The drunk driver ran a red light on a Tuesday afternoon in October, and by the time Emily was awake enough to understand what had happened, six months of her life had already been rewritten for her. She was seventeen. She had been walking home from school with her earbuds in, which she always did, which she would spend years afterward being unable to think about without a complicated mix of guilt and futility.
She woke up in a hospital bed listening to doctors talk around her the way adults talk around injured children when they are not sure what the child can handle and have decided to err on the side of treating her as furniture. Her legs were broken in three places. Her spine had been damaged. The doctors used words she recognized but had never needed to understand before, words like prognosis and rehabilitation and maybe. She was seventeen years old, and she had just discovered that maybe was the most frightening word in the English language, not because it was vague but because of what it implied: that certainty was no longer being offered.
The months that followed were not the kind of story people tell. There was no single triumphant moment, no musical swell, no morning when she stood up and her body agreed to cooperate and everything that had been wrong snapped back into alignment. There was pain, and there was paperwork, and there was the specific exhaustion of being simultaneously a patient and a person, which turns out to be one of the most demanding combinations available to a human being. Doctors spoke to her parents. Administrators spoke to her parents. Her friends visited with expressions that moved from shock to discomfort to a particular variety of forced normalcy that was in some ways harder to bear than the rest of it.
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