He pulls his head back into the car, and I strain against gravity, my seat belt biting into my left hip.

“Is it bad?” Harper asks in a thin, high voice.

No one answers. I don’t know how she could think it’s anything but bad. The whole car is tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. Basically, we’re teetering off the edge of a road we never should have tried to navigate.

“It’s not good,” Josh says, sounding remarkably calm.

I grab the sides of each of the front seats, trying to hold myself in place. My palms are slick on the leather despite the arctic rush of air streaming through the open windows. I’m pinned between Josh and Kayla, and everything feels too close. Too intense.

“How steep is the drop on your side, Brecken?” she asks. “Can we get out?”

“Do we have a choice?” Kayla asks. Her breath is a warm huff in my hair, but she’s struggling with the door. She pulls the handle and pushes with her hands. Then her feet. I tense, squirming under the press of her weight against me. And my weight against Josh. I can feel the material from his jacket and the hard length of his arm underneath. I can feel Kayla, too, and I don’t like this. Not any of it.

I unbuckle and twist my body, shove my hips out and away from the seat. My legs shake, but I crouch in the narrow space between the front seat and the back. I can’t sit here between the two of them any longer. I need space. Air.

Kayla finally gets the door open, and Brecken forces his open, too.

“We need to get out,” I say. I start an awkward climb to the passenger-side door. Everything about my angle is unnatural—I feel like I’ll tumble backward out of the car. My stomach cramps, a warning from my body that this is not right.

Hell, nothing has been right for hours. Weeks. For the whole year, if I’m honest.

“I knew we shouldn’t have done this!” Brecken says.

“You agreed to it, too!” Harper snaps. “Just get over it.”

We all pile out of the car and assess the damage. We’re halfway up to our calves in snow here and the other side of the car is much, much worse. It’s buried above both tires, snow partly up both doors. The ditch is not deep—maybe eight feet, though it’s hard to be sure. And the car doesn’t look as bad as I thought, the passenger-side tires only a few inches off the ground.

Still. It’s buried. This is beyond what we can do with a shovel. We need ten shovels. Or maybe a backhoe.

A certainty settles deep in my gut looking at the half-buried SUV: we aren’t getting out of this snow without a tow.