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knew you.”
    â€œBut I’m not with Carolyn and you know me now.”
    â€œWhat are you saying?”
    â€œWhy don’t you have a thing for me now?”
    â€œWhy don’t you have a thing for me now?” I asked.
    And that’s when Jesse said the thing that set my entire adult love life in motion. “I think I actually do have a thing for you. As of about an hour and a half ago.”
    I looked at him, stunned. Trying to find the words.
    â€œWell, then I do, too,” I finally said.
    â€œSee?” he said, smiling. “I thought so.”
    And then he leaned over when no one was looking and he kissed me.
    That summer, I had to work triple the normal amount of shifts at the store as penance for my underage drinking. I had to listen to four separate lectures from my parents about how I had disappointed them, how they never thought I’d be the kind of daughter who got detained.
    Marie took the assistant manager job, making her my bossfor a third of the hours I was awake. I learned that the only thing I disliked more than hanging out with her was taking orders from her.
    Olive spent the summer on the Cape with her older brother, waiting tables and sunbathing.
    Sam moved to Boston two weeks ahead of schedule and never said good-bye.
    But I didn’t mind any of that. Because that was the summer Jesse and I fell in love.

E mma, would you just turn around?”
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    â€œJust turn around, for crying out loud!”
    And so I did, to find Jesse standing behind me on a sandy beach in Malibu, California. He was holding a small ruby ring. It was nine years after he kissed me that first time in the Acton Police Station.
    â€œJesse . . .” I said.
    â€œWill you marry me?”
    I was speechless. But not because he was asking me to marry him. We were twenty-five. We’d been together our entire adult lives. We had both moved across the country in order to attend the University of Los Angeles. We’d spent our junior year abroad in Sydney, Australia, and backpacked across Europe for five months after we graduated.
    And we had built a life for ourselves in LA, far away from Blair Books and five hundred–meter freestyles. Jesse had become a production assistant on nature documentaries, his jobs taking him as far as Africa and as close to home as the Mojave Desert.
    I, in a turn of events that seemed to infuriate Marie, had become a travel writer. My sophomore year of school, I found out about a class called travel literature offered by the School of Journalism. I’d heard that it wasn’t an easy class to get into.In fact, the professor only took nine students per year. But if you got in, the class subsidized a trip to a different place every year. That year was Alaska.
    I’d never seen Alaska. And I knew I couldn’t afford to go on my own. But I had no interest in writing.
    It was Jesse who finally pushed me to apply.
    The application required a thousand-word piece on any city or town in the world. I wrote an essay about Acton. I played up its rich history, its school system, its local bookstore—basically, I tried to see my hometown through my father’s eyes and put it down on paper. It seemed a small price to pay to go to Alaska.
    My essay was fairly awful. But there were only sixteen applications that year, and apparently, seven other essays were worse.
    I thought Alaska was nice. It was my first time leaving the continental United States and I had to be honest with myself and admit it hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be. But imagine everyone’s surprise when I found that I loved writing about Alaska even more than I liked being there.
    I became a journalism major and I worked hard at improving my interviewing techniques and imagery, as per the advice of most of my professors.
    I graduated college a writer.
    That’s the part that I knew killed Marie.
    I was the writer of the family while she was in