The booth in the corner near the door at Forth and Onward Pizzeria was far from quiet on a Friday night in July. The particular customers that day were three young teens. They had ordered a large Hawaiian pizza and a pitcher of root beer to share amongst themselves, though the food was nearly gone.
The teens had picked that spot that day because of the large cooling unit located above them. News had been going on for weeks about the expected high temperatures of that particular weekend, and the heat, when it came, topped all expectations.
In the pizzeria, however, it was nice and cool. The teens had nearly forgotten about the heat at the moment, having a more pressing matter to think about: the first anniversary of two of the teens getting together.
Cinna, the youngest among them all by a few months, was laughing at something that, though not commonly considered funny, was hilarious to her. She sat on one side of the booth, leaning in on her boyfriend, Tadashi.
Tadashi was smiling good-naturedly at his girlfriend, who looked especially lovely to him in the dim lights of Forth and Onward Pizzeria.
On the other side of the booth sat the teen making Cinna laugh (not on purpose, of course, because she never does know what will get her friend laughing her head off, though they've been friends since sixth grade). Ethel was rolling her eyes at Cinna, though she secretly found her laughter a good tonic for the hate she had been going through at school.
Tadashi swiped another good-sized piece of pizza, then dropped it almost immediately onto his plate as the burning cheese dripped onto his hand.
"You know Tadashi?" Cinna said after she had calmed down a little.
"What?" Tadashi asked through a bite of pizza.
"I don't know why we ordered Hawaiian. No one likes it," Cinna replied sweetly.
"I like it," Tadashi replied.
"Wow, already making bad life choices--and you're just fifteen," Ethel commented wryly, setting Cinna and herself into fits of laughter.
"Bad life choices?" Tadashi protested. "What about that time when you biked off a cliff?"
"I didn't bike off a cliff!" Ethel said.
"You would've if we hadn't stopped you," Cinna commented, a slice of pizza in her hand.
"Yeah, well...I thought you said you don't like the pizza." Ethel pushed back.
"What? I don't want it going to waste!" Cinna said.
"Oh, I see what you did there," Tadashi said. "Changing the topic on us, Ethel?"
Cinna screamed in laughter, and Ethel glared at her.
"You know Cinna," She said. "That seriously wasn't funny."
"Yeah, it was," Cinna said.
"No, it wasn't. Tadashi's not laughing." Ethel pointed out.
"He doesn't need to," Cinna said, snuggling up to her boyfriend and walking her fingers up his arm. "Tadashi's perfect the way he is."
🍕
That memory shouldn't have been a bad one, but to Tadashi and Ethel, it was the last night of Cinna.
Ethel never was quite sure what happened, though she was told many times. It felt like her friend just suddenly disappeared without explanation.
Tadashi wished he had known before. If he had been aware of what Cinna had been going through when he wasn't around, he might have been able to help. He regretted that she never told him, that he had been somehow better, more open. Maybe then she would've been inclined to share.
But on the hottest day of summer, just a week before her fifteenth birthday, Cinna Miyazaki was locked in a small outdoor shed by her parents and died of heatstroke. It wasn't her parents' original intention to kill her: they just wanted her out of their way for a while. It never bothered them much, though. At least not until the police started searching for them, that wasn't much fun.