When I say that this all began at a concert, I lied.  Forgive me.  Don’t forgive me.  Your choice.  In truth, it all began….oh, hell, I’ll just let her tell it.

It all began, actually, when I was 9 and my family moved from one little tiny town in Arkansas to another, tinier town in Arkansas.  Population a couple hundred, I kid you not.  I lived back on an old farm that had been split into three different plots of land with three different houses.  One was ours, nothing big, nothing special, just enough room for my dad, my mom and me.  The other two houses had people who would change, and still change, my life.  In the one behind me lived Dee, Delia, my best friend in the world, though I didn’t know it at the time.  And next door was Danny.  More on him later.  Let’s start with Dee.

Dee was one of those girls that, later on, my parents would have told me to stay away from because she was a bad influence, but who knows about those things at 9.  She was crazy even back then, she and her mama lived in the smallest house, the one behind ours.  Black hair and eyes do dark they might as well be black, too.  Full of life and unpredictable.  I remember that first afternoon, she just marched on into our house like she owned it and stood there, hands on her hips, looking at me cool as anything, appraising me.  “You’re better than the last one,” she said, in a voice way beyond 9 years old, “Let’s go.”  In awe, and a little scared of what she might do if I said no, I followed her.  That would set the trend for the next 16 years.  As we grew up, Dee was always the go to girl for contraband cigarettes, alcohol, the best parties, the best drugs.  She was a free spirit who kept talking about turning 18 and getting the hell out of dodge.  Go to LA, be an actress.  She stared in all the school plays, she really was just amazing.  She could transform herself so fast, it’d make your head spin.  And somehow, she was my best friend.  Total opposites.  She made sure I had a good time and I’d make sure she’d get her homework done.  I loved her more than just about anyone else in this world, still do.

And then there was Danny, who was a year older than us, and lived next door.  The moment I saw him…my world stopped.  I know it sounds stupid, I was only 9, but I went home that night and told my mama I was going to marry the boy next door.  He wasn’t anything special to look at, even back then.  Kind of pudgy with wild red hair and just covered in freckles with these beautiful green eyes.  He was quiet and sweet and helped take care of his three younger siblings and smart as hell.  He kissed me for the first time when I was 13 and from then on, it was me and Danny and Dee against the world.  Dee would come up with the brilliant plans, and Danny would figure out how to execute them, and me…I’d be in charge of making sure we didn’t get caught.  It worked pretty well most of the time, too.  I know it sounds silly, but Danny and I were in love, it was like we always had been, and knowing each other just made that wake up inside us.  In high school, we were voted class couple, even though we were in two different grades.  It was like everyone knew we were meant to be.  That’s probably why, when I was 16 and he was 17, our parents gave their consent to us getting married.

I know, I know.  16 and married.  No, I wasn’t pregnant.  Danny and I wanted to go to college first, we weren’t stupid, we knew a baby would make that impossible for us.  He wanted to be an engineer, I was going to be a nurse.  Then we would worries about babies.  But we loved each other in a way no one could explain, but everyone could see and so the summer before my junior year, his senior, we got married and he moved into my parents house and life was good.  I know it might not make sense to anyone out there who hasn’t been in love, but if you have, then you know why we did it.  It almost felt…well, it almost felt like there was a ticking clock somewhere and we had to beat it, to be together while we could.  Racing against time.  Neither of us could have explained that feeling, we weren’t sick or anything, but it was always there, lurking.

It all made sense just under two years later.  It was the middle of summer, between graduation and us leaving to go to college.  Danny had waited a year, gotten a job as a mechanic, so we could go to college together.  University of Central Arkansas.  That was the perfect summer, and we knew it would be the last.  Dee was moving out to LA at the end of summer, just like she always said she would, and Danny and I were heading up to Conway, we didn’t know that we’d ever come back.  It was the summer of transition, our school friends were either going to college or getting jobs or getting married and having babies and everything was about to change, so we might as well have fun while we could.

In the end of July, I was standing in the kitchen, washing up after lunch when I heard the scream.  I knew it was Danny’s mama.  I knew then the clock had finally fun out.  I couldn’t tell you why or how, but I just knew.  I remember the strange sense of calm that came over me.  I set down the bowl I was washing, dried my hands, and walked over next door and found her and Danny’s dad, people who had become my parents over the past almost ten years.  The hydraulic lift that was keeping the car Danny was working on up had broken.  He’d been crushed until a Ford truck.  It was a closed casket funeral.

People didn’t understand how I was so calm.  They didn’t get why I wasn’t screaming, crying, raging that I was a widow at 18.  I don’t think I could have ever made them understand that I knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t have him forever.  It was why we met so young, why I got to have such a beautiful person in my life so early on, because that was just my lot.  I had found the love of my life, my soul mate and had nearly ten beautiful, perfect years with him.  So on the surface, I was okay.  Inside, though, I was broken.  Only Dee saw that, though, because she knew me better than anyone, now that Danny was gone.  Just about a month after I buried my husband, I left town with her, for LA.  Never to look back.