If I Stay: 7:09 a.m.–10:12 a.m.

“I’ve switched him to decaf,” Mom volleys back. “He’s just naturally exuberant.”

Just like with Shooting Star’s meteoric rise, my admission to Juilliard—if it happens—will create certain complications, or, more accurately, would compound the complications that have already cropped up in the last few months.

I’d actually rather go off with my family. This is another thing you don’t advertise about yourself, but Adam gets that, too.

“School’s out forever,” Teddy sings over Dad’s protests.
“Ever the optimist,” I say.

She’d pestered, cajoled, and sometimes yelled at Dad to get a license, but he’d insisted that he preferred pedal power.

“Neither sleet nor rain nor a half inch of snow will compel me to dress like a lumberjack.”

As usual, there is a battle for stereo dominance.

I want the classical-music station, but recognizing that I’m the only classical fan in the family, I am willing to compromise with Shooting Star.

The chocolate-chip pancakes dowsed in syrup have clearly only enhanced his hyper excitement.

I lean my head against the car window, watching the scenery zip by, a tableau of dark green fir trees dotted with snow, wispy strands of white fog, and heavy gray storm clouds up above.

I hear the first few bars of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 3, which was the very piece I was supposed to be working on this afternoon. It feels like some kind of cosmic coincidence.

I concentrate on the notes, imagining myself playing, feeling grateful for this chance to practice, happy to be in a warm car with my sonata and my family.

The car is eviscerated.

The impact of a four-ton pickup truck going sixty miles an hour plowing straight into the passenger side had the force of an atom bomb.

It flipped the chassis, bouncing it across the road and ripped the engine apart as if it were no stronger than a spiderweb.

A symphony of grinding, a chorus of popping, an aria of exploding, and finally, the sad clapping of hard metal cutting into soft trees.

“Dad,” I call, but as I walk toward him, the pavement grows slick and there are gray chunks of what looks like cauliflower.

And it is the sight of her looking like some preposterous zombie that sends a hummingbird of panic ricocheting through me.

I need to find Teddy! Where is he? I spin around, suddenly frantic, like the time I lost him for ten minutes at the grocery store.

One of my legs is askew, the skin and muscle peeled away so that I can see white streaks of bone.

I stare down at my wrist, the one that looks fine, untouched by blood and gore, and I pinch as hard as I can.

“Immediate cardiac arrest,” he says. “When your heart can’t pump blood, you don’t really bleed. You seep."

So instead I think how fitting it is that she was hit first, that she was the one to buffer us from the blow.

The me who is lying on the edge of the road, my leg hanging down into the gulley, is surrounded by a team of men and women who are performing frantic ablutions over me and plugging my veins with I do not know what.

That and the fact my body seems to be completely numb, though to look at me, at the leg that the 60 mph asphalt exfoliant has pared down to the bone, I should be in agony.

It was a fluke that they even had a cello; they’re very expensive and fragile.

Sometimes I did feel like I came from a different tribe. I was not like my outgoing, ironic dad or my tough-chick mom.

Teddy was just six months old at that point, but it was already clear that he had more personality, more verve, than I ever would.

I was still scared, but it was somehow comforting to think that maybe stage fright was a trait I’d inherited from Dad; I wasn’t just some foundling, after all.

They would not have loaded me on this helicopter, would not be flying me across the lush forests if I were dead.

He played in Seattle last night but he’s always so full of adrenaline after a gig, and driving helps him to come down.

Still, his attention baffled me.

Cool in that he played in a band with people who went to the college in town. Cool in that he had his own rockery style, procured from thrift stores and garage sales, not from Urban Outfitters knockoffs.

I had friends and a best friend to sit with at lunch. I had other good friends at the music conservatory camp I went to in the summer.

By Friday afternoon, though, I was more jittery than when I’d inadvertently drunk a whole pot of Dad’s tar-strong coffee while studying for finals last winter.

It was the uncertainty. What was this, exactly? A date? A friendly favor? An act of charity? I didn’t like being on soft ground any more than I liked fumbling my way through a new movement.

In the pictures of her and Dad from the early days, she looked like a cross between a 1930s siren and a biker chick, with her pixie haircut, her big blue eyes coated in kohl eyeliner, and her rail-thin body always ensconced in some sexy getup, like a lacy vintage camisole paired with skintight leather pants.

When Adam showed up in a sharkskin suit and Creepers (an ensemble that wholly impressed Dad), I realized that this really was a date.

“I’m obsessed with music and even I don’t get transported like you do.”

And it took me by surprise how much I wanted to be kissed by him, to realize that I’d thought about it so often that I’d memorized the exact shape of his lips, that I’d imagined running my finger down the cleft of his chin.