Is was a cold Christmas Eve night in the desert of Arizona. I know Arizona normally isn't cold but tonight it was. it was the kind of cold that sneaks through your skin and squeezes through your bones like an cold dagger. Although our parents told us not to drive The quads with more than two people my cousin, Lauren, insisted on driving my sister, Kenzy, and I down the snake-like dirt road to the guest house we would be staying at. It was late. I was tired. The only thing that lit the road was the starlight that danced around the cactus and sage brush, which may or may not have been a result of the sleep I was just then rubbing out of my eyes. We put the two helmets on Kenzy and Lauren, and decided that putting me in the middle would have to suffice. Lauren started up the engine and instantly punched the gas all the way.

I clutched my cousin with all of my strength all the while yelling at her slow down, but she was in an entirely different world. She started screaming in excitement as a bend approached us up ahead. My arms became weak and fell from the shoulders of my cousin as the turn loomed ahead. She continued charging the turn with all the force of the four wheeler, and continued screaming. I was enticed by the thought of jumping off the vehicle, but I couldn't bring my body to physically do it, so I just awaited the impact of the quad into the ditch. The next thing I knew was soaring through the air. My body seemed to be rebelling against my mind by not doing what it said, and for some reason I stayed completely blind throughout this entire "out of body" experience. I heard a huge crash to right of my body and began to anticipate the thud of my body, but as I felt the dirt beneath me I quickly realized that my body had already slammed into the ground. My eyes began to fill with dirt and any rock small enough to work its way beneath my eyelash. For a moment everything was silent. It was the type of silence that always follows an event of great intensity. that was when I blacked out. My black out was followed by a weird dream that I was being drowned and crushed by an endless pile of tumbleweeds that seemed to suffocate and stab me. My mind wandered to think as to how it was possible for this to happen. My answer came when I awoke gasping for breath. I stood up and rubbed most of the dirt out of my eyes to allow myself to see. Then I stood up to see that the massive quad on top of my sister who was stuck underneath. By the time I acknowledged this my mom was run down the hill screaming, "Lauren!! YOU! YOU! IDIOT!" I Stood there in a daze as my mom and uncles struggled to lifted the four wheeler off of Kenzy. When she was released from underneath the vehicle it was obvious that the helmet had saved her life. It had six inch crack along the top part of it as if a two ton sledge hammer struck it. The broken cactus and shattered tumbleweeds stay there to this day to show us that our parents know better than us, and that most of the time we are the ones wrong.