Now You See Her by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page B

and completely perfect. You don’t usually have a moment like that.
    For the first time I knew why they call it being hit by an arrow through your heart when you fall in love. Go back and look at the beginning of this journal entry. Look at those Roman numerals. The IV. That doesn’t mean “intravenous.” That’s me, lonely, yes, but brave and thin and alone, glamorous in being alone. And then suddenly, there’s Logan. The arrow. There he is. And everything changes. I look into his gigantic green eyes, almost like fake eyes, with lashes longer than mine. And I’m shot
    through the heart. “He jests at scars that never felt a wound,” says Romeo, right before the balcony scene. You might laugh, but I knew this was it. My whole life was going to change forever. And it did. I was a woman. Even before anything happened between us.
    He was so beautiful.
    He didn’t have one single zit.
    I still love him, if you can believe that.

    V ‌

    T

    HERE HE IS , at the top of my journal entry, the arrow that cut through my soul.
    Look, I knew it wasn’t a little crush.
    A woman can tell. I was more mature for my age. He knew I was mature for my age too. And our love was like a storm, so big it knocked us both over. I had never even been kissed before, much less done the sickening stuff some of the girls in Bellamy did, like get drunk and let the neighbor kid climb in the window and feel you up. I had never wanted some acne-face slob’s hands all over me after he was done picking his pimples. Logan was so pure. He smelled pure, like pine. And how do you know it’s love when you were never in love before? Well, I had seen love in the movies and on the stage. And you know how the follow spotlight just narrows down until it’s only shining on one person? That’s what love is like. The
    whole world fades until you can only hear that person’s voice and see that person’s face. No matter who he’s pre- tending to talk to, you know he’s talking to you, that he wants you to hear. And when he crosses the room, even if he’s teasing and pretending he doesn’t see you, there’s this connection. You both feel it. You know he’s been thinking about you since the last time he saw you and you’ve been thinking about him, totally nonstop. I could get physically sick and not be able to eat just thinking about him. At night, in bed, every song on the radio would be him, singing to me. I would think of him out there, in his room, looking out the window and wanting me, and I could hardly stand it. Logan was my breath. I needed him from the first moment. Needed him. We used to try not to look at each other—after all, I was just a kid and he was almost nineteen. People would have said stuff and totally been jealous. He was Logan Rose. And we were probably too far apart in age, maybe. Maybe a little. But we couldn’t stop. Wherever I would go, there he would be. I would be sitting on the floor outside the choral room reading and he’d be coming out of class and he’d practically trip over me, and I knew he wanted to grab me up right there—but he would just kind of laugh and mess up my hair and go jogging off with a bunch of guys. Once, when one of them said, “There’s your shadow,” he punched the guy on the
    shoulder. He didn’t want to hear that about me.
    I knew it was the kind of love that would last if the world would not mess it up.
    It wasn’t like he started going after me the first minute. There was that little thing in the cafeteria his first day. But then he was totally cool about it, and so was
    I. But he would do this thing. He would sort of stop like he had been hit on the back of the head when he passed me (freshman and sophomores had to march in lines across the road from our dorms to class; it was part of the big security thing) and act like he’d never seen me before that very moment. He would act like it made his day.
    Tryouts for Romeo and Juliet were coming up.
    I had read the play in eighth grade and