All the Love You Write

By D. G. Driver

A story about young love, first love, true love, timeless love, and the power of love letters. Mark and Bethany are two mismatched high school seniors in a new relationship.

It’s doomed to fail.

Mark has adored Bethany since middle school, and she’s finally giving him a chance. Only, he’s clumsy at romance and knows he’ll lose her because of it. Bethany thinks Mark is sweet. Only, she’s afraid to commit her whole heart to him because he’s going into the army and she’s headed off to college.

Fifty years earlier, a boy and a girl from the same high school shared an amazing love story. They have now returned as ghosts and are interfering in Mark and Bethany’s relationship.

Who are they? Why do they care what happens to Mark and Bethany?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melange Books, LLC
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781680468151

D. G. Driver

D. G. Driver is a member of SCBWI and Author's Guild. Along with Cry of the Sea, she has recently had a short story called “The Jamaican Dragon” published in an anthology of pirate stories titled A Tall Ship, A Sail, and Plunder from Dark Oak Press. She grew up in Southern California only 30 minutes from the beach. As a girl, she used to dream that magic would change her overnight into a beautiful mermaid. Alas, that never happened, but her love of the ocean never diminished. Even though she is landlocked in Tennessee now, she still only needs one whiff of sunscreen to bring her imagination alive. Thanks to the support of her husband and a sweet drawing of a mermaid done by her daughter that was taped on the wall above her desk to keep her motivated to finish, Cry of the Sea is her first published Young Adult novel. A dragon picture hangs there now, so we’ll see what happens...

Book preview

Part I

Love Letters

"How obvious it is now—the gift you gave him. All those letters, they were you... All those beautiful powerful words, they were you!.. The voice from the shadows, that was you..."

Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

Chapter One

In all seriousness, this took me twenty-two tries, and I still hesitated before I hit send.

2gthr 4vr

I know. It wasn’t original and definitely not clever. All I wanted to do was send Bethany some kind of sweet note to let her know I was thinking of her that morning. I wanted her to feel aww but not roll her eyes at my stupidity. At the same time, I didn’t want to write something too lovey-dovey-gooey and freak her out.

Some of my other attempts were: Good Morning my preshus, which I’m pretty sure was misspelled and made me sound like Golem from Lord of the Rings. First day at school as a couple. Excited as I am? which was honest, but her response terrified me, and, If you get bored in class, think of me, which was just dumb. Bethany probably never got bored in class. I’d get bored, I was sure, and I’d definitely think of her.

Around try number sixteen, I stopped typing them. My thumbs were getting tired. I thought the rest out in my head.

Beautiful day for a beautiful girl.

What’s wrong with that? I don’t know. Something. Try again.

I finally hit that frightening, non-retrievable button on my world-class lame text while I walked up the front steps into the school. By the time I got down the main hallway, she was already sharing it with her friends Lissy and Kat. They huddled over each of Bethany’s lovely shoulders like the good and bad angels of cartoons and giggled. Bethany had her hand over her mouth, but I could tell she was smiling and probably saying something like, I know, right?

As I passed my gorgeous, seventeen-year-old, brunette dream girl, I nodded and winked. All three girls burst into a storm of giggles and fussed over the phone. A moment before entering homeroom my phone buzzed. Her reply: 😉

Awesome! A success! Mark Dowd was a great, thoughtful, romantic boyfriend. And I stayed really proud of that fact for the next thirty-five minutes.

That’s when the ghost notes began to show up.

Even though it was Monday, I was in a great mood because this was the first day of my last semester of high school. Most of my required classes were done, which meant I had a fairly easy load; only five periods instead of six and only three of those were academic. My D+ average wasn’t going to leave me working at Shakes on Skates Classic Drive-In for the rest of my life, because I’d registered to join the army right after graduation. I was excited about my future for the first time ever.

On top of all that, Bethany started dating me over Winter Break, after four years of me dreaming about it and never daring to ask her out. Nothing could get me down.

We got our new schedules in homeroom, and then I headed down to Mrs. Hollstein’s room for British Lit, my last English course—ever. Not even the idea of writing essays about Shakespeare and Dickens upset me. I knew that come June it would never again matter that my spelling sucked, my printing was unreadable, and I had no grammar skills at all. Who needed any of that in the real world anyway? All I ever wrote were emails and texts. Those were done in shorthand. Anything more than that was a waste of time.

So, when I stepped into the room and found every seat taken, I didn’t freak out. A grin stayed firmly in place across my face as I leaned against the dry-erase board with three other slowpokes waiting for Mrs. Hollstein to straighten it all out.

