Truck Hits Classmate; This Time I Won't Save Her

When the truck came barreling toward my classmate, I shoved her out of the way with everything I had, and the wheels rolled over my own legs and crushed them.

Two days later she had me posted all over the campus forum.

He's a sick stalker. He knocked me down so he could feel me up in the confusion.

"The desperate simp playing hero. Losing his legs is just karma."

I explained online that I was crippled for life because I saved her.

But she didn't want to pay the medical bills, so not only would she refuse to come forward and testify, she hired trolls to spread the lie that I'd molested her on purpose.

The whole internet piled on cursing me, and I was forced to drop out.

My parents went to demand an explanation, and she begged her rich boyfriend to hire someone to stage a car crash that killed them both on the spot.

Grief-stricken and furious, I tracked her down and set us both on fire to end it together.

When I woke up, I was standing at that crossing again.

Joy Galloway had her head down, texting the third of her "brothers."

She had her earbuds in, one line already typed into the chat box on her screen.

"Come pick me up tonight, sweetie."

The light was still red.

She was standing at the edge of the crosswalk, one foot already stepping out into traffic.

A truck horn blared at the intersection.

I looked up. That fully loaded truck was bearing down on us.

The driver leaned on the horn, tires screeching across the asphalt.

The truck had broken down. Its front end swung sideways, plowed through the barrier, and came straight at the sidewalk.

In my last life, this was the moment I rushed forward.

I hadn't thought about anything at all.

I shoved Joy Galloway clear, but I didn't make it out myself.

The truck wheels rolled right over both my legs and shattered every bone.

During the emergency surgery the doctors said I was lucky to keep my life at all.

But I would rather have died right there at that crossing.

After they amputated both legs, my whole life was ruined.

Back then I was still naive enough to think I'd saved a classmate.

Instead, to dodge that enormous medical bill, and afraid people would point at her and call her ungrateful, Joy Galloway did something else.

On top of that, her rich boyfriend, Lucius Finch, couldn't stand her being tied to a cripple day after day.

So she flat-out refused to come forward and testify during the investigation.

Instead she went online and posted everywhere, spreading the lie that I was a sick stalker who'd had designs on her all along.

She said I'd only rushed over to "save" her so I could feel her up in the process.

Behind the scenes Lucius Finch paid people to steer the narrative, and within days the campus forum was full of filth aimed at me.

"The dead simp playing hero."

"Saving her was fake, groping the campus queen was real, right?"

"For a guy like this, losing his legs is just karma."

I dropped out.

My parents went to demand an explanation, and on the way they were deliberately run down by a car with fake plates that Lucius Finch had hired.

The two of them went down in a pool of blood and died on the spot.

In the end I sat in my wheelchair staring at two cold bodies in the morgue, and something in me went dead.

Grief-stricken and furious, I brought gasoline, tracked down Joy Galloway, and set us both on fire to end it together.

The moment the flames swallowed me, I thought: if I ever got to do it over, I'd leave Joy Galloway to her own fate.

"Paul Henson!"

Someone shouted beside me.

I came back to myself.

The same crossing was still in front of me.

Joy Galloway stood next to me, head down, texting, earbuds in, so she didn't even hear the truck's horn.

Then she suddenly seemed to realize something and jerked her head up in terror, but the truck was already right in front of her.

Last life I threw myself over and shoved her out of the way.

This time I stepped back and grabbed the arm of a bystander about to rush in.

"Don't go out there."

"Bang"

The truck hit.

Joy Galloway took the front end of it, flipped over the railing, and landed in the planting strip.

Her phone hit the pavement, screen cracked, chat box still glowing.

A few messages popped up.

"Why aren't you answering me, baby?"

"Weren't we supposed to meet tonight?"

"Your boyfriend doesn't keep tabs on you, right?"

Everything around us broke into chaos.

People were shouting, someone was calling for an ambulance, someone else went to check on the driver.

I stood off to the side and looked at Joy Galloway in the planting strip.

A pool of blood was spreading out beneath her.

Her eyes were open, that expression from a second ago still frozen on her face.

