Jenny Han

“I had been lying to myself, thinking I was free, thinking I had let him go. It didn't matter what he said or did, I'd never let him go." - Belly Conklin”

“We didn’t know what was ahead of us then. We were just two teenagers, looking up at the sky on a cold February night. So no, he didn’t give me flowers or candy. He gave me the moon and the stars. Infinity.”

“My dad once told me that Winstone Churchill said that Russia was riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. According to my dad, Churchill had been talking about my mother. This was before the divorce, and he said it half-bitterly, half-respectfully. Because even when he hated her, he admired her.I think he would have stayed with her forever, trying to figure out the mystery. He was a puzzle solver, the kind of person who likes theorems, theories. X always had to equal something. It couldn't just be X.To me, my mother wasn't that mysterious. She was my mother. Always reasonable, always sure of herself. To me, she was about as mysterious as a glass fo water. She knew what she wanted; she knew what she didn't want. And that was to be married to my father. I wasn't sure if it was that she fell our of love or if it was that she just never was. in love, I mean.”

“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer”

“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them,that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.”

“The future is unclear. But it’s still mine.”

“Instead I let the moment pass and I just sighed and leaned back onto my chair. The sky was pinky gold. I had the feeling that there was nothingmore beautiful than this, that this particular sunset matched the beauty of anythingin this world, ten times over. I could feel all the tension of the day drifting away from me and out to sea. I wanted to memorize it all in case I didn’t get to come back again. You never know the last time you’ll see a place. A person.”

“When I gothome, my mother was so mad. But I didn’t regret it. I never regretted it, not for onesecond. How do you regret one of the best nights of your entire life? You don’t. Youremember every word, every look. Even when it hurts, you still remember.”

“The first time I saw him again, it was another year, at my college graduation. And I just knew.”

“I finally said it. The actual words, out loud, to her face. It was a relief, not carrying it around anymore, and it was a rush, actually telling her. I was in an elated sort of daze, on a high. She loved me. I didn’t need to hear her say it out loud, I knew it innately in the way she looked at me just then.Conrad Fisher”

“Suddenly I had this feeling, this absolute certainty, that I was never going to be able to let him go. It was as simple and as hard as that. I had clung to him like a barnacle all these years, and now I couldn’t cut away. It was my own fault, really. I couldn’t let go of Conrad.”

“Things weren’t the same with us, not right away, and maybe not ever. We were growing up. We were still figuring out how to be in each other’s lives without being everything to each other.”

“When I used to picture forever, it was always with the same boy. In my dreams, my future was set. A sure thing. This isn’t the way I’d pictured it. … The future is unclear. But it’s still mine.”

“In his eyes, there was no trace of what had happened earlier, and I could feel something inside me break. So that was that. We were finally, finally over.”

“But I loved that house, and I hated to say good-bye. Because, it was more than just a house. It was every summer, every boat ride, every sunset. It was Susannah.”

“But I had loved him. I loved him longer and truer than I had anyone in my whole life and I would probably never love anyone that way again. Which to be honest was almost a relief.”

“Nothing, nothing felt better than the way sand felt beneath my feet. It was both solid and shifting. Constant and ever-changing. It was summer.”

“You never know the last time you’ll see a place. A person.”

“I whispered “I’m not,” even though I was. Not scared of him, but scared of everything I felt. Sometimes it was too much. What I felt for him was bigger than the world, than anything.”

“My dad always used to say that with everything in life, there’s a game-changing moment. The one moment everything else hinges upon, but you hardly ever know it at the time.”

“It wasn’t was easy as picking one over the other. Nothing ever was. It wasn’t as though I’d even had a choice, not really.”

“Gone had come to mean something different, in a way that is hadn’t used to. Something permanent.”

“And then I had a thought, clear as day. I would never be somebody's favorite again. I would never be a kid again, not in the same way. That was all over now. She was really gone.”

“It’s all relative, I suppose. You think you know love, you think you know real pain, but you don’t. You don’t know anything.”

“In the pool, on that last night of the last summer, we said we’d always come back. It’s scary how easy promises were broken. Just like that.”

“Taylor wanted me to forget about Conrad, to just erase him from my mind and memory. She kept saying things like, “everybody has to get over a first love, it’s a rite of passage.” But Conrad wasn’t just my first love. He wasn’t some rite of passage. He was so much more than that. He and Jeremiah and Susannah were my family. In my memory, the three of them would always be entwined, forever linked. There couldn’t be one without the others. If I forgot Conrad, if I evicted him from my heart, pretended like he was never there, it would be like doing those tings to Susannah. And that, I couldn’t do.”

