Treadmill

XII.I

I never thought of myself as a 'bad person.'

I never thought of myself as a particularly great person, either. Just not a bad one.

And I know that writing this might give me something to be sorry about. But I'm also done being quiet about everything. So here we are, and you're reading, and I'm writing, and we're on this journey together until you decide to stop. Because I'm not.

I'm going to go ahead and give some statistics for those of you who are unfamiliar with human beings getting hit by cars.

When a car is going 20 miles per hour and hits a pedestrian, that person has a 90% chance of survival. Sure, they'll be scratched up. Traumatized. But they'll survive 9/10 times.

When a car is going 30 miles per hour and hits a pedestrian, that person has a 50% chance of survival. Which also means a 50% chance of dying. So it could go either way; other factors would come into play, like whether or not the person bounced off of the windshield and hit the ground with less impact than if they flew over the hood of the car and hit the ground to the back with greater force. 50/50 chance of surviving.

When a car is going 40 miles per hour and hits a pedestrian, that person has a 10% chance of survival. Between 20 and 40 miles per hour, the person who was hit loses 80% of their chance for living through that.

Other factors come into play in every situation, at every speed. But there's a chance of dying with every speed. There's also a chance of surviving at every speed.

You probably don't care about all of these statistics. You want me to tell you exactly what happened. What—or who—did we hit, were they alive, was Kennedy alright mentally?

I love that I say 'we.' As if I, too, was driving the car.

We hit the guy going 45 miles per hour.

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Rebecca felt her heartrate start to pick up again immediately as Kennedy shook her head, feeling herself get dizzy. If it hadn't been a deer...she didn't want to go to the worst-case scenario. But that was the only other scenario she was thinking about.

She got out of the car slowly, unbuckling her seatbelt and taking a few deep breaths before walking over to join Kennedy. She felt the immediate need to throw up after seeing the image in front of her but couldn't find the brain capacity to even open her mouth and do that.

Under Kennedy's flashlight, lying in the street a few feet behind the now-parked car, was a man who looked like he could be in his late 40s or early 50s, with blood pouring out of a gash on the side of his head. He had dark hair and was wearing a truly terrible jean jacket, which Rebecca immediately felt guilty for noticing.

She started to lean down and try to stop the blood flow before Kennedy whacked her in the chest to force her to stand back up straight.

"Ow." Rebecca coughed out, "We need to help him live, Kenne—"

"He's already dead." Kennedy snapped, shaking her head, her expression stony and her eyes tracing around the man's body, "He's dead and we need to get out of here."

Rebecca felt herself starting to panic; everything felt like some sort of nightmare. He couldn't be dead. He couldn't have been killed by a car that Rebecca had been travelling in. Rebecca was a good girl who did her homework and went to her minimum wage job and hung out with her friends and seemed to recently start drinking and hooking up with random guys. But that was normal college stuff. It didn't make her any less of a good person.

She was a good girl who took pictures with her friends and planned spontaneous road trips to the beach and laughed with her head hanging out of the car window while country music blasted through the speakers and the sun shone on her face. She was a good girl. She was a good girl who didn't hit people with her car. She didn't even know someone who had hit a person with their car. She didn't think those people existed outside of movies and news articles.

But there she was, standing on the side of the road in her bathing suit with sandy feet and tangled hair in the pitch blackness, standing over the body of a man who had just been hit by her car.

He had been hit by her car.

"Stop breathing so heavily." Kennedy instructed, grabbing Rebecca's arm and trying to force her back to the passenger's seat, "We need to get out of here."

Rebecca pulled her arm away from Kennedy and stayed with her feet planted in one spot, shaking her head over and over again.

"We have to call the cops. We have to tell them what you did, we have to—"

"What I did?" Kennedy repeated incredulously, "Are you delusional? This is your car, Rebecca. Even if I confess, the cops are going to believe that it was you who hit him. You're not going to get away with this just because I was the one driving—it was your car, so you're going to be in the most trouble."

Rebecca nodded her head slowly. Some part of her knew that the logic didn't make sense. But a much larger part of her was scared out of her mind of losing everything and becoming someone who had a permanent record for something she hadn't even done. But something she was...partly responsible for?

"What if we called the cops and told them about the man and then we just run?" Rebecca asked, "So they can come and maybe save him?"

Kennedy sighed in exasperation.

"Rebecca, he is dead. There isn't going to be anyone to save him. And if we call the cops, they're going to come here and see that we're not here, and trace our phone numbers and call us back and ask why we were even here to begin with, and that will expose our account and expose what we've been working on and everything will be ruined. Do you understand?"

Rebecca nodded slowly, starting to move her feet in the direction of the passenger's seat.

"Okay." She nodded, opening the door. "Okay."

She closed the door behind her as Kennedy started the car.

"Can I use the GPS now?" Rebecca asked quietly.

Kennedy sighed.

"Yes."

A/N: So that happened. Wild. Let me know your thoughts!

And for any Dear Sydney readers, I'm probably going to start working on a third installment during this quarantine time, so follow me on Twitter and Instagram (links below) to vote on polls about where you want the book to go, and check out my blog (link also below) to be kept up to date on everything going on with the books!