It was right then. That’s when I knew, all the way down to my soaking-wet Keds. I love you, John Ambrose McClaren. I really love you. I might have loved you for all of high school. I think you might have loved me back. If only you weren’t moving away, John! It’s so unfair when people move away. It’s like their parents just decide something and no one else gets a say in it. Not that I even deserve a say—I’m not your girlfriend or anything. But you at least deserve a say.

I was really hoping that one day I would get to call you Johnny. Your mom came to get you after school once, and a bunch of us were hanging out on the front steps. And you didn’t see her car, so she honked and called out, “Johnny!” I loved the sound of that. Johnny. One day, I bet your girlfriend will call you Johnny. She’s really lucky. Maybe you already have a girlfriend right now. If you do, know this—once upon a time in Virginia, a girl loved you.

I’m going to say it just this once, since you’ll never hear it anyway. Good-bye, Johnny.

Love,

Lara Jean

I let out a scream, so loud and so piercing that Jamie barks in alarm. “Sorry,” I whisper, falling back against my pillows.

I cannot believe that John Ambrose McClaren read that letter. I didn’t remember it to be so . . . naked. With so much . . . yearning. God, why do I have to be a person who yearns so much? How horrible. How perfectly horrible. I’ve never been naked in front of a boy before, but now I feel like I have. I can’t bear to look at it again, to even think about it. I scramble up and stuff it back inside the envelope and push it under my bed so it no longer exists. Out of sight, out of mind.

Obviously John won’t be getting this letter back. In fact I don’t know if I should write him back at all. Things feel . . . altered, somehow.

I’d forgotten that letter, how ardently I longed for him. How certain I was, how absolutely certain I believed we were meant to be, if only. The memory of that belief shakes me up; it leaves me feeling unsettled and even uncertain. Unmoored. What was it about him, I wonder, that made me so sure?

Strangely, there’s no mention of Peter in my letter. In the letter I say I started liking him in the fall of eighth grade. I liked Peter in eighth grade too, so there was a definite crossover. When did one begin and the other end?

The one person who would know is the one person I could never ask.

She is the one who foretold that I would like John.

Genevieve slept over at my house most nights that summer. Allie was only allowed to sleep over on special occasions, so it was usually just the two of us. We’d go over what happened that day with the boys, every detail. “This is going to be our crew,” she said to me one night, her lips barely moving. We were doing Korean face masks my grandma had sent, the kind that look like ski masks, and drip with “essence” and vitamins and spa-like things. “This is what high school is going to be like. It’ll be me and Peter and you and McClaren, and Chrissy and Allie can share Trevor. We’ll all be power couples.”

“But John and I don’t like each other like that,” I said, teeth clenched to keep my face mask from shifting.

“You will,” she said. She said it like it was a preordained fact, and I believed her. I always believed her.

But none of it came to be, except for the Gen and Peter part.

31

LUCAS AND I ARE SITTING cross-legged in the hallway, sharing a strawberry-shortcake ice cream bar. “Stick to your side,” he reminds me as I lower my head for another bite.

“I’m the one who bought it!” I remind him. “Lucas . . . do you think it’s cheating to write letters to someone? Not me, I’m asking for a friend.”

“No,” Lucas says. He raises both eyebrows. “Wait, are they sexy letters?”

“No!”

“Are they the kind of letter you wrote me?”

A meek little “no” from me. He gives me a look like he isn’t buying whatever I’m selling. “Then you’re fine. Technically you’re in the clear. So who are you writing to?”

I hesitate. “Do you remember John Ambrose McClaren?”

He rolls his eyes. “Of course I remember John Ambrose McClaren. I had a crush on him in seventh grade.”

“I had a crush on him in eighth!”

“Of course you did. We all did. In middle school you either liked John or you liked Peter. Those were the two main choices. Like Betty and Veronica. Obviously John is Betty and Peter’s Veronica.” He pauses. “Remember how John used to have that really endearing stutter?”

“Yes! I mourned it a little when it went away. It was so sweet. So boyish. And do you remember how his hair was the color of pale butter? Like, the way I bet freshly churned butter looks.”

“I thought it was more like moonlit corn silk, but yeah. So how did he turn out?”

“I don’t know. . . . It’s strange because there’s the him I remember from middle school, and that’s just my memory of him, but then there’s the him now.”

“Did you guys ever go out back then?”

“Oh no! Never.”

“So that’s probably why you’re curious about him now.”

“I didn’t say I was curious.”

Lucas gives me a look. “You basically did. I don’t blame you. I’d be curious too.”

“It’s just fun to think about.”

“You’re lucky,” he says.

“Lucky how?”