She glanced over this way, her eyes shifting a little.

This time she hadn't gotten out of the way.

The ambulance arrived, and the medics lifted her onto a stretcher.

Someone asked me, "Do you know the injured woman?"

I looked at Joy Galloway and nodded.

"I do."

"She's my classmate."

"But how she got hurt, I don't know."

Joy Galloway didn't die.

They fought all night to keep her alive, and they managed it.

Her spine was broken. No feeling below the chest.

The doctors said the rest of her life would be a wheelchair and a bed.

I was in the library working on a paper when I heard.

My roommate held out his phone.

"Paul, that Joy Galloway got hurt. Did you know?"

I nodded. "I saw."

"I heard you were right there when it happened?"

"Yeah."

He paused a moment.

"Why didn't you pull her out of the way?"

I looked up at him.

He walked it back himself. "I'm not saying you had to save her. It's just... you were so close to her."

I gave a short laugh.

"Being close to her means I should have died in her place?"

He had nothing to say to that.

Right.

I was close to her, so I should have saved her?

I was young and strong, so I should have thrown myself in front of the truck?

She ran the red light. She had her head down on her phone. She never heard the horn. She handed her own life over to luck.

Yet in my last life, everyone simply took it for granted that I had to pay the price for her mistake.

As if saving her had been my duty.

As if failing to save her made me guilty.

A week later, the police told me to come to the hospital to give a statement.

I was a witness at the scene.

The accident involved a large truck, the intersection signal, and a pedestrian crossing against the light. The traffic police had to verify each point one by one.

By the time I got there, Joy had just come out of her second surgery.

The room reeked of disinfectant.

She lay in the bed, her face white as paper, a thick blanket over everything from the waist down, tubes running into her everywhere.

Her parents sat beside her, eyes red and swollen. The moment the officer walked in, they shot to their feet.

"Officer, look what's happened to our daughter. You have to get to the bottom of this!"

"She's always been such a good girl. There's no way she'd just run a red light!"

"Someone did this to her!"

The officer on the case frowned.

"We're pulling the surveillance footage now. Responsibility for the accident will be determined through proper procedure."

Camila Galloway opened her mouth to say more.

Right then, Joy's eyes suddenly opened.

At first she stared blankly at the ceiling.

Then her gaze drifted toward the doorway.

When she saw me, she went still.

I was standing.

Standing there on two good legs.

Her eyes went wide.

She looked at me, and the color drained from her face.

Then she started thrashing in the bed.

"Paul!"

She screamed it at the top of her lungs.

"Paul! How can you be standing?"

No one in the room said a word.

Carter Galloway rushed to hold her down. "Joy, stop moving! You'll tear the stitches!"

She didn't hear a word of it.

Both hands beat at the mattress, her eyes bloodshot.

"You were right there next to me!"

"You could have saved me!"

"Why didn't you push me out of the way?!"

The more she said, the wilder she got, and the heart monitor broke into a frantic alarm.

A nurse ran in and pinned her by the shoulders.

But Joy kept her finger locked on me, screaming until her voice cracked.

"He's the reason I'm paralyzed!"

"He did it on purpose!"

"He could have pushed me away like before! Why didn't he take the truck for me!"

The room went silent all at once.

Everyone was staring at her, the officer included.

Joy clearly realized what had slipped out too.

"Like before."

It was such a strange thing to say.

Nothing like this had ever happened between us before.

Joy's face froze for a beat, then slid straight back into pain and grievance.

"What I mean is... he was always playing the nice guy, always hovering around me."

"He obviously liked me."

"It's because I turned him down. That's why he left me there to die on purpose!"

The words came easier and easier the more she talked.

Like she really had rehearsed this a thousand times in her head.

I stood where I was and looked at her.

The last shred of doubt in me was gone.

Joy had been reborn too.

She remembered the last life.

Remembered that I broke my legs for her, remembered the abuse I took online, remembered my parents dying.

Joy knew the truth.

She understood better than anyone what I'd given up last time to save her.

What this woman hated wasn't the truck. She hated that I hadn't died for her a second time.

Some people treat other people's kindness as a debt owed to them from the start.

