1. A Rolling Boy A ROLLING BOY
The silver car tumbles end-over-end five times before resting on its roof at the crossroads. A traffic light shifts from red to green, detecting nothing wrong with this arrival, and the headlights glare through the rain, and the wheels keep spinning, flicking their spray at no one in the empty street.

All is quiet. A kebab shop, yellow haze. The stark whiteness of a liquor store and the spatter of residential windows glinting like fairy lights. Faces peeking through the curtains. There’s a scent of sparks from the fireworks behind the terraces, and from the car’s roof where it scraped along the road.

The car sits steaming in the cold, the upside-down world reflected in the wet tarmac. It was the wetness that made the tires slip—tires, illegal, too bald, beige treads—and it was the Jägermeister he’d brought to the party, and the pills still fizzing inside his stomach.

The car’s wheels begin to slow, like a worn-out clock.

Nothing moves but everything speaks—the car speaks, the signs speak. It all speaks, so quiet, so gentle—the whisper of a drain, the birdsong of distant sirens. All of it waits.

They arrive, an ambulance and two police response vehicles, flashing blue-red-blue. The traffic light does its best to recite what happened in its light-language, but none of them listens. The paramedics scurry to the scene, urgent and cautious and tired from the long night. The police chatter like budgies into their radios. They await instruction.

But no instruction comes, for the world slows, slows.

It slows and slows and slows to an imperceptible crawl.

Paramedics with their steely faces masking worried ones—paramedics caught mid-stride, the flaps of their hi-vis jackets frozen behind them in the frigid air. The police officer trapped in a half blink. The rain suspended in space, a billion glass beads reflecting the scene.

I pass between all of it. Through these hanging raindrops, through the emergency team, and I relish the weight of my body, and the crunch of windshield glass beneath my bare feet. I tread toward the car, over these fragments scattered like the diamonds of some careless jeweler. A sign reading 30 leans mockingly beside the driver-side door.

And when the driver, twenty-nine, the man who is still a boy, Samuel Preston, sees me through the side window, his eyes are wide. His eyes are wide because he knows who I am and why I’ve come. Everyone knows, at the end.

He’d planned on proposing to his girlfriend this New Year’s Day. Now he’s sprawled on the upside-down ceiling, all crushed and crooked, strapped awkwardly in his upside-down seat, legs mangled somewhere above the steering wheel. Arms broken. Neck broken, the column cracked, its wires kinked.

I kneel down, open his door.

His friends are unconscious—one in the front passenger seat, one in the back. Samuel tries to move, but I hush him. I lean into the car, holding his head on my lap, and I stroke his hair, and he’s scared, and I tell him it’s okay now. It’s okay.

He tells me he can’t move, and I say I know, it’s okay. He says, is this it? This can’t be it, can it? And I don’t answer because he already knows. And when he asks if this has to happen, I say yes, it’s okay. Close your eyes now. He does, and he winces from the pain. I whisper some things. I tell him things a person should only know right before they die. And the pain rushes away, and he relaxes, caught in this motionless double-world where the light flickers from blue to red, back to blue, minutes in between.

He asks, will you tell my girlfriend what happened?

I can’t, I tell him. But someone will.

She’s pregnant.

I know. It’s okay. Close your eyes.

Oh god, he says. Oh god, I’m gonna miss it. I’m gonna miss everything.

Samuel Preston stares through the shattered windshield. For eight seconds, he’s still. Then he slips the bracelet from his topsy-turvy rearview mirror—wooden beads on elastic. He holds them to his lips as he cries, and he smells them, and he remembers. His face is tight and brave. And we rest in the stillness, just he and I, silent, and the smell of the bracelet is the last thing Samuel Preston ever knows.

Samuel Preston—29 years, 5 months, 4 days