My first car accident

I was entering the big leagues at high school. I had a car and I had just gotten my driver's license. I was hot stuff. Even though my insurance would not go into effect for another week, Dad decided to let me go ahead and drive the car to school.

One week later (the day the insurance went into effect), I was backing out of a parking space after I had gotten out of Choir so I could drive over to the auditorium for my Drama class. This completely beat out having to run over the auditorium as I had done the first two weeks of school. The parking outside the music building was perpendicular. I backed out across the street so I could go in the direction of the auditorium. When I backed up, I heard a loud "CRUNCH." I realized I had hit someone's car. Someone else who was backing out saw me and yelled at me. I knew that I couldn't leave the scene.

I got out of the car and saw this vehicle with a huge gash on the car door. I figured this was the one I hit. I wrote down the license plate number and went to the principal's office.

They called the cops. I had to wait for them to arrive, which they did in five minutes. (It's such a small town.) While we were waiting, the Assistant Principal took me to my Mom's classroom to let her know what happened. Aftet the police showed up, we went out to the accident scene. They looked at the car I thought I had hit and said I hadn't hit that car. The gash was all rusted, like it had happened a long time ago. They looked at the other cars and saw one that had a dented fender above the rear tire. That was the car I hit. I got a ticket for illegal backing. I don't remember how much the fine was.

The principal looked up the license plate number and discovered it belonged to someone in my class. He told me to call her after school. I did call, and she was not aware that her car had been hit.

Because that happened on the very first day of my insurance policy, my premiums skyrocketed. My Dad was mad about the rates going up, but not because I had hit someone else's car. I guess he figured that was going to happen sooner or later. It would happen several more times. I'm not going to go into detail about all of them.

However, a few weeks later, I was driving around after school on Homecoming. I had my movie camera with me and I would take random film here and there. It was a very exciting day (for reasons that will become more more clear later on). At a stop sign, I filmed a car turning right. I had a big smile on my face as I shot the camera point-blank at the car passing me by. It happened to have the girl whose car I had hit. She was driving and her boyfriend was in the passenger seat.

I didn't really think anything about it at the time until about 20 minutes later, when the boyfriend called me and asked me if I was trying to catch her doing something wrong. I then remembered the accident. I said I wasn't trying to do anything like that. The incident was never brought up again.

The next week, I had developed the film. The part where I thought I had filmed the two of them together turned out to be a shot of the trees. I had aimed the camera lens too high. If I was trying to catch her doing something wrong, I would have failed. This means I failed without really trying. It seems like I do a lot of that.