“I used to believe. I used to think that if I wanted it bad enough, wished hard enough, everything would work out the way It was supposed to. Destiny, like Susannah said.”

“When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?”

“I love Conrad and I probably always would. I would spend my whole life loving him one way or another. Maybe I would get married, maybe I would have a family, but it wouldn’t matter, because a piece of my heart, the piece where summer lived, would always be Conrad’s”

“It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.”

“Excuse me, fuck you.”

“The thing was, Jeremiah was right. I did love him. I knew the exact moment it became real too. Conrad got up early to make a special belatedFather's Day breakfast, only Mr. Fisher hadn't been able to come down the night before. He wasn't there the next morning the way he wassupposed to be. Conrad cooked anyway, and he was thirteen and a terrible cook, but we all ate it. Watching him serving rubbery eggs andpretending not to be sad, I thought to myself, I will love this boy forever.”

“We sat around the kitchen table picking off of foil-covered plates. Conrad kept sneaking looks at me, and every time I looked back, he looked away. I'm right here, I wanted to tell him. I'm still here.”

“I hated him more than anything. I loved him more than anything. Because, he was everything. And I hated that, too.”

“I would rather have had someone shoot me in the head with a nail gun, repeatedly, than have to watch the two of them cuddling on the couch together all night. --Conrad”

“You just want to keep me on this hook, right? So I'll keep chasing after you and you can feel good about yourself. As soon as I start to get over you, you just reel me back in. You're so screwed up in the head. But I'm telling you, this is it. You don't get to have me anymore. Not as your friend or your admirer or anything. I'm through.”

“Maybe that was how it was with all first loves. They own a little piece of your heart, always. Conrad at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen years old.”

“That night I dreamed of Conrad. I was the same age I was now, but he was younger, ten or eleven maybe. I think he might even have been wearingoveralls. We played outside my house until it got dark, just running around the yard.I said, “Susannah will be wondering where you are. You should go home.” He said, “I can’t. I don’t know how.Will you help me?” And then I was sad, because I didn’t know how either. We weren’t at my house anymore, and it was so dark. We were in thewoods. We were lost.When I woke up, I was crying and Jeremiah was asleep next to me. I sat up in the bed. It was dark, the only light in the room was my alarm clock. Itread 4:57. I lay back down.”

“For me there was-is-nothing better than walking on the beach late at night. It feels like you could walk forever, like the whole night is yours and so is the ocean. When you walk on the beach at night, you can say things you can't say in real life. In the dark you can feel really close to a person. You can say whatever you want.”

“Sometimes it hurts to look at you,” I said. I loved that I could say that and he knew exactly what I meant.”

“When it's finals week and you've been studying for five hours straight, you need three things to get you through the nigh.The biggest Slurpee you can find,half cherry half Coke.Pajama pants, the kind that have been washed so many times they are tissue-paper thin. And finally,dance breaks. Lots of dance breaks.”

“Do you like Cam?” the girl asked me casually. I wondered how she knew him—I thought he’d been a nobody just like me.“I barely even know him,” I told her, and her face relaxed. She was relieved. I recognized that look in her eyes—dreamy and hopeful. It must have been the way I looked when I used to talk about Conrad, used to try to think of ways to insert his name into conversation. It made me sad for her, for me.”

“I'd never heard of them, but at that moment, it was the best song I'd ever heard. I went out and bought Ten and listened to it on repeat. When I listened to track five, "Black," it was like I was there, in that moment all over again.After the summer was over, when I got back home, I went to the music store and bought the sheet music and learned to play it on the piano. I thought one day I could accompany Conrad and we could be, like, a band.”

“We were just two teenagers, looking up at the sky on a cold February night. So no, he didn’t give me flowers or candy. He gave me the moon and the stars. Infinity.”

“I didn't want to make the same mistake my parents made. I didn't want my love to fade away one day like an old scar. I wanted it to burn forever.”

“All night, I talked to other people. I didn't look in his direction, but I always knew where he was. I was painfully aware of him. When he was nearby, my body hummed. When he was away, there was this dull ache. With him near, I felt everything.”

“I don’t just want a part of you. I want all of youJeremiah Fisher”

“I won’t be the reason you don’t go to him. I won’t be your excuse. You’ve got to see for yourself, or you’l never be able to let him goJeremiah Fisher”

“I never once cheated on you. I never even looked at another girl when we were together.”Conrad Fisher”

“There hadn’t been one specific moment. It was like gradualy waking up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It’s a slow process, but when you’re awake, there’s no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love.”