The Girl I Was Before

Ty and Nate are making fun of me from the front seat, and Cass and Rowe are yelling at them for me from the back. I’m in the middle, where I ignore their noise, flipping through my rag-tag fairytale—the notebook fringe flaking away on the edges. I run my finger over the stick-figure girl with long blonde hair and the prince standing next to her, holding a sandwich, and I smile when I read his butchered Spanish confession of love near the end, an arrow in the margin pointing to the words, reading “this means I love you.”

Yes, Houston.

Yes, it does.

THE END