One

The moon is nearly full as the boy and girl drive along Riverside Drive. It’s late, nearing two in the morning, and they are heading for an after-prom party at somebody’s place on the river. They’re in the boy’s father’s car, a newer model Nissan SUV. The boy had wanted to drive his own vehicle, but the girl had nixed the idea, saying she didn’t spend three hundred dollars on a dress and another hundred on hair and makeup to show up in a GMC four-wheel drive pickup with blatting mufflers and a decal of a half-naked cowgirl in the rear window.

The boy had reluctantly agreed. He’d been reluctantly agreeing to a lot of stuff since he’d (reluctantly) agreed to escort the girl to the prom. He hadn’t wanted to borrow his father’s Nissan and he hadn’t wanted to rent the too-tight-in-the-crotch tuxedo he is now wearing. He’d gone along with the whole miserable enterprise in the hope that the girl would offer a little payback after the dance and agree to go “parking” in the woods by Turtle Creek.

“If you think I spent the last two days getting ready for tonight just to go out to dirty old Turtle Creek, you’d better think again. This dress cost three hundred dollars.”

The boy is well aware of the cost of the dress. The cost of the dress has been mentioned roughly twenty times since the evening began. Even the cashier at the convenience store where they had stopped for Tic Tacs earlier had heard about the cost of the dress.

“Besides, everybody’s going to Melissa’s,” the girl is saying now. “Everybody’s going swimming. Her parents are away in Europe or one of those countries. I bought a brand-new bikini from Couture’s. It cost seventy-eight dollars plus tax.”

“You could model your new bathing suit for me in Turtle Creek,” the boy suggests.

“If you think I paid seventy-eight dollars to swim in a –”

The boy doesn’t hear the rest of the prattle. They are approaching a curve in the narrow road, and as the headlights sweep through the turn, he sees a car in the ditch on the outer arc of the curve.

The car is on its roof.

“Holy shit,” the boy says. He hits the high beams and coasts to a stop thirty feet short of the wreck. The lights from the overturned car shine across the field to the south, illuminating an expanse of ripening wheat. “You think somebody’s still in there?”

He gets out and slowly approaches the car, extremely nervous of what he might find. It’s a red Camaro, fairly new. The odour of