I was lying peacefully in bed, waiting for sleep to take me away when I was startled by a series of muffled bangs. As a scared ten-year-old, I tiptoed into my mother’s room. I stood in her bedroom doorway out of breath and realized that she was wondering what was happening as well. When I looked out of my mom’s bedroom window, I noticed that my family’s silver minivan was on the opposite side of our two-car driveway. I told her what I saw and she ran down the stairs to investigate. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, she told me to call my father, who was working late that night. As I dialed my father’s number, she went outside to examine the situation. I called my father and told him that I had no idea what was going on, but he needed to get here because something was wrong.

After I hung up, I went outside and saw a white BMW on our front porch, as well as three teenagers running across the street to hide what I assume to be alcohol behind my neighbors’ fence. The one who claimed he was the driver of the car that was parked on our porch came out of the car disheveled. Before I knew it there were police, neighbors, and even the teen driver’s parents in our front yard. Still standing in my pajamas by our front door, I watched intently to find out how a car ended up parked on our tiny suburban porch.

Finally, my mom came to me and told me that the two cars were racing down the residential street side-by-side when one driver lost control. He crashed into the side of his friend’s car and then proceeded to run over our neighbor’s corner fence. After going over the fence, the car somehow became airborne, and upon landing, the nose of the car slammed into the grass and then crashed into my mother’s minivan and straight onto our porch. I looked around as I imagined the car doing a nosedive in our next-door neighbor’s front lawn. I stared at the car on the porch, whose backside was touching the side of our house, only inches from my kitchen table on the other side of the wall. I began thinking of all the different scenarios that could have happened if only little details were changed. What if the neighbor’s fence wasn’t there to slow the car down? Would the car have landed in our kitchen? What if someone was in our kitchen at that moment?

At the early hours of the morning the mess was cleaned up, and my family was eventually able to go back inside our house. Luckily, no one was injured in the accident, and there were minimal damages to both my neighbor’s property and ours. I was too nervous to sleep in my own bed that night, so I climbed into bed with my seven-year-old sister who slept through the entire event. The last thing I remember that night before I fell asleep was how peaceful the crickets sounded outside of her bedroom window.