“Ladies and Gentlemen, please take your seats and fasten your seatbelts. We are encountering some turbulence, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
I grimaced and rolled my eyes at my best friend Kristy as we fastened our seatbelts.
“Why all the extra caution? They’ve ‘encountered turbulence’ millions of times, and I wanna get up and stretch!”
Her voice was going up in the scale, both in volume and pitch. I decided to humor her and see if that would calm her down. I laughed.
“Yeah, really. ‘Oh my god! We’re encountering a bump! Everybody, quick, duck for cover, we’re gonna crash!’” I mimicked perfectly, with facial expressions to match.
We both laughed, the tension instantly broken. I opened my collection of celebrity guy pics and sighed, smiling dreamily.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if BSB was on the plane?” Kris asked with the same dreamy smile.
I glanced at her.
“Yeah, it would, but with our luck with celebs…”
She smiled ruefully.
“Yeah, I know. But hey, a girl can dream, right?”
We both sighed and retreated into our own private daydreams: mine about AJ, hers undoubtedly about Brian.
Suddenly the whole plane bucked like an angry horse. My celeb pics went flying and I swore. Then I stopped as the intercom went on again.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just lost two engines and will be crash-landing in approximately 5 minutes.”
The voice had a great deal more to say, mostly safety instructions for parents with kids and babies. Kristy and I stared at each other, numbly. I found my voice and began to speak.
“Well, Kris, I think I jinxed us.”
I had hoped to elicit at least a smiled, but no such luck.
“My god I feel like I’ve just been told I have 5 minutes to live!”
I swallowed hard, wondering to say.
“Well, there are always survivors of these kinds of things. And our luck my be lousy with celebs, but,” I grinned, trying to sound confident and even a bit cocky, “we’re pretty good at stayin’ alive, ya know?”
She shook her head.
“Give it up. I’ve known you since we were kids, and you can’t fool me. Korin, you’re every bit as scared as I am and you know it!”
I took her advice and gave it up.
“Well, yeah. Sorry, but that’s just me. You know that.”
We both sighed. Then I remembered what was happening and looked out the window. I was almost sick. The ground was rushing upon us, horribly fast. I stared, transfixed, and waited for impact. There was a huge jolt, a scream, my leg twisted and splinted, producing a stabbing thrust of pain, and then I went black.
~*~Kristy’s POV~*~
‘Oh shit!’ was my first thought as the plane started going down. As first, when the turbulence had been announced, my best friend Korin and I had joked about it. That’s what we do when we’re nervous-we joke. But then they announced there was going to be a crash landing in 5 minutes, and we started getting serious. Someone had put a 5-minute time limit on my life, and I didn’t like that at all. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us. I was only 22, Korin only 21. We were too young to die! This was going to be a fun, 2-week long, girls-only (well, we were planning on checking out some guys while we were there of course) trip to Hawaii. So much for that.
Korin and I had known each other since we were 12. And we’d been best friends since then, too. We had a lot in common. We both played the flute, loved to sing, loved basketball, were obsessed with guys (namely the Backstreet Boys- I loved Brian and she loved AJ), had a good sense of humor, and were competitive and stubborn as hell. There’s also one major personality characteristic we had in common- we never gave up. That was when it hit me that Korin and I weren’t going to die. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t scared as hell.
The plane was going down. Panic was in the air-people all around us were screaming. I looked over and saw a woman holding a crying baby.
‘Oh god,’ I thought, ‘this is so unfair.’
Everything was like it was happening in slow motion. We were almost at the bottom. I knew it. We hit, and there was a large jolt, which cause pain to come over me. I felt something hard and heavy fall on me at great force, crushing my arm. I heard a snap, which I guessed to be coming from my arm, because intense pain came along with it. Then everything went black.