By now the car was going way too fast, and it was scaring me.
Slow down, Tim, please just let me out, I screamed inside my head. Why the hell did I get into the car?
Panic rose within me. My heart was pounding. I couldn't have made him hear me even if I'd tried, as the beat of the rap music blared from the car stereo.
Sarah and I shot terrified looks at each other. By now, we knew this wasn't going to end well.
We grabbed for each other's hands. There was no time to pray, but then who or what would I have prayed to? It felt like we were beyond help, beyond divine intervention of any sort.
I wasn't brought up to be religious, preferring to trust in my own sense of my destiny rather than a great force somewhere out there deciding my fate. Yet it had got me here, inside this car, speeding towards an unknown future, my fate already sealed, though I didn't yet know it.
The car's wheels bumped as they hit Castle Rising Road, which was more like a country lane. We'd only been driving a few minutes. Everything happened so quickly. It wasn't raining but there were gaping great puddles in the road from earlier. The car swerved as it hit one of them, speeding through the rainwater.
It was all over in a fraction of a second.
The moment when my life, as it was, was utterly destroyed – altered forever.
The car aquaplaned. Jamie grabbed for the wheel as the car spun out of control, veering violently to the right. The trees reared up in front of us. The lane was dark, bushes and vegetation covering both sides of the road completely.
My next thought was, we're going to die.
The last thing I remember is the screaming as the world turned over along with the car, which landed in a ditch at the roadside.
Then there was silence. I think perhaps I had passed out.
The crash, even now, is a blur of noises, people and lucid moments interwoven with panic, fear and the strange sensation of having no sensations at all.
Blinking, my eyes focused but I wrinkled my face, confused.
It was then I realised that I was lying on my front on the inside of the roof of the car, facing through the back window, which was the wrong way up. I'd been flipped over.
I could hear voices from the roadside; I was sure there was no one else inside the vehicle with me. It was then that I felt the pain in my neck, an agony I can barely describe.
'Call an ambulance,' I said with as much strength as I could manage. Sarah's knees appeared, crouching next to me. 'Call Mum,' I added. My throat tightened and I felt rather than saw that the seat belt was twisted around my neck, strangling me as I hung from it. Panic set in.
'Help me, I'm choking, I can't breathe!' I managed to shout and one of the boys, Tim, I think, peered into the back. His face was white with shock. It seemed obvious, even to me in the state I was in, that no-one knew what the hell to do. I don't know how he did it but moments later, or so it seemed, he returned. I was drowning, in and out of consciousness, then I felt the sudden jolt of relief as the seat belt, my hangman's noose, was undone.
Perhaps that was the point at which my neck was broken. Perhaps that was the moment that continues to define every second of my existence. Who can ever know?
My head snapped forward and I slumped onto the car roof. Lying there, my face and hair covered with glass from the shattered windscreen, I was surrounded by a pool of blood that I realised by now was probably mine. But I was grateful to be able to gasp in lungfuls of air. Still alive. Still breathing.
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