So I have absolutely no idea why the hell I say, “I’m in love with you, Henna.”
She smiles a bit at that, looking as surprised at the smile as I am at my words.
“Mikey,” she says. “I don’t think you are.”
Then she screams at the deer that’s jumped out of the trees and onto the road in front of us and there’s no time to even brake and we hit it, taking its legs out from under it, which everyone in these parts knows is the worst thing that can happen when you hit a deer, because now six hundred pounds of panicked, dying, unstoppable deer carcass are flying right up the hood, straight at us–
This is how people die, I think, in that instant–
And Henna and I are both ducking to the middle of the seat and our heads hit together with a funny coconut sound and glass is breaking and metal is bending above us (which is so loud, so loud) and something hits me hard in the cheek and I hear Henna make a soft “oof” sound and her body shifts away from mine and it’s only now I realize the car is still moving and I reach over her to try to steer but the steering wheel has snapped off and I feel us veering and tipping and we come to a slamming stop and the passenger ’s side air bag goes off so ferociously I actually feel my nose breaking.
Then it’s quiet.
“Henna?” I say. “Henna!”
Her voice, when it comes, is deep and guttural, pain-filled. “My arm,” is all she says.
I pull myself up to an almost-sitting position. Rain hits my face. The roof of Henna’s car is peeled nearly all the way off. We’re pushed up against the dashboard and I turn my neck (ow, ow, ow) to see that the deer somehow went all the way over the top of us, which is some kind of freaking miracle. Its bulk takes up the entire back seat, its neck broken, its dead weight pressing against us. The engine stopped when we drove into what I now see is a ditch, and I can hear movement all around us.
I must be in shock. Dozens of deer, dozens of them, are leaping out of the forest on our side of the road, crossing it, and disappearing through the treeline on the other side.
They keep coming. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unreal.
“Mikey?” Henna says, her eyes wide with fear and the same shock as she sees what I’m seeing. Her left arm looks awful, twisted in a horrible way, so I take her right hand and hold it, as the impossible flood of deer spills around us like we’re an island in a river.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” the big Latino intern Dr “Call Me Steve” says, as he sews up my right cheek, “you’re going to look pretty rough for a while.”
“He hasn’t taken his graduation pictures yet,” Mel says, standing to the side of the gurney, arms crossed, and so comprehensively not flirting with Call Me Steve that, as flirtations go, it’s working really well.
“Then you’re going to have two black eyes in them, I’m afraid,” Steve tells me. “I’ve reset your nose” – he glances at Mel with a smile – “which is turning out to be a specialty of mine” – he looks back to me – “so it should be close to its normal shape within a week or so, but I’d keep the bracing bandage on for a week more after that, otherwise you won’t be able to breathe. And as for this” – he puts a rectangle of gauze over my stitches – “I think you were probably hit by an antler or hoof rather than glass. It’s a raggedy tear. I did my very, very best, but you are going to have a scar, my friend.”