My Week on the Milk Carton
Originally published in the Spring 2026 issue of Euphony Journal. Winner of Euphony’s 2026 Prose Contest, which has a theme of “transformations”.
For a week in 1987, my face was on a milk carton. MISSING – DAVID FORREST BECKNER, it read above a smiling photo of me. The photo was pulled from picture day—overexposed, freshly combed hair, chipped teeth. My parents had a framed version of it on our stairs. They walked past it for years without giving it much thought. But now that it was at our breakfast table staring out at them (and thousands of other families), they seemed sick at the sight of it.
The truth was, I had never gone missing. The whole mess started when Billy Bullhorn told me there was easy scoring to be had on Halloween night. His brother had gotten plastered at Mulligan’s Shed, he said. So plastered that he left behind half his stash down there. Now, I gave Billy his nickname because he was a loudmouth, always blowing hot air in everyone’s faces. But looking across the cafeteria, I could see his brother wearing shades indoors, ready to hurl with each bite of his meatloaf. I decided it might be worth checking out. The crew was supposed to just be me and Billy, but he’d been sitting next to Wanda Perry in his math class and had taken a real liking to her. Billy had a bad habit of obsessing over whichever pretty girl laughed the hardest at his jokes. But now that he was driving his dad’s Mustang to school I could buy that some of them might be into him too, if only for a joyride. When he asked me if he could invite her for our expedition I said yes, as long as I could invite Riley Gothke. The first time I met her, Billy was getting his car fixed at her parents’ auto shop. She was sitting behind the front desk working through her math homework. I asked if she went to our high school, and she looked back at me with the most incredible eyes I’ve ever encountered. Never seen anything that’s caught the light like them. Patient soul, Billy waited 15 minutes while I chatted her up and tried to figure out how I’d never noticed her at school before. The day before Halloween I saw her again and invited her along for our misadventure.
At 9 o’clock Halloween night Billy picked me up from my place. It was a Saturday night, so my parents wanted me home at midnight. I thought I’d be able to make that. They weren’t worried about what I’d get up to—I don’t know if they knew I drank, but my report card never took a hit so it wasn’t ever brought up. We collected Riley and Wanda and headed to Mulligan’s Shed. I was kicked out of shotgun for Wanda, but sitting next to Riley more than made up for it. She told me about the craziest people she’d encountered in the lobby of her parents’ shop, and the whole time I found myself paralyzed by her eyes. I was swallowed up in their blue, practically drowning in them. I was mesmerized by how they lit up with each little joke she made, every crazy new turn her stories took. Billy brought me back to the surface when he hollered that we had reached Mulligan’s Shed.
Mulligan’s Shed was a concessions stand whose name survived even after it’d been turned into a lifeguard station. During the off-season, it made a good landmark for hooligans. Riley, Wanda, and I watched the light from Billy’s flashlight dance around for a minute until he was able to retrieve his brother’s stash. He reemerged with a grocery bag full of Heinekens. We were all happy with this score and began working through it. The four of us sat in a circle drinking and telling stories. It started off pretty basic. Billy and I recapped some of our greatest hits, like the time we stole a shopping cart and pushed it through the McDonald’s drive-through to settle a bet on whether they’d take our order (they did—I made 5 bucks that night). We were a kind of double act, me telling the story as-it-was and Billy making the girls laugh with his wild embellishments. Riley repeated some of the stories she told me, about hillbilly kooks and dumb kids our age trying to cover up that they’d totaled their parents’ car. The drunker we got, the more we shut up. Wanda was the exception: she reveled in filling us in on all the popular-kid lunch-table gossip. I’ll be honest, I was 15. I’d acquainted myself with the stack of Playboys my dad had poorly hidden under the Encyclopedia Britannica. My mind was blown the first time I flipped through those pages, the answer to a mystery I didn’t know I was trying to solve. Hearing that kids my age were going at it like that, I felt almost ready to faint. I kept looking at Riley, trying to see what her reaction to it all was. If she noticed me looking she never glanced back. I wanted to know, more desperately than I should admit, if she had any of her own stories to share.
The deeper ruination started when we found the sunglasses cases at the bottom of the bag. At that point each of us had two or three bottles scattered around us. Billy opened the case to find three joints and a lighter sitting inside. Pretty soon we were passing this trophy around and taking it in. The way my parents talked about pot, I thought even being within a mile radius of it could get me thrown in jail. But when our prize made its way to me, I bit back my fear and inhaled. Having never been high before, being high and drunk was a pretty intense experience. I was watching life play out before me, warped and slowed like a badly-wound tape.
