Then We Were Grown

PROLOGUE

NINE YEARS AGO.

LÉO.

I don't remember the day Charlie Jones and I met.

But I have memories from all of the rest.

We are five when we vow to be best-friends forever. We are eight the day Finley McCauley pulls on her ponytail and I realize I don't want anyone else bothering her but me. We've turned nine years old and we play our infamous and forbidden game of hide and seek after dark when I run into a pole and it opens a gash from my chin up to the corner of my mouth, and her mother has to drive me to the ER to get stitches. Charlie cries the entire time and holds my hand.

We are thirteen when we sit up in the treehouse and I realize for the first time just how breathtakingly beautiful she is. We are fourteen when I feel the flutters in my chest—and decide that maybe, I don't want to know what they mean.

Then her mother gets sick. And passes away.

Charlie is but a ghost and yet, the flutters remain and life spills out of her whenever she is near.

We are fifteen when the air shifts between us, morphing into something heavier that neither of us wants to address. The kind that could crush me and set me ablaze at once with a single look.

We are sixteen years old when I decide that maybe, these flutters that have lasted for so long are there to stay and they mean something. We are friends, still I want more.

I am sixteen still when it becomes painful, the flutters roaming free in my chest every time I see her and don't say a word. It seems our bodies cannot keep apart. And every time we talk, we're almost touching. It grows on me, this need to feel her constantly even if to know she's really standing there with me.

Clouds sit low and dark in the sky, looming over town.

I stand at the kitchen sink, observing them and knowing that if I get on my bike now and ride over to her house, I might just get drenched and soaked to the bone.

A storm is near, I can almost see it in the air, the way the electricity bundles up in the clouds. And I feel it all inside: the flutters coursing through my veins like sparks of electricity and yet there is no storm to be found.

Because today is the day I tell Charlie.

Today will be the day I risk it all—and yet, I know that nothing can wreck us. This is years in the making, and today is the day it'll finally happen.

It is long overdue, after all.

My heart races in my chest, but I'm calm and collected.

So, when my phone buzzes in my pocket and the flutters spread through my entire body, I don't even flinch. When I see her name on the screen though, I can't fight off the smile that creeps up on my face.

Treehouse, her text reads.

Lately we've had this habit of slipping into the other's house, or at least in the other's garden, just to wait them out—or spend some time together. It is something we've started doing after her mother passed away, and I have to admit that this is one of my favorite thing we do—sneaking on the other.

I push my phone in my pocket and slide the door open, the wind wrapping me in its chill embrace as I cross the garden towards the ladder.

The bulbs bounce under the wind, the lights flicker in the treehouse and a roaring sound echoes through the valley as I climb. I push the trap door open, and pull myself up, my heart suddenly caught up in my throat.