I’d been in love with Guest for around a decade. It had started in 1999, when I first met her. She was still stunning back then—perfect hair, beautiful face, the epiphany of beauty. At least, to seven-year-old me, she was. And still is. She had rejected me before she even knew me. I slid up beside her in the pool, scrawny and cocky. She was reading a book, and I asked her if she wanted to see me do a cannonball. She said she’d rather see me get hit by one, and I was hooked since. At ten, she was pushing her little cousin on the swing and trying to not get kicked. I came up behind her, informing her it was her fault for trying to push from the front and not the back. She screamed at me for six minutes straight and I smirked the whole time. Now, at seventeen, I still follow her at school, talk to her when she’s lonely, and we even share a few intimate moments… sometimes. Sure, I’ve been with other girls to satisfy a normal teen’s cravings, but her? She was my heart and soul, not just something I used to distract my body. So, here I was, sitting on the bed of my truck with a beer I wasn’t supposed to have, waiting outside her house after begging her for thirty seven minutes straight to go with me to the lake.