The summer Tiffany Thompson turned sixteen, the air in Fairview smelled different. It wasn't just the honeysuckle climbing the chain-link fence by the high school or the faint chlorine from the public pool. It was the scent of possibility, heavy and sweet as overripe peaches. Tiffany, with her sun-streaked brown hair and a constellation of freckles across her nose, was ready to fall in love.
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.
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.
“You dropped this,” Lucas said.
The summer Tiffany Thompson turned sixteen, the air in Fairview smelled different. It wasn't just the honeysuckle climbing the chain-link fence by the high school or the faint chlorine from the public pool. It was the scent of possibility, heavy and sweet as overripe peaches. Tiffany, with her sun-streaked brown hair and a constellation of freckles across her nose, was ready to fall in love.
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.
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.
“You dropped this,” Lucas said.