Okay, she sighed, exasperation fraying the ends of her dyed red hair, it seems the front office made a mistake and put too many students in this class. Again. Until I can sort this out, we’ll have to accommodate. She addressed the four of us without seats. Two of you can share my desk over here… The two girls up front with me thought that was a good idea and lunged for the desk before the dude and I could even consider it as an option. The other two need to find a friend to let them sit beside them at their desks.

Clearly, this wasn’t going to work. Mrs. Hollstein had to know that. The student desks were those skinny ones attached to the seats that piss off left-handers because the elbow rest is on the right. No way could two people share that. Also, while I knew most of the people in the class, I didn’t really want to be that close to any of them for the next eighteen weeks. None of them appeared anxious to be that close to me either, because books, backpacks, and binders quietly began to appear on top of desks where they hadn’t been before. No one glanced in my direction.

I’ll just use my lap, the guy next to me said. I think his name was Jaden-Jay-or-Jason-something-or-other. He’d been in my classes before, but we’d never spoken to each other. The guy whose name started with J grabbed a folding chair from the wall and set up next to a file cabinet by the classroom door.

That left me standing very awkwardly in front of the class.

Following J’s example, I scanned the perimeter of the room for a better option. Way in the back of the room was this big, blocky piece of furniture covered with a stack of stuffed cardboard boxes, a globe, and an upside-down wooden office chair. The chair was the old-fashioned kind, really wide and heavy with castor wheels under the legs. It was too big to use in the space available, so I dragged a folding chair over.

Up close, I could tell the base of the tower was some kind of old cabinet or desk made of dark wood. It was turned backward to the room, making the drawers inaccessible. I had to sit sideways beside it, because there wasn’t any place to put my legs. The thing was badly scratched and worn out, like it had been at the school since the place was built and was too heavy for anyone to ever bother moving it. Considering that Two Lakes High had been around long enough that my grandparents had been students there at one time, the concept of that desk being from the sixties or even earlier wasn’t farfetched.

So much stuff cluttered the top of the desk that there wasn’t enough room to lay a piece of paper flat on the surface. Surely, Mrs. Hollstein wouldn’t hold that against me when grading my penmanship. Not really wanting to use my lap all semester, I seriously hoped that some junior would get bumped out of the class and free up a real desk for me. I stuck my backpack under my chair, against the wall and corner of the desk and pulled out a pencil.

Mrs. Hollstein finally started up class after taking roll, making a seating chart, and handing out her syllabus. As she droned on about how many points everything was worth, I started poking around the desktop with my pencil, allowing the tip to find old scratches in the wood and then imagining what had caused them. My pencil bumped into a groove along the very back corner of the desktop, almost hidden by the window ledge that jutted out over it by an inch or so, and stuck. Carved into the wood was something written in cursive with a heart around it.

I couldn’t make out the word, although I assumed it was a name. I learned cursive in third grade and forgot it in fourth. I’d never written or read a word of it since.

I pressed my pencil tip into the carving and traced the heart and cursive letters. Some dust came up when I pulled my pencil out. Whoever had done this had carved it deeply, probably with a knife, not a pencil. I wondered how long ago that could have been because kids got expelled these days for having plastic butter knives in their lunch boxes. We were supposed to spread mayonnaise with our fingers, I guess. Anyway, I decided the kid with the pocketknife had to have carved this valentine at least a decade ago, if not two.

The name was really elegant the way it was written, too, like something you’d see on a Hallmark card. I imagined this girl with a high ponytail and wearing a poodle skirt working hard to carve it just right one day when she was really bored in class. Maybe Mrs. Hollstein was her teacher, too. She certainly looked old enough, and she sure was boring enough.

Mrs. Hollstein rambled on about something I’d probably need to know later and got a couple volunteers to help pass out textbooks. While that happened, I pulled out a piece of notebook paper and put one corner of it over the heart. Using the side of my lead, I colored the paper until an etching of the heart showed up. I could see the name more clearly now, but it was still this mess of loops. Below the etching I tried to copy it on my own.

My first few tries were hideous looking, jerky, and full of stops and starts. I would never be a professional forger—that was sure.

On my sixth try my penmanship improved. By my eighth try it was a passable copy. I’d run out of room on the paper, though, so I pulled a black permanent marker out of my backpack and tried one more time on the back of my left hand. This time, I got it just right. It was so perfect in my eyes that it seemed to glow and sparkle for a second.

