In the front yard of my parents’ house was a beautiful Japanese maple tree, and in the fall, it grew so red it glowed. That was the color of my heart when Noah looked at me, and all freshman year, my paintings were filled with red and black, the black of his hair and eyes, the pure Noah-red of my love. Noah Sebastian Pelletier, he of French Canadian descent, a boy who looked as if he would’ve been at home in the Canadian Rockies on his own, sitting by a fire, watching the stars, the wolves surrounding him in recognition of his wild beauty and soul.

Hey. I was a teenage girl. It was my job to think this way. I dared not draw him, afraid my mother would find the pictures and lecture me about sex. Or worse, tell me I could do better than a blue-collar boy—Mom was such a snob, and couldn’t resist telling people that my sister had married a man who was somehow related to British nobility. My mother might call his mother and tell her we were too young to be in love, and that would be worst of all . . . because Noah was not in love with me.

Unfortunately. His gentle, “Hey, Sadie,” in the halls of Stoningham High, the occasional scraps of conversation about assignments or, once in a while, an amused smile when he caught my eye when our peers were goofing around . . . same as he was with everyone. There was nothing special between us, and it made my heart hurt in the most pleasurable way, pulsing with that pure, glorious crimson. Once, we sat together at the mandatory holiday pageant, watching Gina Deluca, who was two years ahead of us, do an interpretive dance of Mary giving birth to Jesus, and we laughed silently till tears ran down our faces, Noah’s hand covering his face as his shoulders shook, peeking at me through his fingers, both of us laughing harder in that wonderful, uncontrollable way. Oh, I relived that moment thousands of times. Thousands.