I turned the volume or my car stereo down as some indie song played from a cassette gifted to my best friend, Becca, from her boyfriend. She looked at me with her jaw dropped, faking an angry face.

“This one is actually good!” She proclaimed, cranking the volume once again. “Listen, Jared says the lyrics are about an apocalypse or something.”

“You don’t have to pretend you like it just because he likes it,” I reminded her. But she was already sticking her head out the window again into the late-May evening atmosphere. She let her hair billow in the wind as if she hadn’t a care in the world. This boyfriend was lasting slightly longer than the rest, but I still didn’t completely approve. I would never tell her that, though.

Becca and I continued down the highway dusted with red soil, moving as fast as my old Subaru Forester could carry us. It capped around 60 miles an hour. She curled up in her ginormous jacket in my passenger seat, not a care in the world. The purple plateaus on the side of the road came nearer, then whizzed by, then disappeared into the horizon. One after the next and the next and the next. I wondered how many there were until suddenly--

In all my paranoid thoughts of ending up in a car accident, my fear was always the helplessness I would feel in the silence following the chaos. But never the radio still blaring an ironically upbeat song as my best friend lay lifeless next to me in the passenger seat. She hated this song.