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Mario

A car approaches. But not just any car. When he spots me, standing next to my little Nissan pickup, he turns on his flashing red and blue lights.

There isn’t much traffic out here, especially late at night. No houses nearby either. This section of Wessinger Road has just two lanes and then grass with lots of tall fir trees farther back. The ditch is a few feet deep, and that’s where the girl’s body lies, fully clothed in a red dress and heels. My whole body is shaking. I take a deep breath and roll my shoulders back, telling myself to relax.

The deputy gets out of the car and shines a light on me. “You all right, son?”

I cross my arms in front of my stomach and hope I can keep it together. “I was driving by and saw something in the ditch. I couldn’t tell what it was. I got out and shined the flashlight on my phone down there. Just as I saw it was a girl, you pulled up.”

The beam from his flashlight moves from me to her. “Oh, no.” He starts running down into the ditch. He yells up at me, “You sure you didn’t hit her? With your vehicle?”

“No. I mean, yeah. I’m sure! I didn’t hit her, I swear,” I call back. “I just found her there.”

He’s down there for only a minute before he’s radioing for help. “Dispatch, I’ve got a female juvenile and she’s unconscious with no pulse. Send medical, code three and extra units. Location is Wessinger Road, just south of Hart Road. Her skin is tacky. I’m starting CPR.”

I pace the side of the road. Back and forth. Back and forth. I keep wondering if there’s something I should be doing, but he told me to stay put.

After a few minutes have passed, I yell out, “Is it working?”

He doesn’t answer.

A minute later, I hear the sirens. A fire truck and an ambulance pull up, and a few seconds later, another deputy. I stand back and watch as everyone moves into action.

When the original deputy climbs back up the steep embankment a while later, he’s breathing hard. “Dispatch, page out detectives,” he says into his shoulder mic.

“Is she dead?” I ask. I read his name tag: Deputy Mitchell.

He wipes his brow as he replies. “Yes.” He circles my truck, his flashlight zooming in on every little dent and scratch. The beam finds Elana, my prom date, curled up in the front seat. She doesn’t even stir.

“Oh, god,” I mutter. I hold my stomach tighter. I can’t believe this is happening.

The other deputy goes to work taping off the scene with crime tape.

Deputy Mitchell pulls out a notebook. “Can I see some ID?”

I pull out my wallet and hand him my driver’s license. After he writes my information down, he says, “Step over here with me, please. Away from your vehicle.” I follow him over to his car. “Who’s the girl in your truck?”

“My prom date. Elana Dexter. She’s kind of, um, out of it, at the moment.”

“Too much to drink?” he asks.

I don’t want to tell him, but he’ll check for sure no matter what I say.

“Yes.”

“Just broke up a party not too far from here. You two go to a party tonight after prom?”

“Yes,” I say. “How’d you know?”

“Neighbor called it in,” he says. “Said it was getting noisy. So, what about you? Have you been drinking as well?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what happened tonight?”

“We left the party and Elana didn’t want to go home right away. Didn’t feel well, you know? So I drove around, she passed out, and then, like I said earlier, I saw something in the ditch, so I stopped.”

“Looks like the deceased came from prom as well,” he says. “Didn’t find any ID on her. Any chance you might have been able to see her face well enough to identify her?”

“Yeah. She goes to my school. Her name’s Mirabelle Starr.”

I want to say, She’s the girl I stood beside onstage just a few hours ago when we were crowned king and queen. I can’t believe she’s dead.

“You sure about that?”

“Positive.”

“Did she have a date for the prom?”

“Yes. Parker Young is her boyfriend.”

