Chapter Four

 

The first memory I recall is of my parents fighting. It’s brief but painful. I was ten. Dad had just lost his job, and Mom was in denial about changing her spending habits. She’d bought me a new dress for Easter, and it was such a pretty shade of robin’s egg blue that I was giddy with excitement. I couldn’t wait until Easter to wear it, so I put it on right away and insisted on wearing it during dinner that night.

My dad scowled at me. “You’ll ruin that dress before Easter.”

“No, I won’t.” I grinned. “It’s too pretty to be ruined.”

We had spaghetti for dinner that night. The dress was doomed from the start. I cried when the meatball rolled off my plate and onto my pretty robin’s egg blue dress, the red stain like a splat of blood on a summer sky.

“Don’t worry, pumpkin,” Mom said. “I’ll get the stain out.”

The dress was removed among a torrent of tears, and Mom ran straight down to the laundry room while I threw on an old pair of shorts and a t-shirt. Worried my dress was ruined for good, I snuck downstairs after my mother, eager to watch her work her magic on the stain, but I stopped at the top of the basement stairs when I heard my father’s voice.

“What were you thinking, Lily?”

“I was thinking it was a pretty dress.”

“But the money.”

“It’s for Easter, Martin.”

“I don’t care what it’s for. You know we ain’t got the money.”

“It was on sale.”

“On sale? Are you dumb or something?” Dad’s voice rose. “It doesn’t matter if it’s on sale. If we ain’t got the money, we ain’t got it.”

“You’ll find a new job soon.”

“In this economy, it could be years.”

“Stop being such a pessimist.”

“Stop being such a dreamer!” A bang and resounding echo told me Dad had pounded his fist on something hard like the dryer. “You’ve got to face reality. We don’t have money for fancy things anymore.”

“You should learn to have hope, Martin.”

“You should learn to think before you buy. And then letting her wear it to dinner! Now we can’t even return it. It wouldn’t have been so bad if you had just let her wear it on Easter. We could have kept the tags and returned it the next day. Now she’s ruined it, and she won’t be able to wear it at all.”

I couldn’t listen anymore. I ran up to my room. I didn’t know which was worse—learning my dress was ruined or hearing the hatred in Dad’s voice.

 

My next memory is more painful and much more recent than the first. It took place only one month before my death. I had just come home from school, and like I had done every day for the previous two weeks, I checked the mailbox. DePaul University’s website said they mailed their acceptance letters in mid-March. It was now almost April.

The mailbox lid squeaked as I creaked it open. There were the usual piles of bills and junk mail, plus Mom’s copy of Midwestern Living, but sandwiched in between all that was the one thin envelope I’d been waiting for. The return address had the logo for The Theatre School at DePaul University. A few curved strokes and a circle gave the impression of a happy person with arms spread wide. I smiled. That was exactly how I was feeling at the moment—I wanted to throw my arms open and shout to the world, “Watch out, everyone! Here I come, future Tony-winner Nanette Dunston!”

I dropped the rest of the mail on the front hall table and grabbed the letter opener from the junk drawer in the kitchen.

Upstairs in my room, I carefully sliced the envelope open. I didn’t want to rush this perfect moment. It didn’t bother me in the least that the envelope was so thin. I figured more information would arrive later. After all, I still had to wait to find out if I’d won an academic scholarship. Without financial assistance, there was no way I could attend. But money was a problem I would worry about later. This moment was a dream about to come true.

With trembling fingers, I pulled the letter from its envelope. I sat back on my bed and settled into the pillows behind me, unfolding the letter only after I’d taken a deep breath. Wanting to savor the moment, I read the letter aloud, “Dear Miss Dunston, Thank you for applying to The Theatre School at DePaul University. Although your application and your audition showed signs of promise, we regret to inform you that we are unable to accept you into the fall class.” My eyes gazed over the rest of the letter quickly.

“No,” I said aloud. “There must be some mistake.” I flipped the letter over to see if anything had been written on the back. I think I half expected to find a handwritten April Fool’s note. I peered inside the envelope. There was nothing else, just my printed rejection slip.

I walked downstairs, the letter in my right hand, the envelope in the other. No one else was home. For a minute, I paced the living room floor. What was I going to do? I hadn’t even considered a possibility other than DePaul. Sure, the college counselor at school had told me to list some alternatives, but really I never thought they would be necessary. I’d planned on DePaul ever since my grandmother had taken me to see one of their plays back in middle school. How could they not have accepted me? My audition had gone well; my grades were good--mostly. My test scores were fine.

When the denial wore off, the anger set in. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry. How could they have stolen my dream?