I’m not sure how the others bore it. Billy and Wanda had enough firing in them to make their way back to the Mustang. That left me with Riley. I let her finish the joint—the calm confidence with which handled it told me she had more experience on that subject than I did. Once it was burnt out she moved closer to me on the sand. We sat and watched the moonlight glint off waves, listening to the foamy ocean crash against the shore. Finally, after a few minutes of me stumping myself trying to think of something smooth to say, she began speaking.
“You’re going through it, aren’t ya?” She began, a playful smile stretched across her face.
“Me? No. This is nothing I can’t handle.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want you losing your mind.” She put her hand on mine and squeezed. “You know, I always saw you around. You and Billy. Always laughing at yourselves. I wondered what you guys were laughing at, what your days were filled with.”
“You were stalking us?” I asked incredulously. I regretted whatever part of me fired that one off when she gave me a stern, are-you-serious type of look.
“No. I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I sit in the cafeteria, or walk through the halls, and I watch people coming and going and wonder what’s going on in their lives. I remember one time,” she said in a soft whisper, “my family and I went into the city, and as we were walking I looked all around and saw hundreds and hundreds of rooms with people working and living and being. I looked at them and I just thought about how many people I will have nothing in common with. They’ll hate things I love and love things I hate. Their whole lives are spent working jobs and loving people I don’t even know exist. Or our lives could be exactly the same, and I’ll never know it because we’ll never speak to each other. Have you ever felt anything like that? That endless not-knowing?”
“You know those kids they have on milk cartons?” She nodded. “When we sit down for breakfast my parents always tell my sister and I about how terrible it must be for the families who’re missing kids. Then they remind us to be careful around strangers, and we all go back to our cereal and orange juice. I think they think that’s all it takes to keep us safe, that little warning and those kids on the milk carton. Like us remembering what they said will be the thing that keeps us from winding up dead in a ditch. But I’m just left thinking about what it would be like if my sister was gone. Or I was gone. I wonder if when the kids come back home their parents show them the milk carton and those kids think it’s cool. Like they’re Jim Kelly on the Wheaties box.” I looked back at her. “I did feel that way about you. After we met at your parents’ shop I was wondering how I’d never noticed you walking around the halls before. Whenever I’d run into you I’d play our conversations back and wonder if you thought I was funny or if you thought about me at all after we finished talking. And then tonight, when we were all telling stories, I just kept waiting for you to go. I wanted you to tell me everything about you. I wanted to hear you talk and talk and talk until I was sick of your voice.” She was looking at me deep in thought. In my compromised state I thought she was annoyed with me. “God, I should shut up.”
“No, no, no, please don’t,” she said. “That’s all so… you’re very sweet. I’ve never had anyone say anything like that to me before.” She seemed embarrassed to admit that, and for a moment was unsure of what to do. Then she gained some resolve and in one swift movement kissed me. It took longer than it should’ve for my brain to register the feeling, and despite feeling flustered by it some intelligent part of my subconscious kissed her back. Soon I was slipping away from myself as we disappeared into each other.
I woke up to the sun rising. For a moment I was caught between the bliss of the previous night and the hangover that was pounding against my skull. Both gave way to the sudden realization that I was completely and utterly fucked. I shook Riley awake and we stumbled our way back to Billy’s car. We caught him and Wanda in the backseat—suffice it to say I drove us home. I was fighting for my life. I had never seriously pissed my parents off before, but showing up 8 hours past curfew reeking of everything they had ever warned me about was a bad place to start. I chomped six sticks of gum from Billy’s glovebox to try covering up. When I pulled onto my street, I saw a police cruiser sitting in the driveway and felt a chill run through my body. I’m going to jail, I thought, they’re gonna send me to jail for underage drinking and I’m gonna get beat up in prison and I’m never gonna go to college or see Riley again. That’s really what I thought. I pulled up on the curb, told everyone I hoped I’d see them tomorrow, and bolted through my front door. When I barreled into my kitchen I saw my parents sitting at the dining table with a burly officer.
My mother was the only one of the three who was facing in my direction. I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was pure revelation, like Jesus came down from heaven into that tiny New Jersey kitchen. Every time I saw her in church after that day, I watched her take in the pastor’s words with closed eyes and solemn devotion. She was chasing that divine feeling, hoping something from scripture would deliver it in her again. In one moment she went from gawking at me to swallowing me into her arms. My father turned around in his chair, his face—if my mother saw Christ when I came in, I was Satan incarnate to my father. My mother asked me if I was ok and when I told her I was she hollered that she was so worried about me, that she called Billy’s parents and when they said I wasn’t with them she got worried, that kids, good kids like me, would get snatched up on Halloween night. I’ve only been hunting one time, because the one time I went out I shot a young deer and had to watch its mother cry over it. When animal mothers lose their children they shout their anguish into the sky because they have no better recourse against whatever supernatural force took their babies from them. My mother’s wails were something like that. My dad had to usher her to their bedroom as I sat down with the police officer.
