Chapter 10
TEN
THEN: NOVEMBER, TWELVE YEARS AGO
“You know,” Jake said conversationally, as they turned off Sam’s street, “if you’re going to go this slowly the whole way to Anthony’s, getting there is going to take ten thousand years.”
That night the whole world seemed to be conspiring against Sam, a perfect symphony of disaster conducted by someone who hated him.
Instead of saying this, or pointing out that he had no intention of driving this car anywhere but back to its appointed spot in Jake’s garage, he muttered, “Duly noted.”
Even the roads weren’t working with him on his mission of questionable mercy.
If Jake had just lived on a normal street, the drive from Sam’s house to his would have taken, at most, two and a half minutes.
But because he didn’t, Sam had to drive a whole five minutes, and directly past the high school where his parents and Jake’s were spending the evening.
Or he would have. They didn’t actually make it that far.
Everything that rallied against Sam that night would irritate him for years to come, but surely, of them all, the most annoying blame to have to lay was at the feet of city planning.
Scoone Avenue, Jake’s street, had a cul-de-sac at one end, and was cut off by the lower portion of Scenic Lake at the other.
There was only one way to get in or out, which was to go over the small iron bridge to the road that ringed the lake, Scenic Drive.
It was a scenic drive, one with lovely views of the water and its surrounding woods and wetlands; there had been some legal fight in the sixties to turn the area into a nature preserve, and in the end it had been agreed that nothing new could be built on the land.
Which is why there was nothing on Scenic Drive except for Horseshoe Heights High School.
They were arguing, Sam remembers that. He’d cursed the city planning then, too, if only inside his own head, because the way things were laid out meant Jake cottoned on to what Sam was doing almost immediately.
He’d snapped, “Hey, this isn’t the way to—oh my God, you liar!
You lied to me! You said you were taking me to the party! ”
“We can go to the party,” Sam said, trying not to sound desperate.
He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel as Jake made an assortment of outraged noises.
There simply was no good way to say to Jake just now that a very loud, frightened part of him kept screaming things like, This is a very expensive car, and, This is a very expensive car that belongs to the scariest man I know, and, This is a very expensive car that belongs to the scariest man I know and he knows where I live and I don’t even have a driver’s license, Jake, oh my God!
This was, in a word, unhelpful, especially since it kept drowning out different and more rational parts of him, which were saying things more along the lines of, Remember, the brake’s the LEFT pedal and the gas is the RIGHT, and, Just a note, Sam: You’re supposed to know where the turn signals are and how to turn them on before you start driving.
“Not from here we can’t!” Jake snapped, gesturing around them as Sam eased them, at roughly seventeen miles per hour, up the road.
“Not unless you turn off at Oakwood, but that’ll take you all the way up the hill, and Anthony’s is completely the other way!
And otherwise this only takes us back to my house or to—oh my God, Sam, you’re going to drive us past the high school.
You can’t do that! My dad is in there! Turn around! Abort mission!”
“You drove by it to get to my house,” Sam pointed out, instead of saying, Yes, Jake, I’m more than half hoping we get spotted and stopped.
I think we might need an adult. As he did, he had a glimmer of a thought older than his years: Perhaps Jake, too, had wanted to get caught, the way Sam had always sort of wanted to get caught every time he told a lie.
It had been horrible, what happened with his parents and the house party—it had been awful living with their disappointment and rage—but it had been a relief, too, in a weird way.
That he’d finally gotten their attention, maybe, or maybe just that they cared enough to be angry with him.
Sam glanced over at Jake as they were passing the intersection at Oakwood Road, feeling suddenly soft towards him.
It would take him about five years of therapy, in the end, to forgive himself for that glance—to accept that there was no scenario where, as an unlicensed teenage driver, he would have known in advance about the dangers of the Oakwood Road intersection, and thus been paying more attention.
To accept that even if he had been paying more attention, it wouldn’t have mattered, because of those very dangers he would not in any scenario have known about.
