Tiffany held the earring in her palm, feeling the ghost weight of a summer that had ended before it was finished. She thought about the girl she’d been—freckled, hopeful, certain that love was a thing you could hold onto if you just tried hard enough. She thought about Lucas, somewhere out there, still writing poems on napkins.
Lucas was a new kind of creature. He’d moved from somewhere upstate, a place with actual mountains, not just the gentle hills of Fairview. He had shaggy dark hair that fell over his eyes and a way of leaning against things—the ticket booth, the tilt-a-whirl, the bleachers—as if he was too tired for the world. He was fixing a jammed Skee-Ball machine, his long fingers working the mechanism with a lazy precision. tiffany thompson teenagers in love
Last week, a package arrived at her door. No return address. Inside was a single silver hoop earring—the one that wasn’t hers—and a napkin with a poem written in faded blue ink. Tiffany held the earring in her palm, feeling
And just like that, the summer tilted on its axis. Lucas was a new kind of creature
Because she understood now what she hadn’t at sixteen: teenagers in love don’t get the ending. They get the beginning. The messy, magnificent, heartbreaking beginning that teaches you how to feel everything all at once. And if you’re lucky, it teaches you how to survive the feeling when it goes.
“I know,” he said, and a real smile broke through his tired-boy facade. It was crooked and a little shy. “But it was the only thing I could think of to say that wouldn’t sound completely stupid. Hi. I’m Lucas.”