So me and two friends were headed back to (will refer to driving friend as Friend A and other friend as Friend B) Friend A's house from the mall. Prior to leaving the parking garage, I called shotgun on the front seat, which Friend B almost always was sitting in. On the way back to his place, Friend A was trying to merge into the right lane for an eventual right turn. Supposedly the other car was not allowing him to do this at all and was a point of frustration. There were some factors to mention which lead to the eventual crash in a few seconds.

1) Friend A's attention was almost exclusively on the right lane
2) The road curved right over a period of time
3) Friend B apparently under most circumstances would grab the wheel and keep things straight had he been sitting shotgun
4) There was a median with a sign. This is what we hit.

We hit the sign on the right side pretty hard. No windows shattered, the car still was operational, except for a large screeching sound which was definitely something unnerving. We parked the car as soon as we were able to look at the damage.

From what we could tell, the axle of the car was damaged and the hub cap for the tire was coming off. The bumper on the drivers side was heavily damaged, but fortunately, both headlights were still working. After some cursing from Friend A and a lot of silence from me and Friend B, we drove slowly the rest of the way to Friend A's house with the emergency blinkers on the whole way.

After making it to his house, we evaluated the damage again and pretty much came to the same conclusions we did when we first checked it. We went into his house and all sat down, and quietly watched as Friend A cursed his luck and the decisions we made. It quickly became evident to me that somewhat passive aggressively, in Friend A's eyes, I was a target of blame. Phrases like "Why didn't we just stay at the mall (to catch the midnight premier of Capt. America) and have fun? Why did we have to go home? (the answer is because I had work tomorrow morning and couldn't responsibly see the movie with them.)" and "I should have let Friend B sit in front (as apparently Friend B has saved Friend A's life on a few occasions with his intervention)." Lines like these made me feel horrible, despite that deep down, I didn't really think I should be a target of blame. But in order to keep the peace, I just stayed silent and didn't say much. Lines like "This is pretty much the worst case scenario" made me want to say "The worst case scenario would be that we were all dead", but these are not the kind of things you say to a friend who just crashed his car and will now need to pay for the damages.

I offered to pay some of the damages, which were just quickly generally rejected. I just felt kind of like the evil in the room, as at almost no point in any conversation afterwards was anything really directed to me. I may have indirectly been referred to every now and then, but essentially I just felt as if I was being treated as the catalyst of the event.

I feel bad. I feel bad for Friend A. It was a nice car that was damaged, and he's still paying it off. He works 3 jobs and doesn't have transportation to any of them right now. I don't really know what to do really. He was also going to go to Otakon with me (I'd still like to hope he could, I would offer him a ride up there and free stay in our room no questions asked if he would accept it), but I don't know if he will. Today we were looking for cosplay bits for Keima from Kaminomi, but looks like everything we did this evening is out the window now. But that's really not the incredibly important part. It's just that right now, I just feel like I can't talk to Friend A for a long while now, and just feel that even though he never directly said it, I am the reason in his eyes for all of this. There's only so much an apology can do when someone is  like this.

Anyway, that's the story of this evening.