He replaced the t-shirt, pin, and newspaper clipping. Then he took out the three DVDs.

"Did you hear about this new movie coming out?" a co-worker, Dan, asked me one day.

"Uh, no…" I replied, not really caring all that much.

"Oh, well it's called Prize Money and it's about this girl who two guys are in love with and the girl's best friend is in love with one of the guys and it's all depressing and sad and whatnot, but chicks dig all the sentimental crap. Total first date material."

I laughed, "You and your 'first date material'. When has that stuff ever worked?"

"Hey, shut up, man. It'll work eventually. But seriously, let's go check out the movie tonight and we'll see if it's worth bringing girls to."

I sighed, "Fine, but I'm not sitting with you, just in case you start to cry."

"Ha ha, very funny, smartass," he answered sarcastically.

I smiled, "I thought so."

Later that night I picked up Dan at his apartment and we headed to the nearest theater. When we bought the tickets I looked at the movie poster and something about it made me keep staring.

There was a big picture of a brunette in the center and two guys on either side of her, one with short curly hair, the other with a buzz cut. The brunette and curly-haired guy both struck me as familiar but it was the smallest picture, all the way up at the top, that caught my eye. She was blonde with deep brown eyes.

Emma Nelson.

My breath caught in my throat and I almost walked out of the theater, but was stopped by Dan calling my name and waving me to the door that led to an hour and forty-five minutes of Channing Tatum, Craig Manning, Manny Santos, and Emma Nelson.

I followed through on my promise of not sitting anywhere near Dan, and it was a good thing too, because he ended up hooking up with some chick who turned out to be a transvestite.

The movie wasn't half bad either. It turned out to be deeper than it had been originally described to me. There was something about how Emma's character ended up winning her guy (Channing Tatum) over in the end and Manny's character lost her guy (Craig) because he was in some car crash and put in a coma. Channing Tatum's character was convinced by Emma's character to use his prize money (hence the name) from some competition to pay for the life saving surgery that would bring Craig's character back.

Not something I'd want to see again, but not something I regret seeing in the first place.

But maybe that's only because Emma was in it. Her acting skills had really heightened since that high school performance of Dracula.

Months later another movie came into theaters called Touch Up. It was meant to be a play on words, because it was a football movie about one of the players whose girlfriend died and during a game he was in limbo and had to decide whether or not to reach up to be with his one true love or to go back to living. Emma played the girlfriend and Craig played the football player. In the end, he chose her.

About a year after that there was another movie that was said to be the best out of all the Emma Nelson movies. This one was called Jay. I almost choked when I heard the title the first time.

Jay ended up being the name of Emma's character. And I assumed that the writers chose it, not her, so I shouldn't flatter myself. Jay was a nickname for the character Jayna, a teenage girl who was diagnosed with leukemia and her family didn't have enough money to pay for treatment. In comes Manny Santos, playing an upper class schoolmate of Jayna's, Holly Wilson. Holly and Jay had never gotten along but the movie is about Jay's new outlook on life because she would be dying soon, and how she affects Holly's life. Holly begins to love Jay like a sister and convinces her parents to pay for her treatment but it's too late and Jay dies anyway, but because of her Holly stops being such a heartless bitch at school and totally changes who she is.

It was all very touching.

A few months after that, there was an announcement that Emma Nelson would be retiring from the movie business after only three movies. In honor of her award winning, $29,000,000 Blockbuster film, and just her legendry in general, special editions of all three of her movies were put out on the shelves in what was called the EmmaPack: Movies to Rule all Movies. It was corny and cheap, but she made a ton of money off of it.

I bought the EmmaPack the day after it was released. It was in its original packaging until the day she died when I finally allowed myself to watch her movies again.

For a long time I wondered why Emma decided to be in movies until one day it hit me.

In all of her movies she played a sixteen-year-old with some type of problem in high school. She was sixteen when she had the lead in Dracula. She was sixteen when I screwed up her life.