It's not like in the movies. When somebody hangs on up on you, you don't hear a dial tone. You just hear a click.

At first I didn't even know she was gone. I had heard her phone hang up but I thought there must be something wrong. I said "Stephanie? Stephanie?" a few times, but I only got my own hollow voice back through the plastic of the receiver.

And you're going to think I'm crazy, but the first thing I did was to call up Jim and have him hang up on me. Because I just couldn't really believe it, that it didn't make the dial tone noise. I mean, how many times have you heard that dial tone on a TV show or something? It's burnt into your brain or something. I really expected it.

So, I called Jim and asked him to hang up on me. And I waited, and yeah, that's all it was, a click. A click and silence. But not the silence when somebody's there and just not talking. It was the sort of silence where you knew somebody was gone.

I called Jim back and this time, I hung up on him. He called back to say the same thing, that there wasn't any dial tone. I thanked him and hung up.

I guess I could have called Stephanie back but my instinct was to walk out the door. To walk over to see her. To get to her door and into her face and make her talk to me. To say what I needed to say. To let her know how stupid she was acting, how much I cared.

So I went downstairs and outside. The leaves had turned brown and yellow and orange, and they crunched under my feet. I don't know, I never really appreciated these things, you know, I'm not exactly an artistic type. I just take things as they come.

But it was Stephanie's first autumn out of California, last year. She had never seen it before, and she called me, excited, one day and begged me to meet her in the park. I guess they don't really get it out there, with palm trees and stuff, that they don't have the same sort of thing like we do in New England. I never really thought about it before.

I was a little embarrassed because she was running around squealing and throwing piles of leaves in the air. That's another thing, in the movies, they make it all sweet and cute when somebody acts weird in public. Some teenage girl rolling in leaves like a kid is cute on the screen. They put some happy music underneath it and it looks adorable. But in real life, people stare at you and shake their heads.

I guess the point is, she didn't care that people were staring. Or maybe she did, I don't know, maybe she liked it. But when we were in the park that day, the first day that Stephanie had seen Autumn, she wasn't focusing on the people who were watching. I was. For a while, at least. But then I started watching her. I was watching her and the other people around me stopped being that important.

You know, when you're driving down the highway and you sort of zone out for a minute? You look up and you're a few miles further down than you thought and you never even realized it. That's sort of how I felt watching Stephanie. Everything all around me stopped being important and I just watched her, this nearly-grown woman experiencing fall for the first time.

People always asked us if we were going out. I'm not sure... sometimes we kissed, but it wasn't that important. It sounds stupid to say, but I never really wanted to do that much with her... I respected her too much for that. Like, if I were to have sex with her it would be almost like ruining her. She had this pure, smooth innocence to her... I treated her carefully, I didn't want her to break. I don't know if we were ever really going out, if we were ever boyfriend and girlfriend. I know we didn't do much without one another.

It was more that we constantly we around one another. In between periods at school, we'd meet up, even if just for a minute or so, before going to our next class. If we missed those little moments, it was like a tragedy or something.

After school we'd meet up and go out... usually to a park or something, often times a playground. We'd lay on top of picnic tables and talk for hours, staring up at the trees above us. I don't even remember what we talked about. Hours and hours, each day, it seems impossible to me now that we'd find something to say. But we did, and it seemed like the most important discussions in the history of the world. And now, I can't remember a word of it.

In the winter time, when it was too cold for the playgrounds at parks, we'd head to the coffee houses. The people who ran the places must have hated us: I'd order coffee and she'd order tea and we'd sit there for hours, just talking.

She was a Stephanie. She was certainly not a Steph. She was the sort of person who let you know that right away, if you tried to call her Steph or Steffie or something. She told you plainly that her name was Stephanie, and you could tell by the tone of her voice that you were never ever going to call her anything but that again.

