limbo.
an excerpt

Her name is Leigh Anne Roberts. She’s about 16, three days away from her birthday, with long black hair and friendly eyes and freckles (and lots of them). She’s pretty much “normal”; on the tennis team, plays the trombone, is the president of the Food Lover’s club, the whole shebang. Her friends are plentiful, and are in fact waiting for her to arrive outside the Babbage’s at the mall where they agreed to meet. They’re kind of pissed off, as Leigh is exactly thirty-four minutes late. They call her phone, and it rings sadly in her pocket. It goes unanswered for the next four times they call, and then they give up and go and get pretzels. The purple phone will go unanswered forever, because Leigh had forgotten to look both ways as she crossed the street and was struck by a bus moving at 60 miles an hour. She was dying, and it hurt.

Lying there on the concrete, her copper mouth moving to unsaid words, she tried to move her arms to get up, to laugh and say she was fine and wasn’t that a funny accident. But she couldn’t. Her right arm was bent backwards at a forty-five degree angle, and her legs were bent far back under her. Her vision was careening as the seconds drifted by like years, and the bus driver shook her head. A final thought flickered bravely between the collapsing brain cells, a war zone flattening down onto the bottom of her skull.

“Aw, crap.”