Editor’s note: This is the first story in a weeklong series recognizing noteworthy graduates from the Class of 2016. This year’s series highlights “comeback kids,” students who turned challenges into personal triumphs.

From the driver’s seat, Alex Curry heard metal crumple before he realized he was crashing.

He felt his body lift off his seat and slam into the passenger’s door as his car was sucked into a ditch. The car rolled once and landed on its roof.

Curry, soon to be a Whitefish Independent High School graduate, struggled to describe the crash that almost killed him as a junior and the following football injury that forced him to reshape his future as a senior.

After all, he has only known English for a few years.

Until eighth grade, Curry’s home was a village in the corner of Moldova, an eastern European country cupped between Romania and Ukraine.

Curry sat on the picnic table outside the Whitefish library bouncing his camo-covered legs and readjusting his flat-bill hat as he described his high school experience.

“I came in not knowing any English, and the first people who really talked to me maybe weren’t the ‘good kids,’” Curry said. “But they talked to me, and I learned to talk back. After a while.”

Curry was raised in a stone single-story home by his grandparents. His dad was in prison, for reasons Curry still doesn’t really understand.

His mom, a teacher, traveled between their country home, visiting her new husband in Afghanistan and working to secure visas for their family to go to America.

“She was doing it for me to have a better life,” Curry said. “Mom kept saying, ‘Study English. We’re moving there someday,’ But I thought, ‘No way is that ever going to happen.’”

He skipped English classes to play soccer with his friends and prioritized the season’s crop over homework.

“We didn’t have a lot, but we always had good food,” he said. “We couldn’t go to a store to buy groceries, other than to pick up my grandfather’s beer. We made all our food.”

English became important as he, his sister and parents boarded a 19-hour flight to Kalispell. As the plane’s captain announced they were landing in America, Curry focused on each word, trying to decipher its meaning. He couldn’t.

They landed in Montana at night and in the morning he woke up in a home in the woods.

“It was incredible. I knew I was lucky,” Curry said. “I felt so happy, until my first day at school.”

Initially, Curry didn’t talk a lot at school. His hands shook when he tried to use English and his palms became sweaty. He could visualize the string of words he needed in his home language — a mix of Romanian and other dialects. But when he tried to convert those words into English, he couldn’t.

Three months into school, Curry was spending most of his days watching TV.

“I was so bored, I just stopped being embarrassed as much,” Curry said.

He started hanging out with other students, even though he missed most of what was said. He was introduced to football and the game let him push out anxieties as he became part of a team. He suddenly had friends to talk with during and after school.

His English improved, but he gave less attention to school and began spending nights with friends, smoking and drinking and driving too fast.

On the night of his accident, he was heading to a friend’s house.

“A stupid song started playing, I don’t even remember what it was, but I reached down to change it,” he said. As he filtered through song options, his hand on the wheel followed his gaze. In a moment he was upside down.

He walked out of the accident with scratches on his hands.

“My coaches sat me down and gave me the lecture of a life, they said they had seen kids die and didn’t want me to be one of them,” he said. “That makes me second think everything before I do it now.”

He put partying on hold and started balancing time between friends and homework. By his senior year, he was on track to graduate. He planned to trade his football team for the Army.

But a one practice ended that dream. He was tackled and landed on a frozen clump of dirt. He felt a sharp pain travel from his back down his legs.

“It was all going so well, but that fall gave me a cracked vertebrae. I’m not supposed to lift over 20 pounds or stand for more than two hours,” he said. “I knew I had to rethink stuff again.”

He decided to tap into a passion that had no language barrier and would allow him to stay in the place that has become his home: He picked food.

Curry plans to attend Flathead Valley Community College for a culinary degree.

“Cooking takes what I was doing as a kid, with my grandparents cooking, with what I love here,” he said. “Give me music and a kitchen, I start enjoying. Then I get to watch my friends eating it and love it, and it’s just fun.”

On Thursday, Curry will accept his high school diploma. Then he will stand before the classmates he once felt isolated from and talk about how anything is possible — good or bad.

“I’ll thank everyone: my mom, teachers, coaches and friends,” he said, listing those who were there for him before he knew English and as he had to redraw the groundwork of his future.