How the car Actually got damaged

This story came up at work the other day, and it reminded me of several amusing factors to the story and I decided to type it out.

First of all, I hope my parents don't read this.  Its possible that they have either totally forgotten this incident occurred, or at least the details.  Also, this story happened when I was a teenager.  I think parents of teenagers are a little smarter than teenagers give them credit for so its possible they got the truth and chose to not break us down on our lies. (This would be rather unlike my parents though.  My father once berated me for lying that I had eaten something for breakfast when actually I hadn't.)

But I've gotten way ahead of myself.  First I must explain, the we is me and my older brother.  We have had a love-hate relationship all our lives, luckily solidly in the love side for the past 5 years.  In high school though... we tipped to the hate, or at least the stay in separate corners.  He punched me in the face, I kinda roundhouse whacked him on the temple.  Really, separate corners was a good idea.

However, nothing galvanized the sibling relationship like parental disapproval.

My brother had the car and announced he was going to go to the mall.  Now, I am/was a nerd, but still knew how to be a teenage girl and pretty much said 'ooh! I wanna come, please can I come? will you let me come? I promise I'll be good'

To which my mom pretty much replied something along the lines of 'no, no way, absolutely not, HELL no.'

Why? Such a violently negative reaction from my mom? Well, my brother does not drive in the same way you do.  My mother is not American and so her idioms/metaphors can get a bit confused, but early in my brother's driving career she announced that she didn't want to put all her eggs in one basket.  In this case, her eggs were her children, and the basket was the car.  And when my brother was driving the basket there was a far too high a probability of the basket crashing, breaking the eggs in the process.  In other words, if my brother was going to get himself killed at least he wouldn't take me with him.  To this day it is completely understood within the family that my mother should never, ever be in a car while my brother is driving.  I should mention here too that my brother has had 15 years driving experience, and is alive.

So, my brother's response to my mother's desperate pleading/ordering me not to go, was to suddenly decide, sure, he'd take his little sister to the mall with him.

Said trip was uneventful, but somewhat of a bonding moment, and upon return, I believe we even had a normal conversation with my mother in which all parties were calm, and then parents went off to bed and brother and I were left talking and watching TV.
Then, my brother suggested we go to a party.  Now, we never actually had a curfew, but a curfew would have meant nothing to my brother, and I was never out past any time one would choose as a curfew (yes, sad little nerd. Actually my brother is as big a nerd as I am, maybe worse)  So, while not technically breaking any rules, it was nonetheless certain that parents would not approve of departure from the house after midnight to go to a high school party.  I was either 14 or 15 at the time too, so that would have been a problem.

Then, there was the fact that it was raining, not hard, but enough to ensure wet pavement.  The party was near the park, and he just had to go over a certain bridge and show me what happened.  So off we went.  This is the part that my mom always feared.  My brother was driving, well, a fair amount over the speed limit, through a dark park in the middle of the night.  There was this particular bridge which he accelerated into and flew off the other side of.  (Which is actually very fun to do. And sadly I have not repeated.) Then he told me he was going to go into controlled skids.  Which he did, several long ones, I was dutifully impressed.  And then he came out of the skid.  And in a split second he had lost control.  We were off the road, across the grass, plowing into the underbrush of the park until we lodged ourselves well onto a fallen tree trunk.  I believe the first words out of my brother's mouth were 'Thank god the airbags didn't go off.'  Then we were faced with, well past midnight, no streetlights, off in the forest, stuck on a tree.  Which kinda sucks by the way.

After several good samaritans had stopped to help we got to the crux of getting ourselves dislodged.  This involved several people endeavoring to lift and push the front end of the car off the tree while I did something in the car.  What did I do? I have no idea.  I had never driven a car.  Clearly I had the basic concept under control, but was a little stressed by the situation and unclear as to my duty.  My assumption is that it was to put the car in reverse and then push on the gas on the count of three while they pushed.  I think.

Why, if I was this totally clueless was I nominated for this job? (which seemed absurdly important to me at the time)  I believe it had to do with the fact that I was a 100 pound weakling who would have made no contribution whatsoever to the pushing effort going on.  I'm not sure I got the car pedal thing right either.  You'd have to ask my brother.  Something worked however, and we were free! The evil tree defeated.

After much heartfelt gratitude to the kind passersby who stopped to pull our car off a tree, we were left with a mildly damaged car.  There was a broken headlight and fog lamp.  The frame on the front end was slightly bent.

Aside from this, admittedly difficult to see damage, the most striking evidence that something had gone wrong was that the car was now completely covered with wet leaves and branches of trees.  We tried to remove some of them, but the wet made it very difficult to get all of them off.  So we drove home.  Our stress level rose from the 4-5 in anticipation of tomorrow's explanations to parents, to about 9 when we drove past a police car.  We were terrified he would notice the blown headlight and stop us to ask about it.  We didn't really know what would happen, but it seemed likely not to be good.

We were, of course, busy getting our story straight.  The answer became clear.  It was flimsy, but it would have to do.  The agreement was that we would say that the 'accident' had occurred earlier in the night on the way back from the mall, but we didn't want to say anything so we avoided the subject.

So the next morning, when we got up for our Youth Orchestra rehearsal (yes, nerds all the way), my brother took on the task of explaining this to my father.  I was called upon for corroboration and stuck to the story admirably.  I was closely questioned about my brother's driving behavior of course.  I explained that he might have been going a little fast, but really not very fast at all (lie) and that we were driving through the park (no mention of flying across bridges or skidding down the road), and firmly stated my belief that it was merely the combination of wet road, curvy road, and a little too much speed that led to the unfortunate incident.  Probably had my brother had a similar event occur without me there to solidly corroborate and give my supportive version of events things would not have gone so well, but my word was accepted.

So, when we came home the previous night we were calm and normal kids, and had you looked out the window there would have been a nice little Neon sitting there.  The next morning we were two jumpy stressed out kids and there was a car outside that looked like a tree had shed on top of it.  We came through it all right though.