“No, that’s always sandwiches,” I say. “Abby hates sandwiches. You should bring her to the lagoon. There’s a restaurant where I’m at. It’s called”—I swivel around to see the sign—“the Lagoon Grill.” Another thought occurs to me. “Hey, do you have money?”

“Didn’t Mom give you some?” Afton asks.

“I spent it. I have like seven dollars.” But money is the least of my problems.

“Okay, sit tight,” Afton says. “We’ll be right there.”

Chapter 14

14

My very first memory, ever, is of a car accident. I was about three, I think. Dad (my original father, not Pop) was driving us to pick up Afton from somewhere, on a freeway between San Jose and San Francisco, the world pleasantly zooming by outside the window. Then Dad had to merge. He looked over his right shoulder to check that the other lane was clear, and what he didn’t realize was that the cars ahead of us had all stopped.

“Aaron!” my mom screamed, and then my dad had about ten seconds to go from seventy-five miles per hour to zero.

He slammed on the brakes. That’s the first real part of what I remember, actually, the sensation of being flung violently forward, so hard that I got a hairline fracture on my collarbone from the force of me hitting the straps of my car seat. And then there was my mother screaming again, and me screaming, too, knowing as the car in front of us rushed toward the windshield that we weren’t going to stop in time. Then BAM—the impact—the sheer loudness of it was terrible, that huge, sickening bang, compounded by the crunch and crack of glass, the pop of the airbags.

And then everything, for a few seconds, anyway, was totally still.

Dust floated in the air.

The blinker was still on, and it went click. Click. Click.

I could hear my own breathing. In and out. In and out.

Then Mom scrambled out of her seat belt and reached over to me, her hand touching my face. “Are you okay, honey? Are you hurt?”

I shook my head. Something was hurt, of course, but I didn’t feel it yet.

My dad coughed. “Shit,” I remember he said. “The car is totaled.”

Mom turned on him with an expression I’d never seen on her face, before or since. “You,” she said, gasping for air, at first, but then starting to yell. “You asshole! You could have killed us!”

“I didn’t see!” he bellowed back. “It wasn’t my fault!”

“We could have died!” she screamed.