It Meant We Were in Motion

We knew a girl had died on those roads, but we still drove them. We drove wildly, through that grid of gravel, between the endless expanse of corn fields and soybean fields, past farmhouses, sloughs, groves, old sagging barns and silos, past fenced-in dairy cows and pigs and horses, past lakes and creeks, shallow ditches, and tractors parked in the middle of fields for the night. We drove beneath that great dark sky, the dome we lived beneath, and the distant winking stars. Through our open windows, we breathed in dust from the road. The smell was as familiar as our own skin.

Shelly Brookes was killed the fall of our sophomore year in high school. She'd been "road tripping," drinking beer and driving, with two friends after a high school football game. They were tearing across the gravel, swooping around curves. Maybe there was music blasting from the speakers. Maybe Shelly and her friends were singing at the tops of their lungs, their three high, girlish voices trailing out of the car, pouring across the fields.

People heard the crash. Lorna Arneson, a postal worker and the mother of six children, told my mother about it one afternoon while they drank coffee and smoked cigarettes at our kitchen table. She said it was fast, over in an instant. She said it sounded like the cry of some strange jungle creature. Dave Ludwig, the owner of the only grocery store in town, heard it too. He was standing on his front porch having a cigarette before going up to bed. He said what he remembered most was the silence afterwards, once metal had smashed oak tree. He said that the world, for just a moment, was still as a cave. And then he heard one shrill scream, a girl's voice crying out for help.

Shelly was the only one that died out there that night. The other two girls survived. Jeana was in the backseat; she broke a rib and shoulder. Michelle was in the hospital for weeks, and for awhile there was fear she wasn't going to make it, but in the end she did. For months at school no one knew how to behave around either of the girls. We would smile with sympathy but then shuffle off. We were a little afraid of Michelle and Jeana now. They seemed much older. In their presence we were reminded of our trivial preoccupations—Do you think Tony really likes me? Are you going to the party this Friday? Where can we get some weed? Do you have the new Smashing Pumpkins? What color should I dye my hair? If we asked these questions around Michelle or Jeana, we felt ashamed. They looked at us with disgust. We knew our little worries were ridiculous, but what were we supposed to do, we wondered—mourn forever? We had to carry on with our lives.

Shelly was a girl my friends and I had never liked. She was too pretty, too popular. She got straight As without even trying. She could be cruel, too, making fun of us, saying, "Did you get that shirt at the Salvation Army?" and, "Ever heard of makeup, girls?" or, "Wasn't that your mom I saw stumbling out of the bar last night?" But Shelly was dead now. We should feel terrible, my friends and I told ourselves. We should change our ways, learn a lesson from what happened. But we were sixteen. Invincible. We believed that we were nothing like Shelly.

Other girls cried. At the funeral, in the high school auditorium, so packed that dozens of people had to stand up for the service, sobs could be heard from every other teenage girl. For weeks after that, classes were disrupted by one girl rushing out of the room with tears running down her face. Soon her friends would follow. We'd find them later, between classes...