I grabbed my phone out of my bag, punched in Ally’s name, and pounded up the stairs to my room.

“Hello?”

“Ally, you are not going to believe this.” The story came out in sobs and whimpers. Ally was the right person to call. She always knew when to shut up and listen and when to offer advice. At first, she just listened, which gave me the chance to vent. I denounced DePaul for not knowing talent when they saw it. I declared that their entire faculty was a bunch of has-beens. I swore the kids who did make it were all of the cookie cutter variety and that they had no appreciation for unique talent.

I went on and on about the roles I’d had in our school musicals and plays, about the many leads I’d had and the solos I’d sung in choir. Then I began a litany of the performances I’d been involved in outside of school—the community theater gigs and the park district dance recitals. Finally, I chastised them for breaking a girl’s heart. Didn’t they know this was all I’d ever wanted? That I’d grown up admiring them and dreaming of this?

Ally let me cry, and when I calmed down, she said, “You’ve got to decide on your next step.”

“There are no next steps. This was it.”

“No, there’s always another step. DePaul isn’t the only school that offers a theatre program.”

“But it’s the only one I wanted to go to.”

Ally ignored my comment. “What about Northwestern? They have an awesome theater program.”

“Too expensive,” I said.

“What about a state school?”

“The closest is Northeastern Illinois. It doesn’t have a theatre program.”

“What about Columbia?”

“The one in New York?” I squished up my nose at that one. Ally knew I had to stay in state. I would have loved to study in New York, but my dad said there was no way I was leaving the state. For one thing, it meant paying room and board, something Dad refused to do. For another thing, he said he barely trusted me at home. How could he trust me hundreds of miles away?

“Not Columbia University, silly.” Somehow Ally managed to tease me without making me mad. “Columbia College in Chicago. You know, downtown.”

My nose remained scrunched. “Isn’t that in a bad neighborhood?”

Ally laughed. She’d been a city girl until moving to the burbs at age eleven, so she always found my fear of the city amusing. “If you’re going to be on Broadway, girl, you’ll have to learn to navigate your way through a big city.”

Ally did her best to encourage me, but the pain of being rejected by my dream school never quite wore off.

 

I try to push the third memory away—to keep it from replaying—but I can’t. I’m forced to relive the worst. Yes, my parents’ fighting and eventual separation caused a lot of pain, and the hurt of DePaul’s rejection stung until my final breath. But it was an event three days before the end that took away any and all hope that God answered prayers.

Ally and I were on our way to the pick-up rehearsal for the spring play. The opening weekend’s performances had gone so well, I’d almost forgotten my rejection letter. I was playing one of my dream roles, Abby Brewster, one of the maiden homicidal aunts in the farce Arsenic and Old Lace. The play is about a couple of sweet old ladies who think they are putting lonely old men out of their misery when they offer them poisoned wine. We’d sold-out crowds, and had even received two standing ovations.

On the way to the pick-up rehearsal the following Tuesday, Ally and I laughed over the mistake her fellow spotlight operator had made on opening night, lighting up stage right when he should have been on stage left, the effect being even more comical because his accidental lighting had caught one of the stagehands sneaking on stage to move a misplaced prop.

“You should have seen the look on Daniel’s face when the spotlight hit him,” Ally said, chuckling. “He wasn’t just a deer in headlights; he looked like he was going to faint. There he was all in black with the bottle of elderberry wine in his hand, looking like a burglar trying to make off with the goods.”

I slapped my hand against the steering wheel as I laughed. “Oh, I wish I had seen it.”

“The look on his face was priceless. He looked like this.” Ally made a face, and I turned to see her rendition of a shocked Daniel Peters caught on stage. Her eyes were opened so wide the whites showed all the way around her pupils. I laughed.

I shouldn’t have laughed. I shouldn’t even have looked at her while driving. I paid the ultimate price for sneaking that look at her. It only took a few seconds, but the time I took to turn my head was enough time for the car in front of me to slam on its brakes.

A spring rainstorm had made the road slick, and by the time I turned back to the road, I had to slam on the brakes. The old Civic didn’t have anti-lock brakes, and in my panic, I forgot to pump the breaks until we were nearly on top of the gray minivan ahead of us. A few desperate pumps of the brakes and a quick twist of the steering wheel turned my car until Ally’s side slammed into the minivan. The sounds of our screams, the crunching of the metal, the feeling of complete helplessness are things not even death can wipe from my memory.

I had been following too close. I had taken my eyes off the road. I had forgotten to pump the brakes.

And I had killed my best friend.