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But after we left the fast food place, we didn't take the usual turn toward the ice cream place, or the park, or even the beach.
No, in fact, our father drove us somewhere I had never seen before, an area where the houses were towering buildings filled with cramped apartments, where there were a lot of boarded-up buildings and homeless people pushing carts around.
I remember my stomach getting tight when we'd parked in front of a building, and our father got out.
"You stay here. Keep an eye on your brother," he demanded, looking at me.
Then he was gone, walking into the building while looking side to side, almost as if he was worried about being seen there, being recognized.
"I want to go home," Jones whined for the third time since we'd parked, kicking his feet against the driver's seat as I tried to make a game out of naming things we could see that were blue, then green, then yellow, until I ran out of colors.
When our father finally emerged, he seemed even more tense than when he'd gone in, his movements oddly twitchy, foreign.
He got back in the car, saying nothing to us as he checked and re-checked his mirrors, then finally drove us out of the bad part of town.
We got our ice cream.
But Jones had been in a bad mood about having to wait, then threw a fit when they didn't have the caramel crunch ice cream he wanted, tossing the ice cream cone our father bought him onto the floor of the car.
"You fucking—" our father snapped, reaching a bit frantically into his chest pocket, producing a small plastic bag with white powder in it, tapping it onto the center console, rolling up some money, and snorting it up his nose.
At twelve, I didn't know everything there was to know about drugs, but I knew what he was doing was something I'd seen on a video about drugs at school.
I knew drugs were bad and that you were never supposed to drive if you took them.
But he was my father.
And I was young.
What was I supposed to do?
So I said nothing, did nothing.
And he got out, cleaned up the backseat, got Jones a new ice cream, then got in and started driving us home.
I remembered feeling relieved because we weren't far from home, and once we got there, I could get away from him and try to forget about the white powder, about what that meant.
But then a squirrel ran out in the middle of the road, and instead of stopping, my father jolted the wheel hard, too hard, and the car started to flip.
I remembered screaming. My father's. Jones's.
And then... nothing.
Complete blackness.
I woke up with a jackhammering pain across my entire skull, something so intense that I cried out immediately, before my eyes even opened up fully.
But when I finally could force my eyelids open, I could see the mangled car, the broken glass.
My head was slammed against the window at my side, the airbag in front of me deflated.
"Dad. Dad. Daddy!" I shrieked when I looked over, finding him similarly butted up to his window, blood trickling down his face onto the collar of his shirt. And the steering wheel, the steering wheel was pinning his legs. "Dad!" I shrieked again, reaching over, shoving his arm, but he didn't wake up.
"Jones?" I called, turning my head. Too fast. Making my vision white out as the pain shot through my head.
He wasn't in his seat, had seemed to slip under his seatbelt and was huddled on the floor.
"Jones!" I screamed, trying to reach him but my shoulder refused to move. "Jones! Daddy? Dad? Help!" I screamed. "Help!" I tried again, at the top of my lungs.
That was the only sound for what felt like an eternity.
The sound of my own voice screaming as I frantically tried to get my locked seatbelt off, slip under, get free, my chest feeling tight, not able to pull in a proper breath.
"Help," I whimpered, closing my eyes, tears coming hot and heavy.
I was only half-conscious when I was pulled out through the busted window, when I was loaded onto a stretcher and closed into an ambulance.
And when I got to the hospital, they gave me something to stop all the pain, to send me back to blissful unconsciousness.
"I woke up to the doctors telling me my mom would be right back, that she was checking on my brother," I told Huck, taking a bite of pizza.
"How was he?"
"Concussion only," I said. "thank God. My step-father had lost use of his legs. For a while, there."
"And you?"
"I had a traumatic brain injury, had needed surgery to stop a bleed."
"That's why you have the seizures," he assumed. "From the accident?"
"Yeah. They were worse back then when my brain was still healing. But yeah."
