1.
“What happened?” should be an easy enough question to answer. There’s the fact of the rain—a days-long deluge that ended that evening, revealing a double rainbow across the sky. What you saw in those twinned arcs—coincidence, reassurance, hope, God—said everything about you. Under anesthesia inside the walls of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, I didn’t see them at all. I received the symbols and their meanings secondhand—doled out in doses along with my pain medications in the days and weeks and months that followed the bus accident. So much of my response to the question was fed to me in this way. Only now do I feel compelled to untangle my experience from others’ and to finally arrive at a set of facts. It was raining. Our bus crashed. Two of us did not survive. I did.
2.
The waistband of my shorts have finally lost their elasticity. It’s been 18 years since the paramedics—or was it the nurses?—carefully slid them down my legs like a lover I hadn’t yet had. For years I didn’t wear them, but I didn’t dare part with them, either. They traveled with me to five different apartments in Austin and to New York for grad school and back to Texas again, always folded neatly among my other athletic shorts. So many of the others on the bus had theirs unceremoniously cut from their bodies and discarded. I forget when or why we discussed this—at a memorial service or during a water break at practice, who knows. There was consensus, though, that they were our favorite uniform shorts, mostly because our numbers were appliqued on the thigh. This is how Ashley and Alicia’s bodies were identified.
3.
My mom much prefers Highway 90 to Interstate 10—an objectively safer route from Beaumont to Houston. It’s quicker, too, if you’re heading to one of the suburbs on the northern edge of the metroplex—Kingwood, Humble, Atascocita—as we were that day. It’s a four-lane blacktop road with a grassy median separating the east and westbound lanes. There’s a grass-covered ditch on either side to collect run-off from the area’s frequent and heavy rainfall. The towns it traverses are tiny blips of rural poverty. Rice mills, trailer homes, places to buy beer, feed, and gas. I’ve only been on the road a handful of times since the accident—most recently riding with my mom to Crystal Beach—a decidedly longer route to our destination, but one she felt more comfortable navigating. We turned onto Hwy 365 before passing the sign. Once a large banner, the sign now appears scaled down to the size of your run-of-the-mill FOR SALE sign. It still reads AB2—the logo that became shorthand for Ashley Brown and Alicia Bonura—their shared initials and fate forever collapsing them and their memory into blue bubble letters, a halo draped over the A. I almost breezed right past it just now on the street view of Google maps. It looks faded. I wonder who’s taken it upon themselves to tend to it, to replace it, to stop again and again at the shoulder where our bodies met the earth—first glass, then asphalt, then waterlogged grass.
4.
Our bright yellow charter bus was smaller than your average motor coach. The photo that circulated on the news and online looked like a traditional yellow school bus tipped onto its side. Fatalities could have and do occur on school buses, especially those without seatbelts, especially when a bus tips or flips or rolls, especially when traveling at speeds exceeding 50 miles per hour. What made our accident so horrific, though, in addition to the lack of safety restraints, of course, was the glass. The massive windows shattered instantly as the left side of the bus made impact, raining millions of shards upward as our bodies tumbled down to meet them, to mix with them as the vehicle skidded toward the road’s edge.
5.
I believe the construction workers. Whether it was the rain, conversation, a song on the radio, or a combination of these factors that provided enough distraction, I’ll never know, but according to the driver’s statement to the police, it wasn’t until another driver flagged them down that they realized any of their trailer load had been lost. It was a light load, foam insulation panels wrapped in plastic, so I could see how the loss wasn’t felt as they traveled east toward Beaumont. His eyes were on the road, I imagine, given the ongoing storm. He would have had to be looking in the rearview mirror to see the strap loosen, to see the wind carry the white blocks across the median and into the westbound lanes. Maybe he saw the whole thing happen, saw it play out like a bad movie or a nightmare. But I doubt it. Minutes separated our vehicles when the accident happened, so they must have seen us pass at some point. After all, who misses a big yellow bus? I wonder if one of them looked over and saw HELP written on the fogged glass.
6.
