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hour."
    Up ahead, the light was turning red. "Please, okay, just ... put the gun down, okay?"
    "Here." She lowered it until the barrel was resting against my side. "Do you prefer this?"
    "You shot him. You totally just shot that guy back there. I think I'm gonna throw up."
    She didn't say anything.
    "Who was he?"
    "No one."
    " What? "
    "Keep going. Get in the right lane. We have to go downtown." With the gun still pointed at me, she reached into her purse and brought out the BlackBerry, tapping keys. "Take a right and get on Broadway."
    The intersection was crammed with pedestrians and cabs, and two NYPD cruisers parked at the light. We were still close enough to the club that I could see the crowd getting bigger outside, and cops were getting out, fighting their way through traffic. "We're screwed. We're so utterly, hopelessly screwed."
    "Just get us away from here and I will explain everything."
    "That's a red light!"
    "Run it."
    "I can't! I'll hit somebody!"
    I ran the red light. Behind me, blue and red lights started swirling. Not even thinking, I slammed on the brakes. My heart stopped and everything below my waistline just seemed to disappear—a total eclipse of the balls. I saw two cops get out and start walking up toward the Jaguar on either side. To my right, Gobi reached into her bag and draped a kerchief over the gun she had jammed against my side, pushing it tighter into place.
    "If you say anything wrong, I will kill you first."
    The cop bent down to my window, glaring straight at me.
    "Get out of the car," the cop said.

8
Using actual details, create a completely fictional version of some pivotal moment in your life. (Oberlin College)
     
    For a second I didn't react. Muscles locked on to tendons; ligaments grabbed hold of bones. It wasn't that I didn't want to move; my body just wasn't about to obey, almost as if it thought that if it didn't budge, it could somehow negate that all of this was really happening. Police lights splashed across the Jag's interior, filling it like rising water crackling with lethal electric current.
    "Did you hear what I said?" the cop said. "Get out."
    "I..." I felt the barrel of Gobi's gun gouging my pelvis. "I can't."
    The cop gazed at me with depthless indifference. He looked like the kind of guy that would rather be smashing some crack dealer's face against the pavement or tossing a pedophile off a fire escape but was willing to use me as a little warm-up on a slow Saturday night.
    "I can't get out," I said. "My legs won't move."
    "What, you're handicapped?" He whipped out a flashlight and shone it down at my feet, one of them hovering over the gas, the other resting above the clutch. "You think that's funny? My brother lost a leg in Fallujah—you think that's funny?"
    "No, of course not. I'm sorry."
    He flipped the bow tie around my neck. "Where did you come from tonight?"
    "We were at the prom," Gobi said from beside me.
    "The prom?" His tone of voice hadn't changed. "License and registration, now."
    I dug for my wallet, handed him my license, and reached for the glove compartment for the registration.
    "Wait a second." The flashlight froze on the windshield. "Is that blood?"
    "That? Oh, yeah," I said. "I hit a deer."
    "You hit a deer."
    "Yeah..."
    "Where, Madison Square Garden?"
    "The Connecticut Turnpike," I said. "It ran out in front of the car."
    He looked disgusted. "Get out of the car."
    What happened next couldn't have taken more than a second or two, but in my mind it lasted forever. I saw the cop's hand reach through the open window and realized that he was going to drag me out of the car if I didn't comply. Except that Gobi was going to shoot me first. I would die on the sidewalk at the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Broadway with a bullet in my lung, having spent just enough time inside the 40/40 Club to take one sip of Pepsi. My headstone would read PERRY STORMAIRE: HE DIED A VIRGIN.
    Then—
    The explosion shattered the air somewhere behind me, a deafening blast