Maybe We Should Have Listened
By: Sarah Mitzel
October 6, 2000
“Time check…Good, it’s only 7:45”, I say to myself as I put the finishing touches
on my hair and I run out of the house. I think I hear my mom yell something along the
lines of be careful and grab the cell phone, but I don’t care. I turn the radio up and head
for school. I arrive with a big grin on my face because I am excited. One, I only have
one hour of class, Marching Band. Secondly, I am going to Fargo with Jill.
We rush through our street routine and quickly put our horns away. Everyone
around us makes comments about how we’re rushing off so fast, be we don’t answer
them because we are on a mission. As we are walking to Jill’s 80-something Mustang,
she starts telling me about what her parents told her before she left. “Jill, don’t forget the
cell phone and check the oil!”
We head over to Stop-N-Go and gas up for our trip. $10.03 exactly, a classic over
pump. And we’re off! A good tune came on and we are ready to shop. Jill and I got to
talking about boys and life in general. She was letting me in on all these neat little
secrets, like whom she liked and so forth. In return, I told her some too.
We continue to chat and sing and we notice a smell. “It can’t be my car!” Jill
exclaims. The smell keeps on.
“Jill, something can’t be right. Oh my gosh, the car is smoking!” Jill starts to
panic. I have her pull over at the next exit, which happens to be the Kindred exit, and her
car dies.
We slowly turn and look at each other, with horrified looks on our faces. Neither
of us really knows what to do. Without saying a word, we start to get out of the car. We
walk to the front and start talking frantically. We finally decide we should look under the
hood in hopes that a cute boy would drive by and save us. Well, that idea was quickly
shot down when we couldn’t get the hood open.
“Boy, do I feel pretty stupid,” I say.
“Yeah, me too.”
We then looked down and noticed green liquid running all over the road. We
looked at each other and said, “I hope it’s not oil!”
We are just standing there in tears when a nice guy in an Ag-Air truck pulls up.
He offers us his cell phone and we call Ryan. We got the answering machine. “Of
course he’s not home,” I thought to myself.
I hand the phone over to Jill and we both know who she has to call even though
neither one of us wants to admit it…. her mom. They talked for a while and the
conscientious was to wait in the Mustang for her to come and get us.
“Oh great,” we thought to ourselves as we got back into the car to wait. Her
Mustang would not restart so we couldn’t listen to the radio. We just sat there in silence
trying to figure out what happened.
All of a sudden, a cop car pulls up behind us. She starts to approach our car. Jill
and I both thought that she looked like the cop from the movie “Fargo”. With each stop
she made, the more nervous we got. She motioned for us to roll down our window. She
invited us to sit in the back seat of her cop car and we told her our story. She begins to
tell us that we can continue to drive to Fargo.
“Ah, no, that’s ok,” says Jill. “We’ll just wait for my mom.”
We then tried to open our doors, but they wouldn’t budge. The cop got a sheepish
look on her face and softly explains that she has to open them from the outside.
“Who knew?”, we think to ourselves.
“This sucks!”, exclaimed Jill as she slammed the door to her car. I nodded. I
tried to get her to laugh but nothing worked. I finally brought up prom and how fun it
was. That finally brought a smile to her face. She pulled out some cute pictures and we
began to reminisce. As we were talking, we saw a vehicle approaching so we rushed out
of the Mustang to see if we could stop it; as if it wasn’t enough that the car didn’t stop,
but our pictures blew out as well.
We chased the pictures across the road and down into the ditch. We were almost
in tears. The wind was awful and this was turning out to be a rotten day. I spotted the
cute picture right away. We rejoiced in our small piece of good luck and kept searching
for the other one.
“Jill, it’s been over an hour. Do you think your mom is up there waiting for us?”
“I bet she is. You know, I don’t even care about that picture. Let’s go back up.”
We trudge back up to our car and not five minutes later Beth and Natalie stop and
drop off the cell phone, the same phone that Jill was supposed to grab. We were very
relieved to see some familiar faces. We thanked them and they went on their way.
We nestle back down in our seats and wait patiently for her mom. Jill was
starting to panic about what her dad would say. Just then, Jill’s mom pulls up next to us.
“Are you girls all right?”, she cried.
“Yep, mom.”, Jill said.
“Ok. Dad said ‘We need to push your car off the exit and on to the frontage
road.’”
We quickly pushed it down with our massive muscles and took a few candid
photos so we could remember our experience. As we climbed into the car, we didn’t
know whether to laugh or to cry, we just knew that we were going home.