That looks pretty, said Jill Pietenpol over my shoulder. She was passing out textbooks and handed one to me. Actually, she dropped it in my lap because she was staring at the heart on my hand. What kind of marker are you using to make it glow like that? I’d like to get one for my art project… She stopped herself and cocked her head. Oh, never mind. I thought for a second that it was…It was probably light coming in from the window. She looked up at the window to find the shades drawn. She shook her head. So, who’s Eileen?

Eileen?

Jill giggled in this high-pitched nasally way that had never changed since we were in kindergarten together. Her voice never deepened to a normal register like all the other girls in school. She was seventeen and still sounded five. My spine stiffened at the sound of it.

You’ve got her name all over your paper and on your hand.

If it’s Eileen, that would mean a guy made the heart, I said, mostly to myself. "No guy is going to write all flowery like that."

You’re not making a lot of sense.

"Eileen doesn’t make sense to me, I told her. I directed Jill’s attention to the heart carved in the desk. See that? It’s old, right? You think that was done by a guy? I don’t."

Jill just raised an eyebrow, or at least the part of her face where an eyebrow would be if she hadn’t plucked them to near oblivion. Whatever, Mark. Just make sure Bethany doesn’t see this. If she finds out you’re crushing on some Eileen person, whoever that is, it’ll be over.

That caught my attention. I’m not…

But Jill was gone—bouncing off to deliver more books and stick her nose into other people’s business.

Great, I thought. Now some rumor was going to start about me having a thing for some chick named Eileen. I didn’t even know an Eileen. Was there even a girl that went to our school named Eileen? That was an old-fashioned kind of name.

And by the way, how did Jill know Bethany and I were dating? I didn’t think she and Bethany were good friends. It was only the first day back at school. How did everyone find out so fast? I wasn’t even sure myself if Bethany was officially my girlfriend. I just kind of assumed it was going that way.

I decided to be proactive. To head things off, I snuck my phone out of my pocket. Discreetly, under my seat, using one thumb and not even looking at the keys, I texted Bethany:

Thnkn of u

I knew she probably wouldn’t reply because she was the kind of person who never texted during classes. Bethany was a straight-A student, the kind that follows the rules.

I pushed the boxes on the desk to try to make a little more room, but they wouldn’t budge. I was only working with like two inches. With a shove of my shoulder, I purchased one more inch, enough for my forearm to rest. As I lowered my hand, it came to rest on a corner of a yellowed paper sticking out from under the boxes. I tugged at it and freed it from its prison, curious as to how long it had been there.

What I found was a lined page from a 5x7 spiral notepad. A faint green line divided the page in half, and the top was frayed from having been ripped out. Written on it was a short note not addressed to anyone or signed, like something that might have been passed eons ago during a class and shoved under a box so a teacher couldn’t find it.

None of this seemed all that odd except that the words were in the exact same cursive handwriting as the carved Eileen on the desktop. It had to have been written by the same person.

Hairs raised on the back of my neck. I didn’t know why I got spooked like that. I mean, it made a certain amount of sense that once upon a time some guy sat at this desk carving his girlfriend’s name into the wood and writing a note to a friend. It’s just that, after all these years, how weird was it that I discovered them both on the same day?

I tried to read the note, but it was really hard for me to decipher. I pulled out a fresh piece of my notebook paper and wrote the letters I thought I recognized with little placeholder dashes for the letters I couldn’t figure out. In the end, I had some horrible Wheel of Fortune game with no clues to help me decide if I wanted to buy a consonant or a vowel.

Jill, I called out. She was still playing teacher’s pet and flitting about the room. I waved my book at her like I had a problem with it. She huffed back over to me.

No trading. You get what you get. I think she was trying to sound stern, but her helium voice just made me want to laugh at her. I stifled my smile.

No, it’s not that. I held up the fragile note and winced. Can you read this?

Are you stupid, Mark? she asked.

No, Jill, I returned with an equal amount of attitude. I just can’t read cursive.

She gave it a once over and then handed it back without a word.

Well? I asked.

It doesn’t mean anything. Just some note someone passed in class once.

At the edge of my patience, I asked, What does it say?

"Read, Mark. What does the note read? A note can’t say anything."

Seriously?

Jill did her snotty face, another thing she perfected in kindergarten and never let go.

I tried again, rephrasing my question correctly to appease her only because I really needed to know the answer. "What does the note read?"

She sighed, took it back again, and then read it aloud:

What kind of note was that? Does it even make sense? You can’t even spell, let alone romance a girl. Try again.

