Whitney Barbetti (the first standalone in this series), keep reading!
CHAPTER ONE
Three years ago
It started with a note.
“Adam. I loved your speech.”
No name. No identifying markers besides those five words. Well, unless you counted the hastily drawn rose, and the petals that I had doodled under them. I wasn’t an artist, that was for sure. I held that sticky note in my pocket for a long time, eventually transferring it to reside behind the mirror in my locker. I didn’t actually have the courage to slip it into his locker until our shared class on Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and Their Adaptations had long been over.
We were firmly in the second semester of our senior year, schedules packed with last-minute credits and classes that would look good on our final transcripts. I wanted to wait so that he wouldn’t remember who was in that class with him. Not that I was particularly memorable, one way or another.
And the note itself was unremarkable, without context. But I knew what it’d taken for him to stand in front of a class full of jocks who were failing a class on fairy tales, to lay out his speech on the symbolism of the rose in Beauty and the Beast—the Disney version. “Roses ordinarily bloom slowly, taking their time to reveal their beauty.”
If I was a fanciful person—and let’s just say I was—I ached to be compared to a rose. Not because they were beautiful, but because they made you wait to witness that beauty. His entire speech had captivated me, but if I was being honest, Adam Oliver had fascinated me long before he stood in front of our class and spoke eloquently and beautifully about my favorite Disney movie.
We were eighteen, so my girlish crush and fascination with fairy tales were probably pathetic to some. Like the entire group of jocks, who laughed at him when the rest of us—the handful who had actually paid attention—clapped. The same guys who hadn’t prepared their speeches and would ultimately fail the class laughed at Adam Oliver.
Though he’d held his head high as he returned to his seat, there had been a certain kind of defeat in Adam’s eyes, a defeat that made my heart pinch. I had angled my chair away from the jocks who’d laughed and the circle of people I normally aligned myself with, most of whom had all but ignored Adam’s speech. I wasn’t sure which was worse: being ignored or being laughed at.
Which brought us to the day I decided to finally suck it up and slip the note into his locker. I had a free period that morning, which meant I would be able to slip it into his locker undetected after the bell rang. As casually as possible, I slid my hand under my locker mirror and pulled the note out, staring at it for a moment. There was a big party that weekend, at Seth McCauley’s house, to celebrate the start of Spring Break. I didn’t know if Adam would go, but I suspected he might. As the end of senior year approached, I felt compelled to stop being such a wuss. So I flipped the note over and wrote, “See you at Seth’s this weekend.” It kind of killed the brief part of the front of the sticky note, but I hoped that in putting it out there, I would actually suck it up and say hi to the guy I had crushed on for a pathetically long time.
“What’s up, toots?” Tori asked, practically slamming into my locker door from the other side. I shoved the note under a textbook and turned to her. I confided in Tori a lot, but when it came to this—I just didn’t feel like sharing.
“Nothing. Getting ready for my free period.”
Tori opened my locker door, looking at her reflection in the mirror. “Oh, another thrilling hour in the library.”
“There are a lot of good books in there,” I said defensively.
Tori slid a tube of something shiny out of her purse and held it to me. When I shook my head, she shrugged and began applying it to her lips. “I bet there are. But I don’t have a free period. I would get too bored. Probably wind up in trouble.”
She wasn’t wrong. Though academically gifted, Tori had never really outgrown her boy crazy phase. “Who is it this week?” I asked.
“Keane is looking hotttt,” she said in a hushed voice.
“Haven’t you—”
“Yes,” she said, reading my mind. “Been there, hit that.” She