She, on the other hand, had a million nicknames for me. Todd rhymes with a lot of things, you'll notice, and she probably came up with all of them. I dont' know, I sorta liked that, like she was giving it thought or something. For the amount of time and trust we had in one another, I still felt like it was this big gift to be given time with Stephanie, and that some day she was just going to turn to me and say, "Todd, this is all a joke, I never really would have hung out with you. Somebody dared me to do it. I've got to go now."

Sometimes Stephanie wasn't even that nice, you know? Not that she intended on anything mean, she was just blunt and upfront an unapologetic. I mean, I sorta liked that about her, except when she was saying something about me. Like, she'd say, "Jeez, Todd, you think you could try to pick out an uglier shirt tomorrow?" and I knew it just meant she didn't like my shirt, no big deal. But I also spent hours that night trying to find the right shirt to wear the next day, and I would bury that forbidden shirt deep in my closet so I would never accidentally throw it on again.

The point is, she never tried to be mean, not to me at least. If I took it wrong, well, that's totally my fault and it shouldn't reflect badly on her. She just radiated energy, at the begining she did, and if she had told me I needed to wear a pirate costume just to spend time with her, then I would have worn a pirate costume.

She could have worn a pirate costume any time and pulled it off. I can hardly get away with wearing jeans and a T-shirt without looking uncomfortable and gangly. We didn't really match so well on some levels, but it was what we didn't have in common that really brought us together, I guess.

Winter was amazing for Stephanie. She grew up outside of L.A., and she had always seen snow on TV but never really seen it for real. She was never one to pretend to be too cool or unexcited by something. Our first snow day, she insisted we go sledding.

I hadn't been sledding for years... I mean, you stop it when you're 12 or so and you start thinking that you're too old for that. But it was the first few weeks of winter and we were digging through my garage, looking for sleds I knew were in there somewhere. "What do they look like?" she asked, throwing boxes and blankets to the side.

She found the roll-up sleds, the ones that aren't much more than a long thin piece of plastic with an oval cut out for a handle. "These are good, right? These will do!" I had to explain to her that the roll-up sleds generally suck, that they keep trying to roll up as you slide down the hill. She had no idea about these sorts of things. Finally, we found a saucer sled, just one, and we went up to the hill.

There were dozens of kids there, and a few parents watching over. It was the biggest hill in the park, so big that many of the kids only hiked about halfway up before riding back down again. Stephanie insisted we go all the way to the top, of course, and we hiked up. Some kids would aim to knock you down as you climbed, you had to be careful. Normally, those kids would have pissed me off, but Stephanie just laughed and screamed after them, "You've gotta climb back up, too! I'll get you then!"

To fit on a saucer sled, you've gotta sit cross-legged. And if there are two of you, the second person has to wrap their legs completely around. That was me with Stephanie, my legs wrapping all the way around her. She grabbed on to my knees and turned to whisper in my ear, "Are you ready, Toddster?" she whispered. I said yeah. Her breath on my ear was a distraction, and I didn't want her to notice that.

"Let's go," I said, and pushed off. But as anybody who's sledded knows, you don't go with the first push. You only get a few inches. You have to shrug yourself along for a little while. So we shrugged along until the incline caught us, and we started to go.

The saucer sled turned around as we went downhill, faster and faster, with Stephanie and I screaming at the top of our lungs. It was every bit as much fun as when I was younger, maybe ever more so. Now, when I was sledding, I knew there was a danger I could flip over and bash my skull in or something. I knew there was a risk, and it made it all the better.

We rushed past kids on their way up, past kids at the bottom of the hill, and the hill had long since leveled out but we didn't seem to be slowing. We rocketed past any of the stopped kids. I guess it was because we weighed more, we built up more speed, but at this point it didn't look like we were stopping. And we watched the amazed kids behind us and the saucer slowly turned around to face forward, and we saw where we were going.

