“It’s not funny, and no, not even with you!”
“You won’t, and we won’t. Everything will be fine. You are too fucking smart, Em. Hell, I’m too fucking smart, and we work too fucking hard for this shitty life. It won’t happen.”
“Swear to me.” My voice was tiny.
“I swear on your life,” he said, and I believed him. “But right now I’m kidnapping you in some loser’s truck so I can hide you in my backyard. Let’s just hope we can get past this part. I don’t think colleges will look too fondly at a juvenile record.”
I didn’t say anything, but the weight of what we were doing struck me. There was no way to quantify the impact of our actions at that point. It seemed like if I went to San Francisco I would die without him—literally wilt and turn into dust. But if I stayed, I could be putting his future on the line, and my own. How could I measure the consequences of choosing love at fifteen?
People call teenage relationships puppy love, but what Jackson and I had was far beyond that. We had a lifetime of moments that were meaningful, spiritual, and transcendent. We refused to reduce our love to some flippant expression based on our age. We were mature enough to know that our actions, in that moment, were selfish. He didn’t say it, but the impending doom was palpable for both of us. And he was right: we were smart for our age. We both knew that one of us would have to make a sacrifice.
Jax glanced over at me, as if he knew what I was thinking. He grabbed my hand. “Em, just be here in the moment with me for now, okay?”
I smiled back at him, my eyes already watering. “Don’t make me cry, please. We were laughing just two minutes ago.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
8. Saying Good-bye
I was breathing hard as I lay the book on my chest, right over my throbbing heart. I remembered that moment when everything started crumbling down around us. There was nothing we could do; we were just a couple of powerless, poor kids, so desperate to find a way to be together . . .
It was the middle of the night by that point, and I was too frustrated to keep going. I didn’t want to wake Cara, so I took a bath, got back into bed, and texted Trevor, but he was already asleep. I went into Cara’s room to see if maybe she was burning the midnight oil on her next story, but she was sound asleep as well. I wasn’t ready to go back to the book, so I spent the next three hours lying in bed, thinking.
When I was eighteen, I saw a therapist who convinced me to go back to Ohio to look for Jase and see where we grew up to try to work through some of my issues. Cyndi and Sharon, being the amazing women that they were, dropped everything to take me there. We found the dirt road right at the five-point-five-mile marker, right where it had always been. There were just two lone wooden posts and a memory of the battered mailboxes. We couldn’t drive down the road because there was a locked gate and a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, but that didn’t stop Cyndi. Sharon had tried to talk her out of it, but Cyndi insisted that we climb the fence and make the half-mile journey down the road to where the two dilapidated houses once stood.
When we arrived at the end of the road, there was nothing. The houses had been torn down. All that was left were two concrete foundations and a couple of wooden beams. I was happy they were gone.
“Say good-bye, Emiline,” Sharon said. “Say good-bye to the horrible things that happened here.”
I cried and cried in Cyndi’s arms. Echoes of Jase were everywhere. I could see a twelve-year-old Jase as he stood on a rock with his arms in the air. Look at me, Em, I’m the king of the world! And there I was, a skinny mess of a kid with my arms crossed, laughing. Well, you’re no Leonardo DiCaprio, that’s for sure.
I laughed through my tears as Cyndi asked, “Are you having a good memory or a bad one?”
I smiled. “This one’s a good one.”
We walked past the gravel toward the tree line and spotted the small structure still standing in the distance. It was the toolshed-turned-fort that Jase and I had made our own.
“Is this it?” Sharon asked. I only nodded.
We tried to pry open the plywood door, but it was so weathered and warped that it was jammed shut. Sharon, a fairly petite woman, came at it with the broad end of a thick wooden stump.
“Watch out!” she yelled as she pummeled the door, busting it open.
After the dust settled, Cyndi patted my back. “You go. We’ll be right here if you need us.”
I stepped in, legs shaking, heart pounding. It was empty except for a few twigs and a lot of dust. On the back of the door, I could still make out the fading orange paint where Jase had written the rules of the fort when we were eleven.
NO PARENTS
NO HOMEWORK