheming all along to replace Jayna as Ashley’s best friend.
Ashley and Jayna avoided each other until after midnight. They finally met in the driveway, where they yelled, screamed, and called each other stupid bitches for over an hour as a fairly large group of partygoers looked on.
Then Jayna tried to leave. She got in her forest green Toyota Highlander and started the engine, but Ashley opened the door and pulled her out by her hair. Jayna then punched Ashley in the head and Ashley kicked Jayna in the knee.
After more kicking, punching, and hair-pulling, Ashley outmaneuvered Jayna and ended up in the idling Highlander, in the driver’s seat. Rachel, not wanting to be separated from her new best friend, jumped into the passenger side. Ashley slammed her door shut, and threatened to drive away. Jayna jerked open the back door (it was her car, after all), jumped in, and tried to lunge through the seats and grab the car keys out of the ignition. Rachel, who was closer, also had a chance to grab the keys but was afraid to enter into this epic battle of the two most popular girls in her class.
Ashley fought off Jayna and, to further establish her own dominance over the situation, shifted the car into drive and slammed down the accelerator. The car shot onto the street, shutting all the open doors and violently throwing all three girls back in their seats. Ashley, who had almost no experience driving, then regained control of the car and took off down the road. Within seconds, they were going forty miles an hour. Jayna, who was used to Ashley’s reckless theatrics, screamed at the top of her lungs for Ashley to stop the car now!
She didn’t.
Nobody knows for sure what happened next. People in the driveway watched the car swerve wildly from side to side. They watched it run the stop sign at Highway 211, and rip a tire-burning right turn, and accelerate. Probably, by that point, Jayna was afraid to do anything. They were going too fast to grab the wheel. They were now at the mercy of Ashley.
Rachel, for her part, was most likely unafraid. In her mind, nothing bad could happen to Ashley Brantley. She was too perfect, too beautiful, too charmed. It was like the high school gods had blessed her with every imaginable advantage. She was indestructible.
But in fact, she was not. Neither were the D’Augustinos, an elderly couple, who were driving home from a small gathering at their son’s house. They were driving slowly, cautiously. They knew what night it was.
Ashley hit the D’Augustinos head-on at seventy-three miles an hour, killing herself and the defenseless D’Augustinos instantly. In that way, maybe Ashley was blessed. She never had to think about what she had done.
Jayna, in the backseat, was not so lucky. Though crushed and mangled, she did manage to gasp for air for almost a half hour before the arriving paramedics lost her pulse amid the wreckage of the destroyed Toyota Highlander.
Rachel fared the worst. She was crushed too, pinned, her young face sliced in half by a piece of jagged plastic. She lived, though, and made it to the hospital, surviving four emergency surgeries before she too slipped away despite the best efforts of the doctors, who couldn’t repair her hemorrhaging organs or splintered limbs quickly enough. You had to wonder what her last thoughts were, if she had a chance to reflect on her parents’ warning two weeks before, that they had heard bad things about “that Brantley girl.”