Age:
High School
Reading Level: 5.4
Prologue
I’d always considered myself a bit of a musician. Not that I was famous or anything. I was still really just a kid.
I was also on a soccer team in the village we’d moved to from the US. I enjoyed kicking the soccer ball about at the weekends, but I knew for sure I’d never make it to the adult league.
I had the same attitude about my music. I played for fun. But I knew I was pretty good at that.
The guitar was the coolest instrument I could think of when I was told I had to learn one at school. I’m not sure whether it was a rule at our village school only, or whether every middle school student in Switzerland had to pick one.
I didn’t read music very well, but I learned all the chords first and then learned where my fingers were supposed to go. It turned into a compulsion.
Every day. I heard stuff I liked, and I had to try and play it. Plucking classics took longer to practice without sheet music, but I had a few songs I knew really well by heart.
Chapter 1
Last week I played my guitar until my fingers bled. I kid you not.
When the steel strings cut through the calluses on my fingertips, a sharp sweetness dulled the pain. The feeling stopped, but not the action of my fingers.
I knew I was playing because we could all still hear the chords. But it was as though I was watching someone else’s hand.
I shouldn't have been there, in a hospital, playing guitar for a stranger in a coma. Especially not during mid-term break.
But I was. Like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Like it was fate.
Chapter 2
It was like knowing the phone was about to ring. Or I was going to bump into someone familiar on a remote vacation. A premonition. I knew the accident was going to happen.
I was standing at the intersection outside the shoe store, contemplating whether to jaywalk or wander the few steps to the crosswalk. A green minivan was speeding towards the intersection from the north.
Obeying my annoying compliance to authority, I made my way to the crosswalk a few paces away.
A cyclist wearing a Lycra suit with violet-and-blue swirls approached from the east with his head down. His legs were pumping a high cadence, moving fast. I drew in my breath.
As he passed me in a purple flash, a burning tingle raised the hair on the back of my neck like iron filings. Blood roared in my ears. I recognized the head rush of inevitability.
The minivan braked briefly at the intersection. The woman at the wheel was laughing at something—a shared joke with her passenger who was holding a potted palm on her lap.
Time slowed, and my jaw hinged slowly open. I wanted to yell, but the synapses in my brain wouldn’t connect.
The driver of the minivan looked to her right, craning her neck to gaze beyond the graying walls of the Stag Restaurant. Her eyes focused on a distant point down the road. Without stopping completely, she accelerated jerkily into the street.
The crunch of the bike into the side of the minivan made my stomach lurch.
