Date and Time Unknown

Lorelei woke up first, moaning. Her head ached as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to it.

The first thing she noticed was that her shoulder was most definitely not on a rock surface.

The second thing she noticed was Phil.

Quickly, she shifted her body off of him and crawled away before turning to look at him. Lying on the ground, his body motionless and limp, his strange, reddish-brown hair falling across his face. He looked as though he had been run over by something.

Or someone.

“Oh, god. Oh, god, no. He’s dead. My god, I killed him.”

She brushed his hair out of his face. “Phil. Oh, my god, Phil, wake up! Phil!”

A warm shiver ran through her body as fear, revulsion and hurt all made her knees weaken. Vomit rose in her throat. Taking a step back, she muttered to herself “Breathe. Just breathe.” Her hands did not stop shaking, and in the dim light she could not tell if he was breathing or not.

Phil was dead and she had killed him. She wasn’t even hurt; only several scratches and a giant headache. Did she have a concussion? Oh, god, he was dead.

A murmur sounded from behind Lorelei, and she jumped when she heard the word ‘definite’.

“Is somebody out there?” She called out, walking closer to the noise. “I need help! Please, someone’s hurt!”

The noise grew louder as she approached a wall of rock. Music began to play.

It was her car. Her car’s radio. No one was there to save them.

“Damn it!” She pounded her fist on the wall. “Wake up,” she sobbed to the figure below her. “Don’t leave me trapped here alone. Please.”

March 14, 2009- Time Unknown.

Lorelei had realized something important in the short time she had been trapped. If the radio was still playing, that meant that the car had been running for not quite so long a time. Which meant it was still the same day; she had woken up quickly.

Phil still was out of it. It had taken her a while to draw up the courage to reach down and touch a potentially dead body in order to take a pulse. It was faint, but there. He was alive.

Phil…

It had been a long time since she had seen him. Almost four months since he had gone off to college. A year and a half since they had first met. A year and a half since she had fallen in love.

Yes, love. She loved everything about him, from the way that his obnoxiously blue-green eyes clashed with his messy, almost bowl-cut like red and blond hair; to the weird, almost-sarcastic-yet-totally-serious-and-mischievous-all-at-the-same-time grin that made her melt into a puddle; to his stupid, tasteless jokes about Helen Keller, dead babies, Jeffrey Dahmer and ‘balls’; to the way that he spent time in gym class juggling bocce balls and horseshoes; to the way that he worried about how it would look to his girlfriend if he took Lorelei to a movie so she could use his employee discount but didn’t care what it would look like when he picked her up to work on auditions for their school musical at his house; and most especially how he seemed to like her. It was odd, really. How quickly it had fallen downhill.

“You know, I’ve never woken up next to a girl who wasn’t related to me,” a dry, sarcastic voice declared.

Lorelei jumped at the sudden intrusion into her thoughts. “Oh, god, you’re all right!”

“Yeah, yeah. No thanks to that crazy-ass driver. How’d you get here?”

“…You and I both know you’re a more crazy-ass driver than me. Hence the bicycle.”

“Yeah; mom took away the keys to the ca- Wait, that was you?”

“Heh. Yeah.”

Phil sat up slowly, hands on his temples. “Got any aspirin?”

“Sure. In the car. Beyond that stack of rocks. Have fun getting at it.”

His oddly blue eyes focused on her, seemingly taking in everything she was. And yet all it was was a look. Nothing more.

“You’re seriously screwed up, do you know that?” He condescendingly asked.

“You know it.”

“Care to share?”

“It’s been a little too long to go right back into pointless banter and sharing and caring hands, don’t you think?” She whispered ruefully.

Phil cocked his head. “‘Right back into’? I could be wrong here but the banter left long before I did.”

“Fuck you.”

A silence fell over the two of them. She impatiently tapped her fingers on her calves as he ran his hands through his hair.

It was strange. Even after all this time, the silence was not awkward. Lorelei’s friend Helen had once told her, “That’s how you know it’s love; when you can sit next to someone for a long time in silence without it being awkward.”

She heard a chuckle from beside her.

“What are you laughing at?” Lorelei half-growled.

“Nothing,” Phil said, stifling a laugh. “It’s just been a while since I’ve heard you swear like that. Not since the ‘Juggling Extravaganza’ in gym class.”

“Am I ever going to live that one down?”

“Not until I’m dead.”

Silence once more.

“Well, I don’t exactly expect the rest of your life to last long,” She muttered.

“Oh, yeah. That. Bummer, huh?”

She shot him a look that she hoped would make him shut up or at least take their situation more seriously. “‘Bummer’? That’s all you can say? ‘Bummer’?”

“What, would you prefer ‘That sucks’? Or perhaps ‘Gosh darn it’?” He smirked.

Lorelei forced herself not to smile in return. “Jeez, you remind me of Jess.”

“Jess? Who’s Jess? Some boyfriend or something?”

“What? No! Are you kidding? I could never get a boyfriend. Something about being too much of an ass. And you’ve never seen Gilmore Girls?”

“No, and I never planned on it.”

“It doesn’t really matter. It’s just that you both have the same stupid sarcastic, dry sense of humor. Only he’s better at it.”

“Nice to know I’m appreciated.” He looked her straight in the eye. She hated it when he did that; it seemed as though he saw right through her. A small shiver ran through her as she struggled to maintain her tough-as-nails appearance.

“Well, I’m going to dig out your car.”

“What?”

“Let’s see. I’ve got a headache; you have aspirin. We need to know what’s going on; you have a radio. It’s going to get cold; your car has a heater. ‘Cause trust me, I’m NOT going to be cuddling to conserve body heat with you.”

“Likewise. Just… don’t start a cave-in or anything stupid like that. If I’m going to die in the next 48 hours, I want to be killed by that damn meteor or whatever. Not your stupidity.”