Just the Highlights

A Note From the Author

To New and Returning Readers: This note was written on March 15th, 2016, during what I call "The JTH Reconstruction Era," which was when I had to completely reformat the story to account for Wattpad's 200 story part limit. To post this letter to my readers I deleted the chapter that was here, which was titled "Quick Information," and covered about the same information.

Hey everybody,

It's Emma here (some of you may already know me) and this is the first story I posted on this account. At the time of the posting of this story, I was still using my first account on Wattpad, emmernemmer. My friend, Shilo, and I were talking about cowriting a story together and she had happened to have this empty account lying around so she gave me the password.

She decided to anonymously post a collection of poetry and I posted JTH, mostly just to have something up while we figured out the story. My main project at the time was my story "Broken Record" (which is still posted on emmernemmer) but died out after twelve chapters, not long after the story I was planning with Shilo died.

However, JTH didn't die out. I actually really enjoyed writing about these two crazy kids I had created (I'm still calling them crazy kids even though as I'm writing this I'm also writing the point of the story where they're 30) and for some reason people liked reading it (I still don't get why).

The story was originally posted on March 1st, 2015 and will end on June 16, 2016. It's been over a year since this story was posted and it's been a wild ride. On January 4th, 2016, JTH was put on the Teen Fiction featured list and it reached 1M reads on March 6th.

Anyway, that's sort of the simplified history of this story so far. The real purpose of this note it to explain how this story works. I'm sure all of you are more than capable of figuring this out but I like to explain so if someone is confused, they have this note to explain it to them.

So let's get this show on the road. This story alternates between description chapters (they are "written" by either Julie or Eli) and dialogue chapters. In the old format, an update (which would take place, and still takes place, on every Thursday and Sunday) would consist of a chapter with the description section and a separate chapter with the dialogue. But to meet the story part limit, an update will now consist of the posting of one chapter with both the description and dialogue sections. They will be separated by a graphic (made for me by the wonderful ) and the title of each part will consist of the titles of both sections (I suggest to returning readers that they check this new format out, it's pretty cool).

When reading the dialogue chapters, I know it can sometimes be hard to tell who is speaking. So I made this little guide for everyone: Julie's dialogue will always be unbolded, Eli's will always be bolded, and everyone else's will always be italicized. Most of the time if there is a third party speaking it will not be necessary to know who it is as it's just a nameless character. But if who the person is is important, I'll make sure you know who it is.

This story will cover the characters' relationship over 23 years (now you're getting why it's been a year but I'm not done yet), from when they're in 7th grade to Julie's 35th birthday party. The prologue you're about to read (after my lovely playlist) is Julie and Eli in high school, but the chapter after that is them in 7th grade, because it's a prologue and doesn't have to be in chronological order (I'm powerful like that).

Hope you all enjoy!

Emma

P.S. The YouTube video above is the trailer for this story, made for me by the lovely . This chapter is dedicated to her joint account bamboozling.