The officer handling the case turned to me.

"Mr. Henson, she says you pushed her at the time?"

I answered him.

"Officer, there are cameras at that intersection."

"Whether I ever touched her, the footage will show it."

Joy stared at me.

Both hands gripped the bedsheet tight.

I leaned in a little closer.

"Joy."

"You'd better pray you learn how to tell the truth in this life."

She shrank half an inch under the blanket.

Joy understood.

I remembered too.

That night, someone posted a long entry on the campus forum.

The post went straight to the top of the front page.

"Harassed and Then Revenged On by My Suitor, I Ended Up Paralyzed."

The poster was Joy.

In the post she was a victim without a single fault.

Paragraph after paragraph claimed I'd been pestering her since high school, that I'd kept badgering her in college, and that Joy had held her tongue all this time only to spare a classmate's face.

Then came the fabrication about the day of the accident, how I'd stopped her at the intersection and forced her to accept my confession.

And how, after she rejected me, I'd struck low and shoved her.

At the very bottom of the piece was a photo from the hospital room.

Joy lay in bed, face pale, tears at the corners of her eyes, a brace wrapped around her neck.

The caption read: "I don't know what I did wrong. I just turned down someone I didn't like. Why should that cost me my freedom for the rest of my life?"

In one short hour, the post was pushed to the front page of the campus forum.

After that, local accounts started reposting it.

The comments section fell fast.

"This guy is terrifying."

"Revenge because he got rejected? People like this should go to prison."

"The girl's paralyzed and they still haven't arrested him?"

"No wonder it's hard being the campus beauty. She's probably been stalked by a creep like this for ages."

Someone even dug up my name, my class, my dorm building.

People sent me abusive messages.

People posted "Steer clear of Paul Henson" on their feeds.

Someone said on the school's anonymous wall that just seeing me made them sick.

The next morning, the moment I stepped out of the dorm, someone deliberately walked past and slammed hard into my shoulder.

"Pervert."

They tossed out the word and walked off without looking back.

I stood there, my fingers slowly curling in.

The suffocation of my past life came crawling back through the memory.

Back then I was lying in a hospital bed, both legs amputated, unable to even get up.

People online cursed me, people at school avoided me, and Joy Galloway kept herself spotless.

I was the one who'd saved her.

And in the end I became the villain in everyone's mouth.

But this time, I wasn't going to lie in a bed and wait for them to grind me into the dirt.

I called the police directly.

"Hello, I'd like to report a case."

"Someone is spreading lies about me online, claiming I deliberately pushed a person and caused her disability."

"I want this handled by law. I won't accept any private settlement."

Two hours later, I was at the police station again.

Joy's parents came too.

The second Camila saw me, she rushed forward to grab me.

"You're the one who ruined my daughter!"

"How do you still have the nerve to call the police?!"

An officer held her back.

"Please stay calm."

"If you believe Paul Henson pushed her, you can provide camera footage, witnesses, or other evidence."

Carter's face went dark.

"My daughter said it with her own mouth. That doesn't count as evidence?"

The officer handling the case looked up at him.

"A victim's statement can serve as one piece of evidence, but it can't stand alone as the basis for a ruling."

"Especially since there's public surveillance at the accident intersection. We have to go by objective evidence."

After that, the traffic police pulled the footage from the crossing.

The picture was clear.

Joy hadn't stopped at the red light. She was walking and looking at her phone, wearing earbuds, oblivious to the traffic around her.

When the truck came at the crosswalk, I was standing two meters behind her.

I didn't touch her.

Didn't push her.

There was no so-called grappling or pulling either.

In the footage, I even stepped back.

The officer paused the video on the key frame.

"Ms. Galloway, where exactly did Paul Henson touch you?"

Joy froze.

She couldn't force out a single word for a long time, and started to cry.

"I was too scared back then I don't remember clearly."

"I'm paralyzed, I've lost everything"

"I won't press it any further, okay?"

One line about not remembering, and she wanted to smooth the whole thing over.

I looked at the officer handling the case.

"Officer, I'm the one who filed the report."