“Ha! Very funny, I get it, Pretty Woman. Really, what’s your name?” She unlocked the door and gave me a little mischievious smile, baiting me again. “Ok, I’ll bite, how do I get to know your name? Spin some straw into gold?”

“That might be a start. But what makes you think I’m after your money? I’m the one taking you out, remember?” She opened the driver’s side and got in without waiting for a response. I peered through the passenger-side window, she was smiling that I’m-having-the-time-of-my-life-pestering-you smile I used to see on my sister’s face when she and her friends would make my little brother and I play “house” with them. I always lost in a game I never thought possible to have sides.

I opened the door and climbed in, taking a sideways glance as I buckled my safety belt. She turned toward the business at hand and started the car, heading down University toward Higgins two blocks before turning on the car’s headlights. “Don’t you wear your seat belt? It could save your life someday.”

“All right, Mother Theresa, I’ll wear it if you say please.” But she was already reaching for the belt and had clipped in the harness before I could rally my response. We were crossing University and Elm, not the most evil of streets, but certainly up there with Death Row in my opinion. Two years later we would be in a forty-mile-an-hour-blind-side T-bone in that intersection. Sandi would break two ribs on the steering column, chip her front tooth on her ulna and I would walk away without a scratch.

We would both be wearing our seat belts, but the driver of the car who would run the stop sign wouldn’t be quite so lucky.

He survived, but lost his left arm and most of the function of his left leg not to mention his teaching job at Hellgate High because of the brain trauma he’d suffered. Sandi was ticketed with speeding, forty in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. The police officer handed me the ticket as I watched her and the teacher being wheeled into the back of separate ambulances. The cop had asked that I deliver it when she was feeling better. I never did. I paid the fifteen-dollar fine and asked the judge if he could keep it from her record. He did, but not on my account, she was only doing thirty-six and the judge said it was only a matter of principle that he didn’t dismiss the ticket altogether. I was free to go….

(This is just an excerpt from a detailed and fast moving adventure, just to give you a taste… We have hopes someday of all contributing a chapter to the story.)