Jill handed the letter back to me. Does that mean anything to you? It’s a little vague to me. And pretty rude.

I shook my head and stared at the cursive words, watching the loops and dots magically morph into something I could decipher.

Hey look, Mark, Jill said. Mrs. Hollstein said to start reading page 282. I don’t know if you heard her.

Oh, I said distractedly, thanks. I put the note down and opened my book. Jill went back to parading around with textbooks and handouts.

Some weird story about a boring dinner party full of dead people passed by my eyes, but I didn’t take any of it in. The note was on my mind. It was so strange to read only a part of a conversation. I wondered who this guy had been writing to and what had prompted this response. Surely he wasn’t picking on lovely Eileen’s letter writing skills. That wouldn’t have won him any points.

To be honest, it felt a little like the letter was written to me. I had just dashed out a poorly spelled, pointless love message a moment before that note appeared.

No. That was ridiculous.

The note could be fifty, maybe even sixty years old for all I knew.

Still, I felt compelled to pull out my phone again. Hiding it inside my book, and thankful Mrs. Hollstein was preoccupied on the phone up front arguing to someone in the front office about her class being over-full, I typed a new text. This time I used full words, which is something I’d never done before. It took a couple of minutes.

You look sexy in those jeans today. Cant wait to see more of you at lunch.

Okay, so I didn’t put in an apostrophe on can’t. Otherwise, I thought I spelled everything right. That was an effort, too. I didn’t have one of those fancy smart phones with an automatic spelling corrector. I had an older phone, a hand-me-down from my mom that didn’t have any memory for apps. All I could do was text, call, and access my email. It was my fault. I accidentally drove over one phone and dropped another in a toilet. My parents said they weren’t ever going to get me another good phone. If I wanted one, I’d have to buy it myself. Up until now, the cheap phone and my texting shorthand were all I needed. I read my text again and nodded, proud of myself, feeling confident that my compliment of her awesome body would win me a kiss in public at noon.

I hit send.

When I was done, I pulled out the note and filled in the blanks on my cheat sheet with the correct letters. Now I felt like I had a key to the cursive code. If I found another note—which I knew was unlikely—maybe I could decipher it without Jill’s busy-body help.

The bell rang, and I scooped up my bag from the floor and stuffed my new, heavy English textbook into it. The note and my folded-up practice page went in my back pocket. I walked to my next class, waiting for the familiar buzz of my phone as Bethany texted me back with some appreciative reply.

It never came.

Chapter Two

I scanned the hallway for Bethany. I didn’t know her new schedule for the semester, but I remembered her telling me she was going to have a full load of AP classes. If she was headed for Physics or Calculus, she’d be on the other side of campus. I didn’t have any math or science classes left that I had to take to graduate and had no intention of entering those halls again. Too many bad memories, and those teachers were not my friends.

I took heavy steps through the hallway to American Government class, the silence from her weighing me down. Why was she ignoring me? Had I done something wrong?

Quickly choosing an empty desk for second period, I sat down and plopped my backpack at my feet. Five minutes later I had a new textbook to cram in there with the other one. When I unzipped my bag, I caught a glimpse of a piece of yellowed note paper before it slipped down into the depths of my pack. Certain I’d put the note in my pocket, I gave it a pat to hear the familiar crunch of folded paper. So, what was that in my bag? Had there been a second page, and I missed it?

I yanked out the Government and English textbooks, stacking them both on my desk. Then I dug around at the bottom of my backpack for the note. I regretted now not taking the time over Winter Break to clean the bag out like my mom had told me to. So many candy wrappers, crumpled up worksheets, broken pencils, and inkless pens lined the bottom of my black backpack that it would be amazing if I found it at all. I thought that because the note was yellow, it might stand out, but a lot of Starburst wrappers are yellow, too, and I have a thing for that candy. I picked through the mess as best as possible, but I never saw the elusive paper. I opened my English textbook on my desk and rifled through the pages. That forced the yellow note to puff out at me from the pages where it had lodged itself.

Mr. Dowd, my government teacher, Mr. Antenore, barked at me. This is not English class, nor is it time to organize your belongings. Kindly put your things away and open your book to the pages written on the board.

Yes sir, I said, quickly palming the note. I shoved everything else in the basket under my seat. Before I got called out again, I opened my textbook. We were supposed to be looking at the Table of Contents page as a class, but personally I was studying another letter written on the same yellow paper in the same pretty cursive as the first one. I pinned the note to my book page with my right thumb and pinned the code key I’d created to the book with my left thumb. Glancing back and forth, I slowly made sense of it.

