In the face with a gun

Trigger warning: GUNS It happenened instantly. I remember going out the front door of the apartment then I went to turn the corner and, cut! next scene! I'm spinning, my face feels different. There's grass, it's dark, what happened? My friends rush to me. Oh my god! Dan rips his shirt off and runs down the street after him. Someone else grabs my tooth and knows to put it in milk so it will survive. I'm directed to a car where the door is opened and I'm put in the back seat. Somebody I don't know drives me straight to the hospital. They tell me the dental surgeon is on the way and it's good that my friends put the tooth in milk. He shoves it back in and wires it to the adjacent teeth. I'm told the chipped tooth will be fixed by a dentist soon. What just happened? I was at a party in Chico, CA, USA on Mechoopda St., downstairs in the bottom right apartment of a four-plex. My Dad lived on the same road twenty years earlier. The party was Amanda's coworker's birthday party. Everyone loved Amanda, she's so beautiful. The guys that lived there had a Confederate flag hanging above the couch. The birthday girl's boyfriend, Skye, was there. He had a tattoo on the crease between his thumb and index finger. Skye was in a Mexican gang, someone told me at the party. They found the gun in the gutter of the street. He had dropped it when he ran away. It was a six-shooter revolver pistol with a steel barrel. All I can figure is that someone said something racist and he went out to get the gun from his car and was coming back in to make a big deal about it. Amanda would tell me a few years later that Skye was killed in a gang incident. She was still friends with Megan from work. The police never did anything except give me a pamphlet about services for victims of crime. Someone's life got saved that night at the cost of my front teeth. He must have been holding the gun up high, walking in strong. I'm tall so when we collided around the corner, the barrel lined up perfectly with my mouth. He wasn't trying to knock my teeth out, he wanted to scare everyone or shoot someone. Who knows now. But my life was forever altered on February 3, 2007.