I sat there trying to stay composed, terrified that he’d catch a whiff of pot and haul me off to jail. After a minute I stammered out that I’d just been hanging out at my friend Billy’s house. I’d fallen asleep on his couch for what I thought would be thirty minutes and ended up being the whole night. He asked me why my friend Billy’s parents said I wasn’t home. I said that I misspoke, I was sleeping on my friend Wayne’s couch after Billy dropped me off there. He didn’t believe a word of it, but I was in front of him in one piece so he was fine to let my story ride. He told me that my parents had reported me missing at 1 that morning and that there were a couple squad cars roaming the streets looking for me. He said they had a couple hundred missing posters ready to go, and that my name had already been printed into the Sunday paper. He seemed upset they had kicked up such a fuss for a kid on a bender. As he left he shouted from the door that I should leave a note the next time I’m drinking with my buddy Wayne. After he left my dad came back down and took his spot at the head of the table, stewing in his venomous anger.
“Your mother is asleep,” he hissed out an angry whisper, “finally, and we had your sister stay at the Rockfords’ this morning, so she wouldn’t get scared by all the commotion.” He stood up, walked to the kitchen to grab a glass of water, sat back down, took down a hard swallow, then continued. “I know exactly what you were up to last night so I want no lies and no excuses. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry dad,” I began, “I lost track of time and fell asleep. I’m really, really sorry I wasn’t home by curfew.”
My father gritted his teeth, and gulped down another swig of water. “All right. You fell asleep. Because you ‘lost track of time’, your mother and I have been up for nearly 24 hours raising hell trying to find you.”
“You said you didn’t want any excuses,” I replied lamely.
“I know that’s not an excuse. I just want you to understand that while you were in la-la-land, your mother and I were thinking about you being in somebody’s trunk three states away. Your mother,” at this he choked a little on the lump in his throat, and took a gulp to push it back down. After he’d steeled his nerves, he looked at me through teary eyes and continued, “I hope you never know what state you put her in. Sometimes, your mother and I, we talk about those kids on the milk cartons before we go to bed, and we thank God that our kids would never put themselves in danger, that Lindsey and David will never end up on the side of a milk carton for some other family to feel sad about. But now I think we’re gonna talk about how we raised such a fuck-up.” That was the first and last time I ever heard my dad swear.
I sat there shaking, fighting to stop my silent sobbing. “Here’s the deal. You’re grounded until the end of the school year. All the way until June. You go to school and you come back. If you want to spend time with your friends they can come here where we can supervise you guys. After June, if you ever,” he leaned in until he was inches from my face, so close that I could smell the Folgers on his breath, “and I mean ever, come home smelling of alcohol or grass, you will no longer live at this house. Am I clear?”
I responded “Yes, sir” in shaky breaths. He banished me to my room. I spent the day in the fetal position, nauseous from guilt that pulsed through every part of my body. My sister came back home in the afternoon, and I heard my parents explaining to her what happened. After they were done she marched upstairs into my room. She wrapped me up in the tightest hug she had ever given me. I sobbed into her sweater and she sobbed into my hair; she left without us exchanging any words.
School on Monday was a terrifying prospect, but it was the only chance I had to get out of the house so I soldiered on. People came up to me all day saying their parents had told them I was missing and they had been worried about me. I never had more friends than on that November 2nd. I didn’t see Riley, Billy, or Wanda until lunch. I slunk embarrassed into the cafeteria and tried to be as discreet as possible, but someone spotted me and raised a cheer for me, the lost boy who was found again. I stood frozen in the spectacle before Billy grabbed my wrist. He was sitting with Wanda and her friends, decidedly not our table, but I enjoyed the opportunity to put names from her stories to faces. They started hammering me with questions, but Billy could tell I was getting queasy and put his Bullhorn to work. Later as I went to put my tray away Riley came up to me.
“I bet you got a real intense grounding, huh?” She said after we exchanged hellos.
“Yeah, I got it pretty rough. Did you get grounded too?”
She gave me a bittersweet smile. “Before I left I told my parents I was going to a sleepover.”
“Oh. So… you’d be able to see me again?”
She laughed at that. “Would your parents be fine with it?”
“Well, you’d have to come to my house. If you’re ok with not going on any real dates until the summer, then I’m your guy.”
