September 5, 1994.

He had started first grade only a half hour ago, and 6 year old Marco Del Rossi already hated it. His teacher seemed pretty nice and he was in the class with all his friends from kindergarten, but he just wanted to change his assigned seat. He was sitting next to the new girl in school, who had long red hair and two missing front teeth. She's pretty, Marco thought when he first saw her. Maybe he'd like her.

He changed his opinion on her very quickly. They were in the middle of coloring time, and all this girl was doing was singing. Loudly. "Tra la la la la, tra la la la la." she sang out, as she colored in a picture of an tree. She must have gotten bored with her "tra la la's", because she was belting out Heigh-Ho from Snow White in no time. Marco wanted to tell her the two words his parents told him never to use - shut up.

Luckily, he didn't have to. The girl's loud singing seemed to have stopped abruptly. Marco was happy, but she was being so quiet now that he had to see what had distracted her. She was staring at the picture on her desk with her mouth open in shock, her big eyes growing wider and her lip trembling. A broken brown crayon sat in her hand.

Suddenly, she was screaming and crying at the top of her lungs, way louder than she had been singing. Marco put his head down on his desk, hoping she would stop. Mr. O'Neill, their teacher, couldn't seem to calm her down and walked away frustrated. Enough of this, Marco said to himself. He had to take this problem into his own hands.

"Please, could you be more quiet?" he asked her in a not-so-nice tone. His parents would be disappointed.

She stopped screaming, but she was still crying. "But my...my brown crayon broke. I can't finish my tree."

"Well, I have a brown crayon. You can have mine." He pushed the brown crayon over to her desk. The crying came to an end, and the girl sniffled. "Thank you. Now I can finish my tree!" The girl clapped her hands, and the two of them fell completely silent as she focused back on her coloring.

A couple minutes later, there was noise again. "What's your name?" the girl asked in a curious tone, never looking up from her drawing.

Marco looked up at her. "I'm Marco." he replied. "What's your name?"

"My name is Eleanor. I'm sorry I was loud. I bet you hate me."

Marco felt a little bit guilty. He hadn't been very nice to her earlier while she was crying. "Eleanor, I don't hate you."

Eleanor still wasn't looking at him. "You do too."

"No I don't! You have a nice voice. Were you singing a Snow White song?"

This caught Eleanor's attention. She slowly turned to Marco and grinned. "Snow White is my favorite movie."

"If it's your favorite, it's my favorite." He smiled back at her, and she grabbed the brown crayon he had given her. "How do you spell your name?" she asked.

"M-A-R-C-O. Why?"

A few seconds later, she handed him her drawing. "Read it."

To my best friend Marco, it said.

"Can I be your best friend?" she asked.

"Yes." Marco replied with a smile. "Only if you promise to never make another best friend and we'll be best friends forever."

"I promise."

January 1, 2012.

On New Years Day, rather than recuperating from the last night's festivities, 23 year old Marco found himself standing in front of a grave. He knelt and put down flowers, and ran his fingers across the name of his friend for almost 18 years - Eleanor Nash.

"Hey, Ellie. It's me." he said, as if she was right there in front of him. "Today marks exactly a month since..." The tears he had kept in for so long were already welling up in his eyes. "A month since the accident.

The "accident" was something Marco hated to think about. It had been the first day of December, and Ellie was driving on the highway. It was still a little early, around 9:00 am, when a drunk driver smashed into her car in broad daylight. At first, the doctors had hope that she would pull through, but it didn't end the way anybody wanted it to. She was already gone by 11:30 that morning.

"You've missed a lot, you know. Just in this past month. Jay Hogart died just a week after you did. It was a drug overdose. Manny and Craig had their daughter on Christmas Eve, and I know you'd adore her. She's so beautiful." He tried to think of any other news he had to "update" her on. "Oh, and Sean and Emma announced they're having a girl too. Due in March, if you remember."

He sighed, thinking of the lives of his friends and former classmates. Everybody was doing so well. It killed him inside that Ellie wasn't here to see it or even experience it for herself.

"I miss you so much. I look for you everyday. I wish that God had taken me instead of you." He wiped his tears on his sleeve, with memories rushing through his head. When they first met, she had been the one crying. Now she wasn't even around anymore to dry the tears he knew well. "You didn't deserve the fate you met at all. You had such a life ahead of you, and so many people loved you. Especially me. You were the only one who stuck by me through everything."

After sitting by the grave for a few minutes, he had finally pulled himself together enough to say goodbye to her. "Well, I better get going. I just had to come visit you and tell you how much you mean to me. But look, promise you won't make another best friend in heaven, El?" He smiled and pressed his fingers to his lips, placing them on her name. "I love you, Ellie."

When he got home, he sat at his kitchen table and stared at a memory that was hanging up on his fridge. It was Ellie's tree - the one she drew on the first day of first grade, where she wrote To My Best Friend Marco.

He thought about what he had said before he left her grave. "Promise you won't make another best friend in heaven, El?"

Looking at her drawing, he could've sworn he heard 6 year old Ellie's voice reply to him.

"I promise."