I can't say my life was all that great at first, but it definitely wasn't all that bad. I had parents that were always working, rarely would we ever be together for more than a few minutes before one of them had to work; this caused me to have to step up and practically take care of my sister since I was 7. Don't get me wrong, I loved my parents. Whenever they could spare a few minutes they would always sit down and have a family dinner, and I would happily partake. I may have been only 8, but I knew how hard they worked to keep our family together and healthy.
My school life was going great too, or at least the parts that were were what I let my parents see. I couldn't worry my parents more than they already did, so the bullying was something I kept a secret from them. It was easy to hide because it never got physical, but I knew it was only a matter of time until my angel of a sister would see it happening.
It was during this time that I met Charles, a cheerful boy with a head of bright blonde hair that was only outshone by his energy levels. He was the light that guided me through school, he would be the person to shoo away all of the bullies that tried to get under my skin for some unknown reason. With time, the bullying stopped, and my parents got promotions. Nothing big, but they could finally spare some time for us to go on a trip together.
Oh, how I wish that trip had never happened.
With some time off and spare money, my parents put together a road trip that would bring us to some of the more famous attractions of this part of the country. We all packed up our things, got in the worn-down 2003 Chevy Impala my dad had, and left.
Things were going well at first, we stopped at some landmarks along the way, took pictures, you know, the things normal families do on road trips. It was on the third day when some heavy rain hit; this was nothing new, as we always got heavy rain around this time. But this was anything but normal heavy rain, as it started picking up, going quickly from heavy rain to a raging storm with advisories to stay home playing over the crackling radio. We were in between destinations, and my parents came to the consensus that staying out in the open would be more dangerous because of what could come out of such open areas during this harsh storm.
With every mile feeling like a slow crawl, I didn't need to be driving or very old to feel the car being almost flipped as we went along the road. Though they weren't much safer, the mountain roads allowed for the winds to subside. But it wasn't the wind we should have been worried about.
The truck came out of nowhere, a tire was blown. I heard crashing, I heard my sister and mother screaming. I could feel a plummeting feeling as I saw all of the items in the car, my family and myself all go seemingly weightless until just as suddenly everything was brought down with enough force to break all of the unbroken windows and trinkets we had gathered the past two days. With this sudden event, I barely felt the blood running down my face from a deep scar-inducing cut along my eyebrow as I stared at my lap. I would have looked away if it hadn't been for the disheveled hair of my sister that was present there. I looked right to see an upright body that was my sister, but something was missing, and I looked back down to see that the angelic, adorable, lovely head of my almost 5-year-old sister was there, on my lap, separated from the rest of her. With rapid motions that would have made even trained astronauts dizzy, I whipped my head up to scream for my mother, but all I saw was a mangled mess of limbs tangled in dripping branches from a nearby tree and staring lifelessly into my soul. With that same speed, I looked forward, just to see nothing but an explosion of red, pink, and grey all over the windshield and seats. As I slowly looked down again, I could see that same color scheme all over myself, and soon my eyes met those of my sister's bleeding, lifeless ones on my lap. My breathing rapidly increased, tears refused to form from the sheer disbelief of the situation, and as I let out a scream that shook my throat raw, I slipped from consciousness.