Choose your compliments carefully. Some words aren’t for love letters. They come across as crude and terse. Some words are only for private moments when you are together. A love letter needs lovely words.

What on Earth? What did it mean? And what the heck did crude and terse mean? Who used words like that?

"Choose your words better, man, I muttered, so I can understand you."

What was that, Mr. Dowd?

Nothing, sir, I said, turning the page with the letter inside and hiding my secret.

I should hope not.

I tried really hard to concentrate on class. It felt like the note was trying to burn through the pages of the textbook and get in front of my eyes again. I’m sure it was my imagination, but when I put my hand on the left side of the book, it felt hot instead of the way cool, glossy textbook pages are supposed to feel.

Mostly, I found myself wondering what the notes were about. The guy was trying to give romantic advice to someone, but who? I kind of wished I could see the other half of this conversation. Or maybe, since I found them in English class, they were just jotted notes about something they were reading. Was that possible? I didn’t know much about literature. Was there a book about someone learning to write romantic notes? I needed to stop obsessing about it and focus on school. When class was over, I flipped back to the Table of Contents page to look at the note one more time. My cursive cheat sheet was there, but the note was gone. I reached into my back pocket. The other note was gone, too.

I scrambled through my backpack again while all my classmates got up and left the room. The notes had completely disappeared. Mr. Antenore finally came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. You’ll be late for third period if you don’t get a move on.

I apologized, tucked my textbook against my chest, threw my backpack over my shoulder, and got out of there before I did anything else to get on my teacher’s nerves. I practically ran down the hall to my Spanish II class. I didn’t find another note in this class, and I thought that was funny. I half expected to find one telling me that French was a more romantic language than Spanish, since both the other notes had a weird way of correlating to my actions. Pleased to not have a scribbled note implying that I was doing something wrong, I was able to relax a little bit. I had fun going over all the words and phrases we learned in Beginning Spanish to see what we remembered. I’m actually pretty good at Spanish, compared to my other academics, and soon I was able to get the notes off my mind.

Bethany, however, stayed ever present in my thoughts. The day dwindled on with no word from her. Finally, fourth period, one of my J.R.O.T.C. electives, let out for lunch. I went right to the spot where I’d seen Bethany eating lunch for three and a half years, hoping I’d get to officially join her friends as her boyfriend. Only, she wasn’t there. Kat and Lissy shrugged at me and said they didn’t know where she was, but I had a feeling they were lying. They also neglected to invite me to sit down and wait for her.

I headed over to my old table with the guys who had been my buddies since grade school, almost tripping three times because I was looking around for her and not at where I was going. Finally, I saw her on the stairwell, leaving the cafeteria. For some reason she’d tied a sweatshirt around her waist, completely obscuring that delicious swish of her behind in those skinny jeans.

I stood up and called her name. Bethany turned and raised a finger at me as if to say, Just a minute!

I texted her: ???

I watched her pull out her phone. Without looking back at me, she continued up the stairs and out of sight. Her reply: Busy now. See you later.

She had a quality phone and didn’t use text shorthand. I bet she even spoke into the voice recorder and said period after each statement to make sure her texts had correct punctuation.

But what was going on with that reply? See me when? I thought we’d planned on lunches together. We didn’t share any classes. She had Debate Team after school, and I had my job. Lunch was going to be our only time together. Without that, our relationship wasn’t going to be much more than texts and phone calls. That wasn’t what I wanted at all.

I sent her a half-hearted: Cant w8

After I hit send, I read back the texts of the day between her and me. What I’d texted to her did seem really lame now that I looked at it. I was as romantic as a stale fortune cookie. Maybe I shouldn’t have texted the thing about her being sexy in the jeans. It was true. She looked freakin’ amazing in those jeans. But maybe she took it the wrong way. Maybe I’d been too forward or insulted her.

I thought about that odd note I’d found during American Government. My text to Bethany had been crude and terse. The note had been telling me that.

Wait. No. Was that possible?

My heart began to race and painful chills rain down my arms and legs. Two things had me terrified:

I might lose Bethany—and—those notes weren’t coincidental. They were meant for me.

Whoever it was writing the notes had to be someone really stealthy to be able to slip them into strategic places for me to find and then return to make them disappear again. Also, it was someone with a keen interest in my love life and how I was conducting myself.