The park is bordered by Oak Street, one of the major roads in our town, and we were going right towards it. "We've gotta bail!" I screamed into Stephanie's ear, but she was shouting something else that I couldn't hear. So I held myself even tighter to her and pitched us both over to the left. We hit the snow and tumbled over and over, for a moment the world was flashes of sky and muffled darkness of snow. Then it was just darkness, with light seeping around the edges, and I pulled my face out of the snow. The saucer had continued on without us, right onto Oak Street and as I looked, as if on cue, it was being run over by somebody's VW Rabbit.

Stephanie was a few feet away. I crawled over to meet her, the winter breath burning the back of my throat. She was curled up and her body was shaking.

"Hey... hey, now." I said, "It's okay. We're okay."

Stephanie looked up at me and said, "I know,"

"Were you just crying?" I said.

She looked down at her body, as if to make sure it was still there. "Of course not! I was laughing!"

And her mittened hand reached up to wipe a tear from her eye. I'm sure, perhaps, it was just the wind that made her tear up, and she had never lied to be about something like that before, but I was worried.

"We're alive." I said, "Don't worry. We've survived."

"Exactly." she said, and began trudging towards Oak Street.

She was like that a lot, as much as I felt I knew her, sometimes I couldn't read her at all. She'd go from incredibly happy to incredibly sad in a moment... I struggled to keep up. I sometimes wondered why she hung out with me at all. Her mind raced so much quicker than mine, it was like she was on another level.

But I knew a lot more than she did. Not about things that mattered, just about stupid trivia. Stuff you learn in books; I picked that up pretty quickly.

She'd come to me with questions, out of the blue. She call and ask about weird stuff. What whales eat, or how people keep from imploding when they're on the moon. That sort of thing. I tended to know that stuff, I remembered the stupidest things. I couldn't remember somebody's name five minutes after I was introduced to them, but I'd remember facts about the rain forest for ages. It was a little frustrating.

Stephanie seemed to love it. "You're so smart!" she'd yell, and punch me on the shoulder, after I answered some question or another of hers. "Yeah, a lot of good it does me," I'd say. A constant issue was how badly I was doing in school... I was getting grounded for it because my parents were getting so pissed, and I didn't get to see Stephanie when I was grounded, which was getting me pissed.

I don't even know how she came out wanting to know these things, just like I'm not even sure how I came to know them. Her brain was always going, always thinking of things, wondering things. Me, I generally just tried to catch up with life, I didn't think about it too much. So she was the one who wanted to know things, and I was the one who knew them. I guess it was a good match.

But things started to change... she stopped asking so many questions. We would be out, and we would just be quiet. Usually, this wasn't a problem. A long time before, months before, we had gotten used to the silences.

"It's one of the great mysteries of life," she'd say sometimes, in a melodramatic way, "that humans have such issues with quietness. Why can't everybody just sit like this every once and a while, being with one another, enjoying one another." And I'd agree. There wasn't much Stephanie said that I didn't agree with. She just always said the right things.

But starting into the summer, it got different. It's wasn't just quiet anymore. It was silence. It wasn't just that there wasn't anything being said... it felt like there were things that weren't being said.

"What's up?" I asked her one day, as we lay on our back on a picnic table in the park. Dusk was coming up soon, which meant the stars would soon be coming out, and soon afterwards a patrol car would come around and tell us the park was closed at sundown.

"What do you mean, what's up? Why does something have to be up?" she shot back.

"I don't know. I'm sorry. You just seemed... I dunno... like something was on your mind."

"You'd never understand."

"I could try."

"Do me a favor. Don't try."

Her mood worsened as the months did. I don't know why I didn't really see it. I mean, honestly, it wasn't fun to hang out with her anymore. But I didn't really think of that... I knew that I loved her, you know? That I wanted to be with her. It wasn't the introverted person I had come to know, it was that person who had rolled around in the leaves in the park that day. I still thought of Stephanie that way.

And I also felt like I owed it to her. She did so much for me. She had a way of straightening me out when I was in a bind, when something was bugging me. She was so much better than me with things like that. Real life things. And I thought, maybe, there would be a moment when she needed me there to listen. Not to answer geology questions, but to actually help her in some way. .