Still: He glanced at Jake, and away from the road. So he wasn’t looking, noticed only the abrupt change in lighting, when the car hit them.
The Oakwood Road intersection was dangerous for five reasons, all of which had been enumerated in a variety of city council meetings that Sam, as a seventeen-year-old, had neither attended nor heard about.
The first reason was that Oakwood Road twined down the long, steep slope of Oakwood Hill; the second was that it met Scenic Drive just off a sharp curve, and thus was essentially a blind turn for both directions of traffic.
The third reason was that only Oakwood Road had a stop sign, and the fourth was that said stop sign was mostly obscured by both the curve in the road and an unfortunately low-growing beech bough.
However, the fifth reason that the Oakwood Road intersection was dangerous was the most important one, and that was where it was in relation to the world around it.
Most of Scenic Drive was surrounded by sparse, relatively young forest, but where it met Oakwood Road happened to be the only point along its run where it skated close to the lake it was named for.
So close that between the road and the water, there was only a badly battered guardrail, barely standing, and a roughly ten-foot drop.
Sam doesn’t remember screaming. He must have screamed—Jake must have screamed—when the other car hit them, but he doesn’t remember that.
He remembers that it was from behind them, and hard, like it had been flying down the hill and turned right into them without slowing down at all.
He remembers his mind going perfectly blank, forgetting how to brake or steer even as part of him knew it was all happening too quickly for either to do any good.
He remembers there was a tearing, crumpling noise as they went through the guardrail, and he remembers—God, like it was yesterday, he remembers—the sick, strange serenity of the approaching lake through the windshield, and making brief eye contact with a very surprised duck.
Then they hit the water, and the world went black.
Sam blinked his eyes open into a brief, muddy moment of confusion.
He was wet; he was cold; he could hear strange, metallic creaking noises, distant birdsong, and the rush of water.
Slowly, as if being filtered through mud, the realization that he’d been unconscious drifting towards him, though not for how long.
Why he’d been unconscious, on the other hand, was pretty clear. His head ached where it must have slammed against the steering wheel on impact, and he dizzily remembered Mr. Thompson saying something about this car being older than airbags—
—wait, why was he in—
—oh, God, he crashed the car into the—
“JAKE!” Sam yelled this, frantic, as he whipped his head around to look for him, and then cut himself off abruptly for two reasons.
The first was that turning his head so quickly was decidedly unpleasant, and probably, in the circumstances, foolish; the second was that Jake was right next to him, still in the passenger seat where Sam saw him last.
Of course, that passenger seat was half-submerged in lake water, and Jake, bleeding sluggishly from a head wound, was fully unconscious, so Sam wasn’t exactly counting it as a win.
The water was a concern. Sam hadn’t quite noticed it up until that point, but it was up to his own waist as well.
For a second he was gripped with panic, sure both that they were sinking and that Jake was dead, before he realized the water level wasn’t rising.
Glancing over the edge of his door, he realized they seemed to be stuck somehow, the surface of the lake a mere inch from the top of the open cab, but the car not descending any further than it already had.
This made no sense at all, but Sam decided to worry about it later.
In the interest of giving himself less to worry about later, Sam held a hand in front of Jake’s mouth briefly and, when he felt Jake’s breath brush against his palm, heaved out a sigh of relief so intense he nearly choked on it.
At least Jake was alive; at least they were both alive.
Sam was fairly certain, as he wincingly took stock of the wreckage around him, that it might easily have worked out otherwise.
Telling himself to approach the situation with a triage mindset and tackle the most urgent problem first, Sam found himself stuck almost immediately on determining what his most urgent problem was.
The car was in the lake; it was late November, so the lake was just this side of freezing; the human body could only be in cold water for so long without developing hypothermia; these all seemed like fairly critical issues.
But then, so did Jake’s lack of consciousness, not to mention his head wound, not to mention Sam’s head wound, not to mention—