It was about midnight. Stevie had gotten a lot off her chest. I'd already confessed that I did sit-ups to "Edge of Seventeen" in high school (Me: "I remember it was great because it had that urgency, that, you know, Ooh, Baby Ooh." Stevie: "Yeah, and that undercurrent dadadada, dadadada, dadadada.")I could feel the River story waiting to be told. Suddenly, the moment seemed right. I said, "I'm sure you hear stuff like this all the time," and then just launched into it.

I finished telling the story and there was a long pause (was she going to hang up?). She took a deep breath and said, "I, too, was very affected by River Phoenix's death."

It was a moment of Stevie Bonding. She seemed to have been as disturbed by River Phoenix's death as I was. She, too, was looking for ways to sort through the baffling experience of mourning the death of someone you didn't even really know.

"I read an incredible article about him in one of the magazines," she said. "I have it in my scrapbook. I saved it. I wrote a long poem about it, relating it to all the people I had known that had just gotten way beyond themselves on drugs, and not being able to get to them in time to save them. I circled parts of it, read parts of the article out loud to my mom, and to a couple of my friends. I called my brother . . . I thought, if I could have met him, I could have saved him. I know that. And I thought about it for days. He reminds me of someone I know really well."