7

Charlie managed to make the only maneuver that would prevent them from getting T-boned—he slammed on the gas. The car jerked across the road, into the ditch, and then into a fence post in a jumble of shouting teenagers, smoke, and airbags. Gloria reacted first, leaping out of the car and racing to pull Daniel from the wreckage.

“Daniel, are you okay? Hey, Daniel, look alive! Are you all right?” she asked him. His heart was racing and his ears were ringing from the sound of the airbags, which had made a deafening bang when they deployed. But after running his hands over his body he realized that, other than a few scrapes and bruises, he was mostly uninjured.

Once she’d gotten Daniel out of the car, Gloria moved on to Trisha, who was sniffling in the passenger’s seat. She had gotten a black eye from the airbag, but otherwise she didn’t look too worse for wear.

That just left Charlie. The trio found him groaning in the driver’s seat with his arm bent at an unnatural angle, like he had two elbows. He must have been holding on to the steering wheel in just the wrong way when they hit the fence post. It was definitely broken.

“Charlie!” Trisha shrieked. “Are you all right? Your arm!”

Charlie looked down at his arm and then back at her with a glazed look in his eyes. “Doesn’t look great,” he said with a cough. “At least the police are nearby. It shouldn’t be long until we get some help.” He might have been out of it from the crash, but he wasn’t wrong. The police were on the scene almost instantly, and the paramedics followed soon after.

Once Charlie had been whisked away in an ambulance with Trisha at his side, Gloria and Charlie slid into the back seat of a police cruiser to be taken down to the station. Their parents would pick them up there and—in Daniel’s case at least—almost certainly ground him for the rest of the summer.