He finishes up his notes, then reaches around and opens the back door of his car. “Mario, I’d like to have you take a seat back here. I’m going to need to get a Breathalyzer test, and then a detective will want to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

After he gives me the Breathalyzer, which comes out clean, he tells me to hang tight. And so I do. I call my mom to tell her about finding Mirabelle and what’s happened since and that I hope to be home soon. She’s worried, of course, but there’s nothing I can do. After we’re done talking, I sit back and wait while watching the commotion outside. More cops arrive, including a state trooper, and the road is completely blocked off on both sides. At one point, I see Deputy Mitchell talking to Elana, who’s finally woken up.

A while later, a different deputy pops his head in. “Just have a few more questions to ask you. He’ll be over in a few.”

“Do I get to go home soon?”

“Hopefully it won’t be much longer.”

One of the patrol cars pulls out and drives away.

“Where’s he going?” I ask.

“To the victim’s home,” he says softly. He looks up at the sky, like he’s trying to keep tears back. “Every year, parents worry about their kids on prom night. Hoping and praying they keep their wits about them. Hoping they don’t do something crazy and end up in a ditch somewhere.” He shakes his head and looks in the vicinity of Mirabelle. “What a tragedy.”

Parker

I’ve never gone into Grandma and Grandpa’s liquor cabinet. Never even thought about it. Until now, that is. I know it’s not going to magically cure my broken heart, but I just don’t know what else to do. If you’re a musician and someone breaks up with you, I guess you grab your guitar and write a song. But what do normal people do? I don’t have a clue, so it’s tequila for me.

I’ll try anything to stop the memories from coming fast and furious, like they are now.

It was our junior year and we both landed parts in the spring production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Mirabelle was a fun, wacky girl who loved to make people laugh. Her exuberant personality slightly intimidated me at first. I consider myself outgoing, but not like her. Though, really, no one’s like her. Anyway, she loved to joke around with her castmates, and eventually the joke was on me.

I played the part of Ginarrbrik, the White Witch’s dwarf. During dress rehearsal, in the scene when the White Witch and the dwarf first meet Edmund, I was following the script by pulling a book out of my coat to look up the word wardrobe. Inside the book I discovered a picture cut out from an old Playboy magazine.

It took everything I had and then some to stay in character and not burst out laughing. Belle, a cute little thing, played the part of one of the beavers, so she was offstage at the time. Of course, I didn’t know for sure that she’d done it, but I had a pretty good idea based on things I’d heard about her.

Later, when we were standing around waiting for rides, Mirabelle came over to me with a big grin on her face.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey.” I pointed to a book in her hand. “What are you reading?”

I can’t remember the title now, but she told me what it was and said it was an epic fantasy about a dragon hunter named Gretel.

“Oh,” I said. “The poor dragons.”

“Yes. The handsome king wants them gone.”

“But the dragons were probably there first. Let me guess: Gretel and the king eventually fall in love.”

“Yes,” she said. “But not in my version. In my version, she kills the king, and the villagers appoint her queen, and she is able to learn dragonspeak and control them. The dragons live another day.”

“What do you mean, your version?”

“I write fan fiction,” she explained. “Online. You’ve read fan fiction, right?”

“No,” I said. “Never have.”

“Oh, well. Poor you, then.”

I decided it was time to see if she’d come clean. “So that’s what you do when you’re not messing around with actors’ props, huh?”

A smile crept across her face. And then she started laughing. See, the thing is, when my girl Belle laughed, for that brief moment, it felt like being nuzzled by a litter of furry puppies. Like standing outside at midnight and witnessing a glorious meteor shower. Like eating a warm piece of homemade apple pie topped with caramel sauce and vanilla ice cream.

She reached out and squeezed my elbow. This was something she did a lot, I discovered. I don’t know what it was about elbows that she liked, exactly, but that’s usually what she reached for when she was talking to someone.

“You’re not mad, are you?” she asked as my elbow rejoiced.

I wanted to say, How could anyone be mad at someone who makes you feel like you’re being nuzzled by a litter of puppies? But I didn’t. I just said, “No way. It was pretty funny. Where’d you get it, anyway?”

