When it came to treating victims, every kid at the ambulance had at least one call that remained indelible-maybe a multi-car crash on the highway, maybe a cardiac arrest or a house fire or a head injury-that introduced us to a world of grief we hadn’t known before, that took us behind the veil of our town. When the grandfather of the boy next door keeled over on the lawn, I lined my palm up on his sternum as I’d been instructed-and had succeeded at so many times before on the dummies-and with the first thrust felt three real ribs give way. Repetition made for perfection on those fake bodies, though reality, I would soon find to my dismay, could be different. Initially, however, I remember a lot of time spent blowing air into those manikins, real lip to synthetic lip, thrusting palms down on fake chests loaded with thick springs, and, at the end, paper readouts issuing from a slot at the ribs, a ticker showing the peaks and valleys that gauged one’s efficacy at giving CPR. And how guilty I'd feel for years after about it. In the zero-sum of that moment, it didn't even occur to me what the inverse meant: Let it be Seger. There, we were taught to regard each new accident with a sort of dispassionate intensity, no matter how extreme the circumstance. And our precious weekends were soon filled with fund-raising, chores at headquarters, and more training courses, including hours logged at a local emergency room. The rest of the time we carried pagers-in school, at practice, wherever. to midnight, we acted as first responders, clad in our "whites" (a curious uniform choice for those dealing in blood) and orange fluorescent jackets. On every night of the week, including weekends, holidays, and religious days, a crew was "on duty" at the rickety station, where we’d run through checklists, train, sit and do homework, or just flirt and shoot the shit, pimply, hormonal teenagers that we were. Still, there were those in town who wondered: Could a 16-year-old EMT (someone who had only recently learned to drive a car) really help at, let alone handle, the worst accidents? It became our job, then, to be overdiligent and professional so as not to let anyone down. The Jaws of Life were required to cut the bodies from the wreckage. The crash drove the engine through the dashboard. On a stretch of road by one of the town’s country clubs, Jax lost control of his car, hit a telephone pole, and skidded a hundred feet into a tree. Riding with Jax was Seger, and with Flynn, Xavier. There were two cars, belonging to Jax* and Flynn, driving from the beach north up through town to someone’s parentless house. Mine was spent with my girlfriend, so I missed the pre-party and then the ride to the real party. For us seniors, it was a free night with no school the next day, a holiday from everything, including our cursed college apps. When the news reached my family that night, in that orbit of calls, my parents, perhaps like other parents among our friends, presumed their child might have been in the car, which wasn’t the case, though might have been, had I made a different decision earlier that evening. Given our own shock, we couldn’t imagine the parents of the victims hearing those first words: There’s been an accident. It left one friend injured and one dead, and for a while afterward the whole thing seemed so surreal and impossible that all we could do-friends, family, anyone connected but not in the accident itself-was try to re-create the simultaneities of that evening, the first person at the scene, the shock of the couple at the nearby house from which the call was made for an ambulance, and then: who called whom, and who was where when they heard. The accident-the first one-occurred on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving of my senior year in high school.
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