Chapter 8
They say the Bonneville Salt Flats look like another planet.
That it’s just sky and space and salt and silence—like Earth gave up trying to be beautiful and natural and decided to be something else entirely.
I didn’t come for the views, though. I came to die.
Or maybe, to tempt death harder than I ever had before.
Standing on top of a car while it barrels through a desert at seventy miles an hour is not the kind of thing you can half-ass.
One wrong shift in balance, one gust of wind, one unnoticed crack in the salt, and I’d be face-planted into the hard earth with nothing but a GoPro and a viral legacy. And smashed brains. Hopefully.
The plan had been simple. Get a rental car, find a closed section of the flats, and a driver who I paid enough not to ask too many questions, which I appreciated.
I didn’t need concern, I needed speed. After all, I had my ass strapped to the roof with a harness I’d pretended not to double-check three times.
I was going to film the whole thing with two cameras, one mounted near the front windshield and one on my chest. I’d climbed onto the roof like it was an altar.
The horizon looked endless from up here.
I adjusted the strap once, twice. The metal was warm from the sun and smooth in my hands.
I sat down first, knees tucked under me.
Once I was situated, I tapped the GoPro twice to confirm it was rolling. Red light: on. Then I gave the signal.
The car started slow. Just a crawl. The wind caught in my hair and teased at my shirt.
My fingers curled tighter against the roof.
And then—faster. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. The salt flats blurred.
The landscape flattened. There was no depth, no sense of motion, only the rumble beneath me and the wind clawing at my ears.
Sixty. I stood. It wasn’t graceful. My knees wobbled, but I stood up anyway.
Arms out. Like some kind of suicidal Jesus on top of a Dodge Charger.
The wind screamed past me, flattening my shirt against my ribs, turning my throat dry, and my lips numb.
The sun blazed above like it knew I didn’t belong here.
Like it was trying to burn me out of existence.
I welcomed it. My eyes watered instantly.
Every breath tasted like heat and dust. My heart hammered—not with fear exactly, but with something ancestral. Animalistic.
The speedometer mounted on the hood of the car told me that we had hit seventy.
I was a human lightning rod on a rolling death trap.
And it was… beautiful.
Terrifying, too. I couldn’t lie. Every cell in my body screamed that this was the end.
That one wrong movement, one patch of uneven ground, and I’d be airborne—my body twisting in the sky before shattering against the salt crust. I imagined the headline.
The slowed-down footage. The comment section full of kids saying, “RIP Legend.” And for a heartbeat, I felt at peace. Finally.
It was a gentle acceptance. For a split second, I didn’t feel broken or held together by sarcasm; all the times the world had failed me oozing out between the stitches.
I just existed as a speck in the universe, a quick inhale in the chaos, a body defying gravity and consequences.
It was the closest thing I’d felt to belonging.
Not to people, a place, or a movement. Rather to the moment. But the moment didn’t last.
The car began to slow, like the driver sensed the invisible line I was about to cross.
I dropped back to my knees as the wind died around me, my hands pressed to the hot roof like it might keep me grounded in some other way.
My muscles shook. My throat burned. I was still alive.
Of course I was. I always fucking was. It was really starting to piss me off.
When I replayed the footage that night, there was this one frame—my arms wide, shirt flapping, face turned toward the sky—and I looked very much happy to be alive.
Which was ridiculous. I paused on that frame.
I was laughing. I didn’t remember laughing, but there I was, head back, mouth open like I was joking with the sky.
It infuriated me because it made me worry that a part of me thought I may have made peace with the world and was okay enjoying it, but I hadn’t. Not even close.
After exporting the footage, I started a new email to Carter. As usual, I didn’t type anything in the body, just attached the file and hit send. Less than ten minutes later, he called me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, already anticipating a rant. “Should I have added a note that said, ‘No, I didn’t die. Yes, I’m still annoyed about it’?” He thought it was a joke. He had no idea my flirting with death was a real goal and not just me doing crazy things for the views.
“You’re a fucking lunatic,” he said.
“Do you know what kind of messages I get every time I upload? I had to block a woman named Sunflower_Moon_Mommy because she said she wanted to adopt me as her adult son.” I changed the subject.
“That’s beautiful. I hope she knits.”
I laughed.
“You stood on the roof of a moving car, Danny.” He brought our attention back to the insanity.
“And?”
“Barefoot.”
“I wanted to feel the salt beneath my feet.”
He groaned. “You could have felt your bones snap on impact, you dramatic bastard.”
“Touché.”
I named the video “Riding the Edge: Standing on a Moving Car at 70MPH” and uploaded it without fanfare.
The views started pouring in almost before the thumbnail finished rendering.
Carter texted me around midnight.
CARTER
3M views in 5 hrs. Congrats, Grim Reaper’s apprentice.
DANNY
Tell that to my future grave.
CARTER
Working on your merch line: ‘Still Not Dead.’
DANNY
Put it on a mug.
I laughed. Like, actually laughed. Then sat there wondering what the hell was so funny.
The money truly started coming in after my fourth almost brush with death.
Stunt number four. The comments started stacking, views exploded, and brands were even more seriously sniffing around like flies to a carcass.
Someone even asked me to model for their workout clothing line.
I had to spit out my water when I’d read their message.
By the time my car video hit forty million views, I had four sponsorships lined up—two adrenaline junkie gear companies, one sketchy energy drink brand, and a GoPro knockoff with a name I couldn’t pronounce.
It felt like the biggest joke of all. Companies were paying me to film my death wish.
Influencers were making TikToks about “The guy who should’ve died by now.
” Someone even made a prayer candle with my face on it and tagged me.
Meanwhile, I woke up every morning wishing I hadn’t.
Sometimes I’d lie in bed and think about all the times the world had failed me.
Not the big, headline-type stuff. The small stuff.
The invisible stuff. The time I called the police because my foster father locked me in the garage overnight because at fifteen, I’d finally hit him back when he tried to pull my pants down and they said, “Maybe you should just listen better.” Or the time I got a perfect SAT score but didn’t apply to any colleges because I didn’t think I could make it happen.
Or the time I called a help line and told them I wasn’t okay and they said, “We all feel that way sometimes.” Or the time I bought myself a birthday cake because I knew no one else would.
The summers I’d waste rotting in my room because I couldn’t find the energy to want anything better.
The time I got a thousand messages saying, “You inspired me to stay,” because of how beautiful they found my videos to be but didn’t know what to say because that had not been my intention.
I wasn’t trying to show the world how beautiful life was, but somehow my death wish videos were doing exactly that.
The problem with me was that I’d never felt safe.
Not really. Not anywhere. Not in my own skin, my own bed, my own head.
And I didn’t think I’d ever really felt happy either.
Just moments of less pain. Numbness with better lighting.
People thought rock bottom was one moment of despair, but it wasn’t.
It was a thousand quiet falls until one day you looked up and realized you’d been living in survival mode your whole life. That realization was rock bottom.