I had a weird feeling coming from beneath me; everything was off and many obstacles were getting in the way of things. It could be said it was mental and literal as we were rushed like every other morning.

My sister—Macy—got her morning coffee topped off with the Starbucks creamer she loves dearly. While my mom was over by the stove making avocado toast and scrambled eggs to be sprinkled on top, my other sister—Marie—just sat on the sofa on her phone while she waited for the school bus to arrive. While getting aboard our little family car, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck tensing up.

I was re-adjusting my seating at the morning stopping light. There were no other cars or passengers in sight. It was only the three of us: mom, Macy, and me. We turned right onto the next street as my mom and I were talking to one another, and Macy sat in her seat sucked into her phone. 

Mom and I were having a conversation about my boyfriend and how our one month was going to be coming up in about two weeks. She turned her head to look at me, seeing the smile spread across my face. 

She was holding her hot cup of coffee in one hand and the other on the steering wheel. I took one look out of the window to break eye contact and saw a deer sprinting straight at us from inside the tall grass right by the YMCA.

“DEER!”

I screamed. My mom sped up, but the deer was halfway through the road. Within seconds, the deer jumped and hit the window in the back of our black van, trying to jump over our car. The glass shattered instantly, flying into the car.

I looked back anxiously, making sure the deer didn’t hit the part of the car where Macy was sitting. She burst into tears, screaming and traumatized from the incident. I felt my face heat up and tears rushing down my face; I couldn’t help it. We were petrified. If mom hadn’t sped up, Macy would’ve gotten hit, or we would’ve.

Mom pulled over thinking about what to do next. 

“Call your dad,” she said.

Macy grabbed her phone and called dad. She was uncontrollably shaking and all she could say was deer, nothing else, just deer. She was frozen still in her seat and couldn’t explain what was going on, so my mom grabbed the phone and explained. 

We turn around and drive back; we hadn’t made it far to school and were right by our house. The second we got home, I called my friends to tell them what had happened. 

My dad comes into my room after coming home from work. He told me that we are going to have to drive to school in the same car that we had just been hit in.

The glass was still shattered in the back, but we had to get to school and had no other car because our other one was in the shop getting fixed. 

Everything happened so quickly, and for the rest of that day, I wasn’t able to focus at school. The only thing I could think about was that huge deer with antlers on the top of its head along with the billion pieces of crushed glass that flew in. It was traumatizing.