Chapter Two
In the year of our Lord, 1975, I am swallowed up by death.
My first romance ended when Donnie died. It began five years before, when I was twelve and he was fourteen. He was the most popular boy in our neighborhood, so I was ecstatic when he asked me to sit on the crossbar of his bike. His dark brown eyes were so dreamy. I melted as he moved in for a kiss. The sweetest kiss ever—though there was not much to compare it to.
Stunned by my pounding heart and spinning head, I jumped down and ran home. I didn’t know at the time, or maybe I did, that a single kiss could ignite a years-long, tumultuous, on-again, off-again romance. It lasted through middle school and into our senior year of high school. I thought we would marry, but my mother was set against it. Donnie was planning to work in the local mill after graduation. She didn’t want me to marry a mill worker.
“You’re a pretty girl. You’ll meet someone in college,” she said.
My dad was a mill worker. He worked in Tube Works, a US Steel facility in McKeesport, PA. He had worked there since they got married and provided a home, a car, meat on most days, and nice clothes for his wife and kids. No. He could not pay for my college education; I had to get loans. But I never went wanting for anything else.
My mom wanted better for me, though.
I broke up with Donnie and started dating Steve, a boy from another school. He was planning to go to college like me. It didn’t work out, though. It wasn’t Steve’s fault. My head was in another place. I wanted Donnie back—the boy I had loved since I was twelve. The boy who was my best friend and my lover.
On April 19, after months of separation, I went to a party with Donnie. We weren’t there long. We left to go to his place, an apartment he shared with his sister, intent on renewing our promise to each other. But soon after we got there, his closest friend burst through the back door with another friend, Tommy, on his heels.
Donnie and the first friend argued.
They fought.
Tommy and I tried to help. We held Donnie on the couch and yelled at his friend to leave. He did leave the room for a minute but came right back with a knife the size of his forearm. I watched incredulously as the shiny silver blade descended toward us. Then he ran away. I jumped up and chased him to the door. But when I returned, Donnie was standing upright in the middle of the room, looking dumbstruck. Then I saw why. Like water from a pitcher, blood was pouring out from a gaping wound in his neck, emptying his life onto the floor.
He begged me to take him to the hospital. I tried to find his car keys. They were supposed to be hanging on a shoestring around his neck. I patted aimlessly around his chest for them, but the blood that had soaked his shirt was so hot and sticky. And the smell, like sour metal, overwhelmed me. I collapsed into the blood that had pooled at his feet and cried hysterically.
That’s where I was when the police arrived.
But Donnie was gone. Where was he?
He had run to his mother’s house a few blocks away.
She drove him to the hospital.
He died a few days later—so did I.
The Story So Far
The Story Behind the Story
What’s Next?
I can’t decide. Should it be chapter three? Or another chapter further along in the story? We will both find out next week.
See you Thursday!