“My dad has a few,” she told me. “He calls them ‘collectors’ items.’ I call them disgusting sexist misogynistic rags.”

“That are good for a laugh at a poor actor’s expense?”

“Exactly,” she said, her green eyes sparkling like whitecaps on the ocean.

From that moment on, Mirabelle Starr became the person I thought about before I went to sleep at night, when I woke up in the morning, and during the hundreds of minutes in between. Until I met her, I did my best to live in imaginary worlds. Through movies. Through art. Through books. Through plays. What I love about acting is that you get to leave everything about your life behind for a little while. You get to become someone else. Onstage, I don’t have to think about the mother who chose drugs over me. I don’t have to think about the father I’ve never known. I don’t have to think about how badly I want out of this smothering small town. All I have to think about on that stage is being the best actor I can be.

Because I don’t deal with reality all that well, it took me a long time to find the nerve to ask Mirabelle out. Three months, to be exact.

I saw her in the library one day at lunch, and I decided I just needed to do it and get it over with. I asked a friend to get Belle away from her backpack for just a minute by asking her to help him find a book in the shelves. While they were busy, I took her latest fantasy read out of her backpack and taped a dirty picture on the cover with a speech bubble coming out of the dude’s mouth: Can I take you out for breakfast tomorrow morning?

I hid nearby and watched. When she spotted the picture, she covered her mouth with her hand, and I could tell she was trying so hard not to laugh. She frantically looked around, and when she finally spotted me, she got up, walked over, pulled me into the stacks and gave me the best hug of my life.

“I thought you’d never ask” was her answer to my question. And from that day on, we were just . . . together.

I take a giant swig. Jesus, just make the pain stop. Please.

The past year had been tough on Belle. I get that. And I was as understanding and supportive as I could be. Her little brother, Josh, a freshman, had been diagnosed with leukemia last summer. Josh was being treated at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital up in Portland. Her mom and Josh drove the two-hour trip back and forth a lot. Meanwhile, Belle and her dad tried to keep things normal at home, even though there wasn’t anything normal about the situation.

But Mr. Starr went to his job every day, doing his electrical work. And Belle went to school, trying her best to keep up her grades. On top of that, she was applying to colleges—although, looking back, I can see how her heart really wasn’t in it. I think it was hard for her to think about going away considering everything that was going on with Josh. Like, how could she leave her family when her brother could still be fighting for his life a year from now?

I did everything I could think of to keep her spirits up. She almost didn’t audition for Rabbit Hole, but I encouraged her to do the play. Told her it would be a good distraction at a time when she really needed it.

She was thrilled when she landed the lead. And in the spring, when she got accepted to four universities, she was happy about that too. But none of that could compare with how she felt when Josh got the good news that he was in remission. On a sunny April day, they invited anyone and everyone to a picnic in the park to celebrate Josh’s news. So many people came out to wish them well that day. Afterward, I took her to our favorite twenty-four-hour diner for milkshakes.

“Things are going to be better now, right?” she asked me as she swirled her Oreo milkshake around with the red straw.

I remember looking at her, really looking at her, thinking how tired she looked. She couldn’t have been sleeping well. Worried sick, just like they say.

I reached over and took her hand. Gave it a squeeze. “Absolutely. He’s going to be okay. We’ll have a great summer, and then we’re outta here. You decided yet?”

“Parker, please don’t wait for me,” she said. “Go where you want to go.”

I’d told her a hundred times already. Still, I told her once more. “Don’t you get it? Where you go is the only place I want to be. Do you want to do some research together tomorrow? Try to nail it down?”

“Can’t. We’re going up to Portland for the day. Gonna do Pip’s Doughnuts, OMSI, maybe Powell’s.”

“With your family, you mean?”

“Yep. Josh’s idea. Wants to do a fun Portland trip for a change. See all the good stuff instead of just the inside of a hospital.”

“Okay. Well, if you want to do it next week, let me know. We need to decide.”