Would you have pulled over? It’s an easy question to answer in hindsight. Between the rain and the windows fogging over, not to mention the door malfunctioning at the Chevron station, there were plenty of reasons to consider it. At what point do you decide, I’m not going to get these girls to their game on time. I’m not going to fulfill my job of transporting them from point A to point B. What does your training dictate? Does it cover such a scenario? Who do you have to answer to? To whom do you have to dispatch the problem? How long between knobs pressed and settings tried on your control panel do you wait before you try something else? Before you give up and ruin everyone’s day? Is it even safe to pull over on a rural highway? The town of Devers was just a few minutes up ahead. Maybe a gas station there would have been where we stopped to troubleshoot the faulty air conditioning system and decide whether to continue toward Houston or not. Were the blocks not scattered across the pavement, of course, none of it would have mattered. The foggy windows and not the premonition that we were about to swerve to avoid debris in the road caused one of the seniors to draw P-L-E-H in the condensation, prompting Morgan to tell me: “We’re going to die.”
7.
I thought I loved Chelsie’s boyfriend. Ashley loved a boy who thought he loved me. He would park his truck down the street and text me to come outside. We’d make out. I’d play coy as I toyed with his affections. This happened only a handful of times, but it plays in my mind on a loop along with the time we both went over to his house and we spent a few unsupervised minutes with him in his room. I felt embarrassed at how plainly she liked him and how plainly he liked me. She hooked up with him in the weeks before she died. Not sex but they went further than I’d ever let him take me. I was annoyed with him at the time, because I thought he was leading her on the same way I’d done him. He’d finally grown weary of me playing cat and mouse. In hindsight, though, I’m happy she felt desire and, hopefully, pleasure. And it’s possible I’d read the situation all wrong and he liked her more. It’s even possible that he liked us both equally. The timeline of it all collapses in my mind. This love triangle couldn’t have gone on more than a few weeks. Both he and Chelsie’s boyfriend were photographed in my ICU hospital room, along with Chelsie and Afton and Traci. I remember feeling both thrilled at these boys’ concern for me and embarrassed by the sight of me, although I was pleased that the antibiotics had cleared up my acne. Before these photos were taken, I’d only wanted to be wanted. After the photos, nobody saw me or wanted me in the same way again. None of this has anything to do with what happened except for the fact that I don’t remember a word of what I said to her—what state our friendship was in and what of our wants and desires were known to one another—not only that hour, but also that day and that week. I should have been sitting next to Afton on the bus. Why had I moved to squeeze my body next to Traci who was sitting next to Ashley—the three of us nestled into two seats? What did we talk about? So much was happening in our personal lives—16 felt like a turning point, not the end. I carried so many secrets onto the bus that day. I can only imagine, so did she.
8.
For many, it was the cold shock of the ditch water. For others, the fire ants alighting their skin like pop rocks. Still others, the confetti made of glass. What revisits me like a haunting is the swerve. The trapdoor in my stomach giving way. There being no bottom to the inside of me. The certainty is what lurks on the other side of my subconscious, what ruined forever my relationship with sleep. Over and over and over and over again, I am going to die. I know it like I know the shape of my own hands. And I stay suspended there, paralyzed. Never dying, which would be a welcome, sweet release. Never finding my way back to safety. Only existing as terror.
9.
Predetermined is how I would describe the aftermath. Not the wreckage, but the response to it. The way the world processes, or fails to process, suffering. It begins with overwhelming community support: HUNDREDS GATHER AT VIGIL TO REMEMBER TWO TEENS. Next, an endless stream of “what ifs” and “should haves” unfurl, some of which prove actionable: LAWSUIT PENDING; CRIMINAL CASE ALSO POSSIBLE. Eventually you learn that people love to pity a victim, but more so, they love to judge a victim who practices their right to redress: CHARTER BUS FIRM IS SCAPEGOAT IN GIRLS’ SOCCER TEAM DEATHS. Shame, guilt, and confusion linger as your personhood, your life and its trajectory become inextricable from a moment in time. How that moment in time cyclones the future around it, loops your sense of possibility around itself. This is how you become a person with no other past.
10.
Just yesterday I got asked the question again. Eyes widened at the skin graft on my shoulder. Eighteen years later, I still don’t have a good answer. My response: “I was in a bus accident in high school.” True? Yes. Satisfying? Hardly.
