You know...

Today was a little special. My parents had to catch a flight out to Texas, so I had to skip my early morning class to take my sister to her school. I was already off my game—I slammed on breaks for a yellow light, then went ahead for the next yellow light and wound up caught in the middle of the intersection. By the time I got back to school, I was pretty flustered, and I was confused by over what entrance to use when coming to school late. But then, the worst possible scenario unfolded.
I’m still pretty new at driving and parking is one of the hardest things for me. Usually, I show up before any cars park around me, and I have the freedom to back out and pull back in as desired. But now, it was right before school. People swarmed the parking lot, and there were cars on either side of my space. The clock was ticking; I didn’t want to be any later than I had to be. Carefully, I began to inch into my spot.
I stopped. The front corner of my car was dangerously close to the back corner of the car next to me. I had to decide—did I have room to pull in? Or should I back out and try again. People were walking around behind me. I remembered practicing parking with my parents, and how I would back and out re-park only to have my dad tell me there had been enough room to pull in the first time. I loosened my foot from the breaks.
The sickening sound of metal scraping against metal, and the little lurch that accompanied it. I’d felt it once before when I scraped the side of my car against the garage. A rare stream of profanity spilled out as I backed out and pulled in. I looked around. Someone’s little brother was watching and laughing. But it didn’t seem that anyone else had noticed. I jumped out of my car with another recitation of lewd prose and inspected the back of the other car. None of my blue paint had come off on it. Wait, was that a dent? No, it was part of the car’s design—I checked it with the other side. Some of his paint had rubbed on the corner of my car, but I didn’t care about that. From my panicked inspection, I found not a scratch. Was this a miracle? I looked around to make sure no one had seen, then hurried to class.
Someone had seen. And that someone told everybody, even drawing diagrams of what happened on the board for people to see. By third period, I was in class with my victim. I already knew the rumor had spread, and I braced myself for the worst.
He walked into class a few minutes late along with a couple of his friends.
“I heard about what happened to my car,” he said to me calmly.
I’m an idiot. The first thing I blurted out was,
I didn’t see a scratch!”
“There’s a pretty good scratch,” he smiled thinly at me.
On instinct, I started to spit out a thousand “I’m sorry!”s and “I’ll pay for it!”s. I felt like a coward for not telling him upfront, when we were in homeroom together. I had to be caught.
We were trying to talk about it while my teacher attempted to start class. He wanted to give us some washed-out Christmas sermon, and I figured the car situation was a little more important. I kept talking, but then the teacher addressed my victim and his friends.
“You guys were five minutes late to class,” he accused, even though he’s the one who usually shows up late.
“We were looking at my car,” my victim explained.
“Why would you do that?” my teacher asked in a condescending tone.
“Because I got hit.”
I scraped the tip of my pencil along the underside of my forearm in an act of mock-punishment.
“That’s no excuse for being late to my class,” the teacher retorted, the picture of sympathy and understanding. He told the three that were late to stand up. “Wall sits, five minutes.”
“What?” the boys looked at him, unsure of whether he was serious.
“Yeah, you’re going to wall sit for the length of time you missed my class.”
“I’d rather just take a tardy,” my victim said as he began to sit back down.
“It’s wall sits or a pink slip,” the teacher said, referencing the disciplinary forms used at my school. One pink slip equals one detention.
The class disintegrated into a muddle of chaos and protest.
“How can you get a pink slip for being tardy?!” my friend shouted over the other voices.
The teacher looked at her with a cocky tilt of the chin,
“For skipping class.”
We all stared in disbelief, and I in horror, as the three boys served a wall sitting sentence for the accident I caused. The last thing my victim said to me before assuming the position was,
“We’ll talk about it later.”
Someone turned the car situation into a prayer request, and I could feel the acids in my stomach churning as my folly was prayed over. Then, the teacher began his sermon out of Luke 2, and I started writing this blog on paper while thin of creative ways to kill myself.
The teacher ran out of things to say and gave us the last ten minutes of class to ourselves. I hurried over to my victim’s desk with another outpouring of apologies and promises to pay for it.
He stammered as he tried to downplay the situation. He showed me a gut-wrenching picture he’d taken with his iPhone—I’d ripped ribbons of paint somewhere off of his car, even though I’d never seen it earlier that morning. It looked awful.
I only half-heard his words. He said something to the effect,
“It’s no big deal. I’ll take it to the shop.”
“Send me the bill,” I told him, and the conversation ended there. I shuffled back to my desk and sank into the chair.
For the rest of the day, this guy who’s never looked twice at me stared at me every time we passed in the hall. He’d been super nice when we’d talked about it in third period, if not a little uncomfortable. But, one of my friends went with him to lunch, and came back complaining about what a “douche bag” he was being. I asked her if he’d said anything about me, and she looked like she was about to affirm my worst fear, when my other friend stopped her. She had the best intentions of protecting me from hurt feelings, but it only made me languish all the more.
It’s not the cost of repair that bothers me at all. In fact, when I called my dad about it, I was surprised when he said he’d foot the bill. It’s the social humiliation of it all that kills me. Everyone was talking about it this morning, and the guys who normally joke with all the girls were unusually quiet around me. I can hear the conversations they have with each other in my head,
“Dude, the weird chick hit __________’s car, and she didn’t even tell him! What a *insert your favorite expletive here*!”
Thank God it’s Friday, and that exams are coming up, and that people are too distracted to worry about our less-than-fender-bender for very long.
Still, I know I won’t be able to live it down until my victim’s car is fixed for whatever invisible damage it may have (my same friend who tried to protect me against the rumors inspected his car and claimed she couldn’t find a single scratch). Then, hopefully, I can fade back into invisibility.