I lived in hope and fear for those moments. Hopeful that the chance might arise that I could try to help and terrified that, when it didn't, I wouldn't have a clue what to do.

Mostly, when she did talk, she talked about her parents and her therapist. Her parents were making her see this guy, Dr. Campbell, like the soup. She totally hated him. He was always asking her questions about how she was feeling and they wanted to put her on drugs. But she only pretended to take the pills, she'd hide them under her tongue and spit them out later. She showed me the jelly jar of them she keeps under her bed.

Mostly, I just said stuff like, "What an asshole" when she'd tell me the things that Dr. Campbell asked her. She wanted to hear that sort of thing, and I knew it made her feel a little bit better. But I couldn't help but feel that the therapist was trying to help. I don't know much about therapy or anything, but I know she wasn't doing well.

I mean, I couldn't argue that much, because she'd get pissed off at me if I tried to take their side. But, you know, even if it wasn't working out at least this guy was trying to help her. I knew she obviously needed something. But I guess there was a part of me that felt like if Dr. Campbell couldn't help her out and that maybe I could.

I had this strange sort of daydream, I don't know, maybe you'll think it's sick. But in the dream Stephanie and I would be somewhere and she'd break down. She'd begin to cry, and she'd cry and cry and I'd put my arms around her and let her cry right into my chest. And she'd be angry, and her fists would whale against me, and I'd just say gently to her, "It's okay. It's okay". And then eventually, it would be.

That sort of thing, you can probably guess, never happened. Maybe it's my fault, I don't know.

The silences got louder into the next school year. We'd still meet in between classes, but we'd just sort of say "hey" to one another and walk to where we needed to go. Then one day, after biology, I went to wait by her locker and she wasn't there.

I waited for a while, after the second bell rang, and ended up getting marked late for class because of it. I found her after school and we started walking home. I asked her what was up with ditching me.

"What do you mean, what's up? I don't have to spend every single moment with you."

"Yeah, I guess not, but ... you know, it would have been nice to tell me"

"What, you need to keep track of my every movement now?" she shot back, kicking the dead leaves at her feet as she walked.

"No, that's not what I mean"

"Well what do you mean?" she snapped.

I don't have much of a temper, I'm more shy than that, but she was trying to get me angry and it was working. "Look, why are you being such as asshole to me?" I asked, my face growing red.

We shuffled through the leaves for a while before she answered. "I don't know," she said quietly, and then turned and walked away.

I called her every night that week, but we didn't talk much. I'd say, "What's up?" and she'd mumble, "nothing" and we'd sit there for minutes, hours just waiting. I held on to that receiver for entire nights, just knowing that having her on the other end kept her safe in some small way. Sometimes, there's so little you can do.

Then that night, the time she hung up on me, I knew something was different the minute she answered the phone. Her voice was strong, clear, louder than usual. It had a little waver in it, but it was sure of itself. I asked her what's up again, and she told me. She told me what she was going to do, she told me that she loved me, and she hung up.

Like I said before, no dial tone. With all that happened in that 5-minute phone conversation, the thing that struck me the most was how there was no dial tone. Maybe I was just couldn't really bring myself to think about all that she had just said, I don't know.

Her house was eight blocks away, but I heard the sirens halfway there. I didn't run, I was pretty sure there wasn't anything I could do. I just kept walking, through the leaves, down her street. The ambulance sped past me as I made my way up to her house.

Stephanie's mom was in the front yard, and as soon as she saw me she burst out crying. I just walked right up to her and pulled her close to me. I just pulled her in and told her "It's okay. It's okay." And she cried all over me, she cried and cried and I was only there to let her, but it didn't get any better, and she didn't calm down. So I just kept saying "It's okay. It's okay" even though I knew it wasn't, I knew it wasn't going to be for a long time. I don't know, maybe that's all I could do.