Story.

I am jolted out of some semblance of sleep by my sister telling me to wake up. I’m cramped against the passenger door in her compact Chevy, the smell of litter wafting around me from the cage of kittens in the backseat. Her car is stuffed to the brim, and as I blink and stretch as much as I can, I see the bright yellow moving truck in front of us. We’re driving across the country after flying to Alabama just to move her home after a failed experiment. It is about eleven hours in to our trip, and last I knew we were in Tennessee.

“Hey, I think dad is really tired ‘cause he has been driving kind of weird. I need you to wake up so he can have a chance to sleep,” my sister says to me, her eyebrows creased with worry as she focuses on the yellow truck.

“Mkaay,” I mumble and blink away the sleep, cracking my neck and sitting up straight. I readjust my glasses and look around us. It’s daylight now, although just barely, and everything is pretty flat around the highway. “Where are we now?” I ask, glancing at the clock to see it somewhere around Seven AM.

“Indiana,” is her curt reply, and I am slightly boggled. At three we had stopped at a rest stop to get some sleep, all three of us at once, but that was a whole state ago. He must have woken her up early to get started again. Dad never did like to drive alone, but I was asleep in my sister‘s car when they started, so he had no choice this morning. “I’m gonna pull in front of him and get off at this next exit so he follows us, so get ready to take a turn driving,” she explains to me.

“Mhmm,” I reply, still coming out of the time warp of sleeping while moving. My sister pulls over into the middle lane and guns it, her little red car pulling steadily in front of dad and his moving van. He looks focused as we pass, and soon my sister and I are a good ways in front of him. A quarter mile to the exit and she puts on her blinker, clearly telling him that we are going to get off.

Soon we are careening up the exit, and my eyes go to the rearview mirror to make sure he saw us. He flies past the exit, and my heart catches as I follow with my eyes to see him slumped to the side behind the wheel.
“He passed out!” I think I scream, my eyes glued to the yellow truck as it slowly goes onto the shoulder and slows down considerably. My heart is thumping.

“Shit!” my sister curses, taking her foot off the brake while I watch the truck. There is a divided highway at the top of the exit, but we ignore it and get on the exit ramp, never slowing down. I know that the knowledge of my dad’s type I diabetes is on both our minds, because it’s the only logical explanation for him passing out…a blood sugar of extreme lows.

The truck is ambling along now, probably coasting without his foot on the gas. We reach behind him, slowing to his speed. “Let me out! I’ll go wake him up!” I say, making sure my shoes are on as my adrenaline kicks me completely awake. My sister nods and comes to the tiniest stop, at which I wrench open the door. I slam it and am running along the highway, somewhere in the middle of Indiana, at seven on a Sunday morning, the night after Halloween. It’s a new experience for me.

Thankfully the truck is slow enough that I am able to run faster than it, amazing since I am out of shape and a bad runner to boot. I glance up into the passenger window of the truck, it’s shape looming at least ten feet above my head. My dad is definitely passed out, his seatbelt holding him up. I raise my hand and, summoning all my strength, knock on the glass pane of the window I can barely reach.