Niall's Fire

-Quincey-

I know I sound really antisocial, but I was so excited to go home with my friends and get into our pajamas and just eat and talk and watch old Disney movies.

We were standing at the cross walk when I got a text. It was my mom, asking me what we wanted for dinner.

As we started crossing the road, I asked my friends. They all agreed on pizza. I started typing, but the screeching of breaks interrupted me and I only got to finish half the word.

Screams. And pain.

Everything went black for a while. It was kind of peaceful for a minute actually, for a minute. That is, before my left leg and my left ribs started flaming with pain.

It started to smell like gun smoke and burnt rubber.

When I opened my eyes a little, all the street lights were white and fuzzy looking. My vision was at different levels of clarity from second to second. It looked like I was looking through a camera, taking the image in and out of focus.

It sounded as if there were cotton swabs stuffed in my ears. I could hear my friends screaming and yelling into their phones. I see Maggie's face over me as she knelt next to my crumpled form, and I could feel as she shook me roughly and took my hand and squeezed it a little to hard.

All I could do other than that was groan and try to keep breathing. Every exhalation brought stabbing pains from my inevitably broken ribs and every inhalation was even worse. I couldn't move because of my leg, and I couldn't talk either.

After a while of lying there, trying to cry through the blinding pain, I heard my mother and father, yelling at the accumulating crowd to get back.

And after that I heard the ambulance. And I was finally able to force out the scream that I had been storing since the car hit me when the paramedics roughly lifted me onto a stretcher.

The ambulance ride was a struggle at first. For some reason, I was freezing cold, and no matter how many blankets they put over me, I was still shivering. Also, the white lights that hung over me burned my eyes, even when they were closed.

Fortunately, I only had to suffer through this for all of five minutes. They had given me sedative drugs so that i could supposedly sleep through the pain. Which was actually really nice.

I woke up with what seemed like hundreds of tubes going in and out of me, a hospital bracelet on my wrist, the sound of many nurses and doctors talking and phones ringing and machines beeping, and I was dressed in the equivalent to a paper napkin.

At least I felt well rested and was surrounded by tons of chocolate, balloons, flowers, teddy bears, and everything else I could have wanted.

Notes