Posted on: Thursday, December 27, 2001
Fear comes too late to save best friend
By Lauren Tasaki
Moanalua High School
You accept another plastic cup filled with beer and tip the cold drink to your lips. You have already had too much, and as the alcohol slides down your throat, it makes you giddy.
People are talking about crashing another party across town, and, as the idea sounds good to your wasted mind, you hop into your beat-up Civic; your best friend falls into the passenger seat beside you.
The keys don't seem to fit into the ignition, and your giggling friend informs you, with her words so slurred and your brain so slow you can barely understand her, that you're trying to start your car with your keychain light. The situation strikes her as hilariously funny, and her drunken laughter fills the car.
You wonder briefly whether you are drunk, too, but before you can focus on that, you realize that you have somehow gotten the car started. As the engine roars to life, you have suddenly become a deadly weapon, a 3,000-pound bullet fired straight from the gun of alcohol.
Your distorted brain, however, fails to realize that.
As you weave out into the main road, struggling to make sense of the bright, shining lights that make your eyes sting, a horn blares. Your friend mumbles something incoherently, and you glare vaguely in her
direction for a second before directing your eyes back to the road. The world shifts and spins, then is brought sharply back into focus; you suddenly wish you had not had those five beers back at the party.
Another emotion, besides regret, hits you: fear. You are scared for your life; the alcohol is making you slow and stupid and the thought that you are not fully capable of driving this car terrifies you.
You are afraid and wishing that you were dreaming instead of trapped in this horrible reality. A car whizzes past; you instinctively wrench your steering wheel to the left. There is the awful sound of screeching tires and breaking glass; a wail pierces the night.
And before you slip into unconsciousness, the only thing you can think of is one plaintive plea: Don't let me die.
You do not die. Remarkably, you walk away from the crash with nothing more than a mild concussion and a bruised knee.
The family whose car you hit is not so lucky, however. The father has been paralyzed below the waist, the mother suffers a broken arm and two cracked ribs. Their 5-year-old son sustains severe internal injuries, and his 8-year-old sister is in a coma. Four lives ruined by your nonchalant decision to have a couple of drinks and get behind the wheel.
And your friend? Your best friend since as long as you can remember, who brought you your homework when you were sick, who gave you her ice cream when you dropped yours on the ground, who listened to you whine and complain about your parents and their stupid rules, and always knew just what to say ... what has happened to your friend?
You sit in the emergency room, the nurse on duty dressing your wounds and giving you looks of scorn that she does not bother to hide. You have now been reduced to the scum of the universe.
Not that you don't think you deserve the title. ... The ER doctor comes out looking weary. He sits down beside you and tells you the news that will haunt you forever.
"She's dead," he says flatly. Your head aches from the after-effects of the alcohol, but it doesn't ... it can't hurt as much as your heart.
Your friend is dead. She is another memory, another statistic, another victim of drunk driving. You thought it would be cool to drink, you didn't think at all when you got into the car. And as a police officer comes over to arrest you for driving under the influence, you lower your head into your hands and cry.
