She left them anywhere.
I wonder if the police know.
I wonder if I should tell them.
THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN
Once upon a time, a girl and a boy went to the forest without their parents. They walked until they found a tree wide as the sky, a cemetery full of flowers, and best of all, a mountain of stones better than any witch’s house of candy, because it was theirs. Back at home, there were parents who told them to fatten up or skinny down, who said that they must save money for school and study and stop believing in fairy world. But at the mountain of stones, it was only the two of them, and that was enough.
Sometimes they got lost. Sometimes they didn’t want to be found. But it was a big forest and a bigger world, and whenever they went anywhere without each other, they left trails of stones that led all the way back to each other.
Because they loved each other with the biggest love of all.
before
SEPTEMBER 10
Ander Cameron is on a ten-phase, month-long, totally non-creepy schedule to fall in love with me. I spent two weeks planning us out on pages 158 to 176 of my last journal, and he—bless his beautiful heart—has rushed ahead this morning. Being the most perfect person in all the inhabitable planets in the universe, Ander Cameron has brought me coffee this morning. He didn’t have to do that for another week, but god, isn’t punctuality hot? (It totally is.)
And it gets better—he did it right! Chocolate hazelnut latte with chocolate whipped cream. He walks into English, slides it down on my desk, flashes those perfectly perfect teeth, and says, “Hey. That’s what Piper usually grabs, right?”
One of the perks of being best friends with Piper Blythe is that she lives right next to Starbucks and picks up coffee every morning. But Piper is at an orthodontist appointment today, and I had already steeled myself to the horrible reality of trying to survive today without caffeine, even though I’m still trying to make up the sleep I lost for Carrie, and then—well, hello, Prince freaking Charming.
“You’re the best,” I tell him, like he doesn’t already know, and fluff out my hair in his direction so he can catch a whiff. Lemon raspberry keratin strengthening shampoo and conditioner—I smell like a freaking sunrise. And it works! He leans in, just a little bit, but the little things matter most.
But he, on the other hand, smells like salt and deodorant, which is preferable to, like, no deodorant, I guess. He smells like salt in my head too, just more like the ocean and less like sweat. Alas, life isn’t perfect. Who knew?
Here is what you should know about Ander Cameron:
1. His soul is the color of a humid day, when there’s just the thinnest layer of clouds hiding the sky. You know there’s something behind there—it might be rain or sun or thunder, but you can’t quite tell yet.
2. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, he goes to the community college and strips—I mean disrobes—for the drawing class. Ander isn’t beach-boy hot, he’s hand-assembled-by-God hot. He’s made of the kind of angel parts that would have had Michelangelo swooning, and he pretends not to know.
3. Okay, so he’s kind of a douchebag. That’s okay, though. It’s high school. Everyone’s a douchebag.
The bell rings, and someone nasally comes on the PA and says the pledge, and Mr. Markus does attendance, and Micah and Dewey still aren’t here. Mr. Markus sighs when he sees their empty desks (again) and passes a hand over his face. He has time-travel hands, at least twenty years older than the rest of him, wrinkled and veined and knobby, nails like moons. I sketch them on the desk while he talks. (I figure that the no-drawing-on-desks rule mostly applies to penises.)
“The first part of your senior projects is due today,” says Mr. Markus. Collective sigh from the class, but not me, because I’ve talked my way into an extension. We’re supposed to write an autobiography, because you have to understand yourself before you can understand anything else.
But my project is multimedia and my autobio is going to document my process—I’m fracturing fairy tales and fracturing them again until they fit my life, and it isn’t due until the end of the year. Anyway, Mr. Markus couldn’t argue when I told him I knew myself pretty well already.
“As of five minutes ago,” he continues, “I’ve received four. This is pitiful. I want to remind all of you that your senior projects are seventy-five percent of your English grade. Fail this and you won’t graduate. Work.”