She made a face feigning that she was deep in thought, before brightly saying, “Ok! If there’s nothing to do at your house, you’re just gonna have to hear me talk and talk and talk forever.” She gave me a peck on the cheek and departed. That little kiss rolled around my mind the rest of the day. On weekends I’d wait on my front porch for her to bike over. She knew how hard I was fighting to contain my excitement, so she’d always busy herself making sure her bike was locked tight to our mailbox before coolly sauntering up the driveway. When she actually sat next to me, though, she’d light up. We’d watch cars drive by and people walking their dogs, giving them all manner of hidden lives. She’d muse that Mrs. Appleton in the green Volkswagen picked that color because she wished she lived in the rainforest, or that Mr. Bradley walking his sheepdog had thought he’d bought a rug until it barked at him.
“You ever wonder if mailmen collect stamps?” She asked once, as we watched the mail truck make its way through our neighborhood.
“Why would they do that? I feel like they’d get pretty sick of anything to do with mail.”
“I don’t know. They might see a cool stamp and go out and buy one for themselves.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “If I was a mailman, I’d probably have a little map with all the places people have sent mail from. Just imagine, you’re going along your route and along with the phone bills and magazines there’s a letter from cousin Bill in Alaska or a postcard from Italy.”
“They shouldn’t let you be a mailman. You’d open up everybody’s mail.” She laughed pretty hard at that. I turned to her and said very sincerely, “I’m sorry you’re not getting a real date. You deserve better than this.”
She shot me a stern look. “You know, I’ll go out and find someone who gives me ‘what I deserve’ if you don’t stop saying dumb things like that.” She slapped me pretty hard in the arm, which made me burst into laughter. Suffice it to say, my parents absolutely loved her, and after three months of hearing me wallow in self-pity they bent their rules a little so we could start dating for real. Luckily for us, they never figured out that she was with me on Halloween night 1987.
Billy and Wanda started going steady. With those two coupling up, and me dating Riley, over time we got pulled into each other’s groups. I’d play DnD with Riley and her friends and he’d party with Wanda and her friends, and each of us was where we wanted to be. We’d reconnect every month or so, for a long chat about life. We often just ended up going over our most recent misadventures, trying to see if any of them lived up to the glory days. Even during our once-a-month calls from separate colleges, we never spun any yarn that came close to what we got up to in high school.
The Millersfield Dairy Company saw my name and photo in the newspaper, and for the second week of November 1987, I was their milk carton kid. Our breakfast table was rendered eerily silent. After we’d emptied the carton I cut myself out of the cardboard and held onto it in my wallet. It was my badge of honor. People at school would come up to me and show me their milk cartons, asking me to sign it like it was a baseball card. Some of them took to calling me Milk Carton Dave, a nickname Riley made endless fun of but I admit thinking was pretty cool.
My family never saw my “disappearance” as something they could just laugh off. I came home alive, but my parents lost their son that night. Their perfect boy was sprawled out in the sand surrounded by Heinekens. My father looked at me like I was an imposter. Like I was a teenage drifter who’d masqueraded as his son to get a roof over his head. They still cooked me dinner. They still did my laundry. But I overheard their bedtime conversations, wondering out loud if I was still the son they had raised.
My mother was consumed by fear of “stranger danger”. She was paranoid in a way I’d never seen before, almost crippled by her suspicions. I remember the house being filled with neighbors and the smell of her baking as she campaigned for HOA. Once she was elected, she devoted her energy to locking our neighborhood down. All over the street, on every tree and lightpost, were signs telling our neighbors to call her if there was a car or person they didn’t recognize. She stood watch on the porch every day, until I left for college, as I walked the ten feet to my car. She was so worried I’d be snatched up out in the front yard she needed to watch me get in my car and drive away, for her own sanity. As for my sister, I wasn’t her annoying little brother anymore. I realized that she’d had the same thoughts as me about the milk carton kids, wondering what would happen if I’d disappeared. She’d learned from whatever regrets she’d had when she got a glimpse of it. She also seemed to understand that I had graduated into the adult world (as a 17-year-old would define it) after Halloween night. We could sit down and have actual, serious conversations and bond over things deeper than “mom and dad are so lame”.
Now that I have kids who’re creeping up to be the age I was then, I often wonder what I’m gonna say to them when they disappear into the world. Whenever I run in the park and see parents with their young kids, I tap into that phenomenon Riley told me about. I hope sometimes that I run into another milk carton kid, who was found again and knows exactly what lessons to take away from it. But it’s just as likely that he’s pulling a photo of himself out of his wallet and hoping I figure it out for us.
