Quentin was lying in his bed as his alarm clock blared its incessant racket as a reminder it’s time to rise and shine. That it was yet again time to climb into his car and attend yet another hellish day as a high school senior. This day though would be much different; today would be the day Quentin Cornelius Jackson, age 17, died.

Quentin ran across his bedroom and grabbed his black backpack out of the closet. His flung open the door and sprinted to his car parked out on the street in front of his family’s townhouse. The 12 degree air slapped Quentin in the face and the wind burned as it tore into the holes of his sweater. His Mother had promised to buy him a new jacket for Christmas this year but she had gotten drunk a month prior and planned a huge week long vacation for two in the Bahamas. The two included his Mom and Bryan, her boyfriend, not Quentin… and well to get her money back required an inordinate amount of work. That actually made a lot of sense though, his Mom has been working a lot recently and she really needs that time away to prepare for 2014. Or as his Mom put it,
“F*** son, I got you a ton of s*** last year do I not get a year for my fun?”
She was right, last year she had gotten Quentin three randomly selected books snatched from the shelves of the local Salvation Army. One of those books was, The Adventured of Huckleberry Finn, which quickly grew into one of Quentin’s favorites. “IT’S BALMY OUT TODAY,” he cried out as he walked over to his Toyota 87’ Camry and flung his backpack into the backseat. “ I MAY AS WELL BE BARBEQUEIN IN SOME SHORTS RIGHT NOW” It was an old coping mechanism his dad taught him when he was a kid. His cold hands touched the steering wheels and the familiar sting of the frozen seat took hold. Maybe it was the lack of sleep the night before, the numbness in his hands, or just general bad driving but he went to a little too fast over just too tight a corner and plummeted over a much more than too tall cliff. The metal cried as it smashed against the rock. The car broke in two as it finally reached the bottom of the cliff. The wreck was now lying in the middle of a jogging path with a pool of gasoline, blood, and motor oil slowly pooling around the shell of the thing formerly known as a car. The biggest problem with old cars is that their batteries have the most awful habit of shooting sparks at the seemingly least convenient of times. Such as after a two-ton hunk of metal has fallen off a cliff, fallen a couple hundred feet, and its highly flammable fuel was gushing out like an open cut. The explosion wasn’t like in the movies; it was much less dramatic than that. More like a small burp from a dragon after it ate some chipotle rather than a ball of fire shooting into the sky. The police didn’t arrive at the seen until a full three days later when a hiker couldn’t figure out why there was a burnt out shell of a car in the middle of a hiking path and asked the local Park Ranger if this was some new exhibit to appeal to people looking for a place to do Parkour…it was not. The coroner told Mrs. Jackson that the body had been so severely crushed and burnt that there really wasn’t a way to determine what was Quentin and what wasn’t. This was not a very considerate thing to say and the cuts across his face and neck now attested to this fact. Quentin’s funereal was truly an awful sight to see. It was simply Quentin’s Mom and her boyfriend crying and doing the regular routine of screaming up to God and heavens “Why did you take him from us”. Quentin’s friends were never actually informed of the car incident and didn’t find out he was dead until they stood outside his house a month later banging on the front door trying to find out why he wasn’t in school. Quentin felt disappointed and hurt with the funereal and couldn’t figure out why his mom wouldn’t want to invite more people. He felt this way because he was standing above her. Looking down and judging her, something he had never done while he had been alive.
“Ready to go babe?” Quentin’s girlfriend asked.
“Yeah totally, lets get out of here”
Quentin turned around and climbed into her Subaru. He opened up the passbook in his the front pocket of his black backpack. It read, “Quinton Andrews DOB: December 11th, 1992 Born: Toronto, Ontario Canada”. He looked into the rest of his bag at the mass of forged documents holding the life details of Quentin Andrews and he took a deep sigh,
“I’m dead,” he said. “I’m finally dead”.
“It’s a real shame about that hiker though”
“Who the f*** is out jogging that early? How the f*** was I supposed to know to watch out for him?”
The long cuts across Quentin’s wrists were supposed to have been enough blood to prove he had been in the car at the time.
“You can’t hold yourself responsible for that. At the very least the Universe put him there because it wants you to be somewhere new, y’know?”
“Can you just drive?”
And with that Quentin began a completely new chapter in his life.