could be better than my sign. My baseball kind of looks like a basketball.”
“I love it,” Walsh said, pulling something from his car and offering it out to me. “So, I went walking around my yard yesterday, just needing to think. I went out to the railing and saw it, plain as day. When you threw it, it must’ve landed on a rock. It didn’t get washed away with the tide.”
It took me a long, long moment to recognize the rectangular object in his hand for what it was—with the stickers emblazoned on the front and the scratch along the bottom corner.
It was my writer’s notebook.
The edges of the pages were wrinkled a bit from the heavy rain we got, but since it was hardbound, it was relatively okay. I flipped open to a random page, the ink still intact.
I didn’t realize the significance of seeing it until something turned over in my chest, like a lock undoing itself, allowing a tidal wave of pressure and relief to burst through my bloodstream. My journal. My writer’s notebook. It was here. It hadn’t been eaten by the sea. Walsh found it, saved it, and was offering it out to me.
He couldn’t have known how important this was to me, how desperately I’d been missing this bundle of paper. A part of my soul. I was itching, desperate to get my hands on it, to feel it solid underneath my fingertips. Maybe even more importantly, I wanted to kiss Walsh.
So I did both.
I grabbed onto the journal while pushing onto my tip-toes, finding his lips with my own. His other arm came around me, holding me close against the fabric of his jersey and the firmness of his body. It was the most comfortable place in the world, being in his grasp. And I fit so perfectly, like I’d always meant to be in his arms.
My eyes closed as every inch of me hummed with happiness. I realized I’d experienced it with my mom the other morning, being in her arms, hearing her comforting words. “Thank you,” I said, reaching up and tracing the angle of his jaw with a fingertip. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”
“I might have an idea,” he murmured in response, kissing that finger, sending a flicker of flames down my spine. “Every writer needs their notebook.”
I wrapped my arms around Walsh’s waist and held on tight, basking in his embrace, even as the rain still sprinkled from the sky.
I’d been so close to losing this, to missing out on this. On never feeling his arms around me again, never feeling his lips brush the top of my head, never feeling his fluttering heartbeat through his shirt. I’d been too consumed in my own life, my own world, that I almost lost this entirely.
But Mom and Edith were right. I wasn’t by myself in life; others were around me. It wasn’t just about me and my dreams, and I thanked the universe and all the stars in the sky that my eyes opened before it was too late.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I didn’t have an article to submit to Mrs. Gao by the deadline, but I didn’t feel sad about it. It really felt bittersweet. Before, I’d been dead-set on reinstating the newspaper at school, that that was the only key to my future in journalism. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot. Just because Bayview High didn’t have a newspaper didn’t mean I had to stop writing. Just because I wasn’t going to get the senior internship at the Blade didn’t mean my career was over.
This summer gave me something I didn’t have before: perspective. Everything happened for a reason—I knew that now, from how everything worked out with my parents and with Walsh—and I believed that my writing would work out, too.
Positive Thinking and I were now BFFs.
The day after the school’s board meeting, Mom, Walsh, Dad, and I all sat in the living room watching a movie. Walsh and I cuddled up on the chaise lounge while Mom and Dad sat on the couch together.
My cell chimed with an email going through, and I saw that Mrs. Gao sent me an email that read “Stay by your phone today.” I brushed it off, thinking she’d sent it to the wrong person.
Well, I’d thought that until my cell phone started to ring. “Hello?” I said, taking a glance at Walsh. He’d been running his fingertips along the side of my leg, which was pressed