My friends at my table were busy with their phones or gaming devices. No one was really talking much except to say, Look at this! or the occasional cuss when they messed up. I hadn’t told any of them about Bethany yet even though I’m sure they would cheer me on. None of them had much experience with girls, certainly not enough to give me advice that would be of any value. None of them, as far as I knew, had ever written a love letter or a poem that wasn’t required for some English assignment. Plus, none of them were in my classes that morning. Who else would care about the quality of my texts to Bethany?

The whole thing had a stalker feel to it. That didn’t make a lick of sense to me, though. I’m not the kind of guy that a girl stalks. I shot up over the summer last year, so I’m not as short as I used to be. The five-year war I’d been fighting with pimples was finally coming to an end. Mom insisted that my shoulders were broad like my dad’s, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I was thin, and the wide shoulders made me look gangly. I never thought of myself as one of the good-looking guys, and the fact that Bethany even gave me a chance seemed like a minor miracle. So, who on earth would be interested in me to the point of stalking?

Or maybe it wasn’t about me at all. It could be that girl, Sadie Jones, who bought all the same clothes as Bethany and tried to imitate her all the time? Girls like her creeped me out. I could believe someone like her would send me weird notes like this to get in the middle of what was going on between Bethany and me.

I almost convinced myself of that and found myself scanning the cafeteria for Sadie to see where she was sitting when another thought hit me. Nether Sadie, nor anyone else for that matter, would have been able to read the texts I sent Bethany. I had been in the back of the room when I sent them, and odds were Bethany didn’t even have her phone out, let alone on, during class. No one could have known what I wrote, and therefore no one could tell me that I wrote the notes badly.

Everyone else in the cafeteria was busy talking, eating, and cutting up with their friends. No one was looking at me as far as I could tell. But I felt like there were eyes on me. Right over my shoulder. The feeling made my shoulder tingle, like when someone is too close, and I shrugged uncomfortably.

I couldn’t eat. I threw my lunch away and headed to my next class where I barely concentrated on the P.E. soccer game. All I could think about were those creepy notes and my stupid cell phone, wondering if I get a new message from either of them. I checked everything when I got back to the locker room before I dressed. Not so much as an emoticon from Bethany and no new notes. No sixth period this final semester of school had seemed awesome when I made my schedule, but Bethany did have a full load, so I wouldn’t get to say hey or anything to her before heading out to the parking lot. All I could do was hope we’d talk on the phone later that night.

Chapter Three

After school I went straight to work. Hours passed slowly as I roller-skated from car to car with burgers and shakes. The only thing that broke the monotony was letting my mind wander back to the night right before Christmas when Bethany showed up by herself at closing time.

I didn’t know it was her at first, because I didn’t know that she drove a steel blue Prius. All I knew was that whoever it was that drove in at a quarter to midnight turned off her motor and all the lights. That was not normal for people who stopped in the evenings, especially so close to us locking up. My manager, Miguel, told me to let the driver know we were about to close but to be careful, just in case it was a set up for a robbery. Cautiously, I skated toward the car, kind of expecting the worst. I steeled myself for some kind of assault, reminding myself that I was going to be a soldier soon and could handle it.

Then this beautiful pale arm reached out of the open window, her pointer finger aiming for the call button and not quite reaching it. It looked like a petal dropping from a flower, so delicate and graceful. I stopped halfway between the store and the car, frozen at the sight and suddenly unsure of what to do. I peeked back over my shoulder at Miguel who was inside the hub using both arms to wave me onward. I couldn’t hear him, but I could read his lips shouting Go!

I moved forward again, coming up to the side of the car. She was leaning pretty far out the window; her entire arm to her shoulder was out. Even at that, she still couldn’t reach the button. I could see her lovely brunette hair, and then I knew who she was. The girl I’d had a crush on since seventh grade.

Excuse me, I said, trying not to spook her.

Oh. It was a quiet sound. I’d startled but not scared her. And I think she was a touch embarrassed, for she quickly lowered her face and let her curls hide it. That move wasn’t fast enough to prevent me from seeing the mascara smeared down her cheeks.

Um, we’re about to close. Can I get you something?

I just want a chocolate shake and fries. Is it too late for that?

No. I’ll get right on it.

Oh, and Mark? She raised her head. I caught my breath, amazed that she said my name. I mean, I figured she knew who I was after all this time, but she didn’t have to acknowledge me. She was Bethany Rivers, one of the smartest, most beautiful girls in school. I was a dumb guy working in fast food. We didn’t exactly hang in the