other end, like he used to do. He climbs under the covers with his jeans and T-shirt still on and curls onto his side, facing me.
We lie there. Head to head. Feet to feet.
As I start to drift to sleep, his eyes—open, green, beautiful—are the last things I see. His soft, even breath the last thing I hear.
Until …
“Ellie?”
“Yeah?” I murmur, half awake.
“I won’t remember any of this tomorrow, will I?”
My throat stings as I feel the tears form behind my closed eyelids. “No.”
Tomorrow I’ll wake up, he’ll be gone, and I’ll be alone again.
I assume he’s fallen asleep, because for a long time there’s nothing but silence. I feel myself drifting off. I feel the darkness taking me under. I steel myself for what I know will happen next.
The morning light will stream through my window. My phone—back together in one piece—will ding with Tristan’s first text message. I’ll knock over my water reaching for it. I’ll pick up Owen from school and everything—everything—will start all over again.
I wait for it.
I wait for it.
I wait for it.
And just as sleep pulls me under and the last glimmers of consciousness flicker out, I hear Owen say, “Then I won’t remember telling you that I’ve been in love with you since middle school.”
The Way We Were (Part 5)
Four months ago …
You have no idea how fast news can spread in high school until you become that news. The Monday after Tristan kissed me in his bedroom and took me out for pizza, I became a different person. I became a known entity. My name didn’t matter. All that mattered was my new status: “Tristan Wheeler’s Girlfriend.”
For the first half of the day, I thought I had put my clothes on backward, stepped in dog poop, broken out in hives, been the victim of a social media hack. Hundreds of explanations for the sudden attention flooded through my mind. None of them were the right one. Because never, in a million years, would I have ever guessed that dating Tristan Wheeler would attract this much attention. People whispered about me in the hallways, girls sized me up in the bathroom, I got at least twenty new followers on Instagram in a matter of hours.
I felt like the mistress in a political scandal.
I was grateful when school let out for summer break a month later. The sudden interest was unnerving me. I had started taking longer routes to class to avoid inquisitive eyes. I had stopped using the bathroom at school, convinced that girls were judging the sound of my pee.
The entire time, I don’t think Tristan ever knew.
This was his life. The attention was part of his existence. It never occurred to him that it wasn’t part of mine. And I never mentioned it. I dealt with it myself, in private. I didn’t want to be the girl who complained about her boyfriend’s popularity and its adverse effect on her.
The first time I witnessed Tristan’s influence over people—namely girls—was the first Whack-a-Mole gig I ever attended. It was on the last night of school, at a small club two towns over that allowed minors inside before eleven p.m.
The place was packed. I didn’t know how my entire school could fit into this cramped space, but somehow they managed.
“You know you’re my good luck charm,” Tristan said to me backstage, a few minutes before they went on. He was tuning his guitar and I was sitting on a black drum case, fiddling with the metal snap, flicking it open and closed and open and closed.
“You probably say that to all the girls you take backstage.”
He stopped tuning and looked at me, his blue eyes serious. “I’ve never taken anyone backstage.”
My fingers froze against the snap.
“It’s true,” Jackson, the drummer, vouched. “You’re the first.” He patted my side, urging me off the case so he could pull something out of it.
I hopped down. “Really?”
Tristan flashed me his killer dimple. “Really.”
“Why is that?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to be distracted right before a show. I wanted time to focus.”
I walked up to him, tilting my chin up to look into his eyes. “Am I not a distraction?” I asked coyly.
He bent down to graze his lips against mine. “You are the very best kind of distraction.”
“Maybe you should kick me out then,” I murmured into his mouth.
His hands fell from the strings and wrapped around my waist, pulling me into him. The guitar banged against my hip but I didn’t complain. “Never,” he said, and