After we graduated, they’d taken a year off and moved up there, to make things work with Jess Orlando before they went off to college. I’d tried to see them when I was last home for Christmas break, and even though we’d had two weeks, we never could find the time. We were still friends, though Ros was right: It was different than it had been before—not as tight or as grasping as we’d been before going up to Lovesick. I’d even made some new friends senior year, good friends, people who had come out of the woodwork, people from swim team, people who I thought I’d known because I’d played tennis with them in middle school, but of course, I hadn’t known at all. People who felt like my people—who felt like friends—but who didn’t feel like a part of me.

“That place has a way of getting under your skin,” Henry said.

I nodded, feeling suddenly like I wanted Henry to know every detail of what had happened that summer: of us counting the frogs and swimming in the river and rearranging the furniture so we could stare out the window that no longer existed. How that first night we stayed outside long enough that we experienced the onset of night, felt the temperature change on our skin as we lost the sun.

“In some ways—” I said.

The lights dimmed, saving me from myself.

“Talk later,” Henry whispered.

In the darkness, there were sounds—coats being shuffled off, throats being cleared, peppermints being unwrapped. Melodic jingles of phones being powered down. How long had we spent in Lovesick Falls—eleven weeks? Still, what I would have said, if the show hadn’t started, if I’d had the chance to tell everything to Henry, to pour my heart out to this stranger-who-was-not-a-stranger, what I would have said was this: I hadn’t been there long, and there was still so much about my time there, about the world, that I didn’t understand or know, and I didn’t know if I would ever go back, though I hoped I would, one day—when I was older, maybe, under my own steam. I would have told Henry that I grew up there. I would have meant it.

I settled back in my seat. The actors stepped onstage, and the show began.

Footnote

25 I’ll spare you. You can look it up if you’re interested.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, my thanks to Erika Turner, my brilliant editor, whose wisdom and insight helped shape this story into one the Triumvirate deserved. Thank you to the rest of the team at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: to Roddyna Saint-Paul for your smart read of the manuscript; Annie McDonnell, production editor; and Patrick Hulse for making the whole thing look so good.