Alex,

If I could trap a moment like a firefly to hold and keep in a jar, I would seal away our last kiss, so that in my loneliest hour, I might feel the warmth of your lips against mine.

How could feelings so strong just vanish? How could he abandon her like this?

Her instructor Liam batted the epee from her hand. She looked up at him through the thick mesh of her mask and raised her arms in defeat.

"This is pointless!" she snarled, turning her back to him, ripping off her mask and marching toward the door.

"What's wrong, little daisy?"

"I'm leaving." She tore at the zipper of her lamé as she headed into the women's changing room. Fencing hadn't helped her relax at all. She was only more incensed now.

"Your mother already paid for the lesson!" Liam called after her.

The door muted him and she was glad for it. The man had once been a welcome distraction. He had a charming sort of confidence that won girls' hearts and he had always harbored something a little more than fondness for Alex. He was handsome, mature, cultured, so much so that his crow's feet and hard laugh lines hardly bothered her. While Alex enjoyed his worship, she didn't dare let his infatuation with her reach fruition. She had only room for one man in her heart, and though that man was gone now, she'd sooner let the organ shrink and wither than fill it with new passions.

Outside, the rain pattered against her windshield. Ten minutes into her drive home, her cell phone rang. She fumbled for it, hydroplaning a little as she stopped at a light.

"Hey."

"Alex! What's going on? Why did you walk out of your lesson?" her mother demanded.

"It's raining, Mother. I can't talk," she said plainly.

"Are you not feeling well?"

"I feel fine." That was the necessary answer if she didn't want to spend an hour on her father's couch being psychoanalyzed and grilled about her emotions.

"Were you sneaking off to see Nathan?"

"No, Mom. I'm driving and it's raining. We can talk later."

"Oh, trust me, sweetheart. We will definitely be talking later."

Alex knew she should have been mortified. Her mother's wrath always came with a whirlwind of accusations and threats, ugly assumptions about virtue or the lack therof. That evening Alex received quite the verbal lashing. Her mother asked if she was sexually active, if it was time for her physical, if she needed birth control, overreacting on purpose.

That night, Alex waited for her parents to go to bed. She climbed out of her window and got picked up by her friend Laura. Growing up, Alex and Laura had been a pair of geeky loners. Laura would come home from her summer trips to Japan with video games that weren't available in the states. As instructions in Kanji would flash across the screen, she would translate for Alex, shouting commands and jumping up and down as Alex failed to respond in time.

Laura was one of the more eccentric members of Neptune's elite. She dressed like a hippie and fantasized about living on the road, collecting a postcard from every state. She had no shame when it came to embarrassing her parents at social functions, which automatically made her amazing in Alex's opinion.

Once on what might have been just another boring summer day, Laura and Alex dressed up as princesses and cruised around town blasting Disney songs, but in the last year, Laura had discovered the joys of prescription pills. She'd come into possession of her dead grandmother's oxy and offered them once or twice after a round of video games. Alex had been hesitant at first. She found Laura increasingly tiresome. All she ever talked about were her experiences on drugs.

"This one time, I was candy-flipping in my friend's garden and I honestly felt like I had melted and sunk into the earth, like, my skin was turning into the bark of the trees and my limbs and hair were rooting into the soil."

Blah blah blah, on and on she would go, often retelling the same stories each time Alex saw her. Finally Alex agreed to try ecstasy. And that had made her situation with Nathan overseas feel gloriously romantic. Next she tried valium with wine, a cocktail her mother was famous for. And that had been lovely. So she tried other pills too. Adderall made homework fun. Percocet made TV bingeing oh so cozy.

Today, Alex decided she would ask about the dead Granny's oxy. She wanted to numb herself, delete and rewrite herself before morning.

She called Laura with a single question.  "Do you still have any of those pills left?"

"Hell yeah, girl!"

Eighty milligrams deep into oxy euphoria, they played a video game as if the fate of the world depended on it. Every zombie head that exploded inflated Alex's heart like a balloon. Her usual video game war cry was replaced by a giggle, and Laura echoed her with more trills of girlish laughter.

"Yeah, girl! Shoot his ass!" Laura shouted. She could make Alex laugh until her body hurt. "Oh, yeah. The maid is a spy for my parents, so make sure you keep the you-know-what hid." Laura didn't notice a zombie creeping up behind her, but Alex scored the headshot. Blood spattered against the back of Laura's avatar and the girls cackled wickedly.

Alex took a victory sip of her wine. "What's the point of having your own guest house, if it comes with a spy?" she asked.

"So, my therapist told my mom that I needed my own private space, so she had this house built for me; but the woman never fully gives up her control." Laura lay down on the carpet, her controller rolling out of her hand. "Ugh. I'm too messed up to kill zombies."

Alex didn't want to kill zombies either. She kind of wanted to go home, but she knew that she would only start going through old letters from Nathan if she did. She took her wine into one of the guest bedrooms and climbed onto a mountainous bed.

In a world obsessed with texting and electronic mail, she had found the one guy who preferred the sincerity of a slow correspondence. She had written him so many letters and filled them with pressed flowers and dabs of her perfume. He was the first man to appreciate her. He knew her favorite poem was "Poppies in July." He knew she spoke softly and wore a perfume called "Écoute Moi," because she secretly wished it would make people listen.

At first he had written back sparingly, his letters inhibited with a tone of uncertainty. Every day she checked her mailbox for letters from the USMC. When she found one, she opened it in frenzy, smelling the stationary and touching the pages to her lips. For a few months she got a letter every other week. But as time wore on, the letter exchange fizzled out to being only once a month.

Everything changed when he came home for the holidays. She had grown up a little more. She was allowed to drive until 11 p.m. and one night managed to sneak over to his house for dinner. His mother adored her at once, and finally Nathan looked at her as a young woman and not just the little girl who got her head cracked in grade school.

After dinner, he walked her to her car and she kissed him beneath the ghostly glow of a streetlamp. She had never kissed anyone before, but she went for it, catching him off guard. Nothing about it felt strange or awkward, only much too ephemeral.

"You're a sweet girl," he had said. "But you're young. And I don't want to wreck your life."

"Why do you think you'd wreck my life?"

"If we do this, it won't be easy on you. We'll be apart for a long time. Maybe years. And if something happens to me—"

"I won't have any regrets," she said. That answer seemed to satisfy him. He took her into his embrace, closing her into his heart, a world of unrequited love and interludes of radio silence.

From that point forward, he wrote her almost every day from the base, so frequently that their letters began to react to each other in delay, giving answers to questions long after there were new questions in the air.

Then he shipped out for his second deployment. Their letter exchange decreased in frequency, but the few letters she did receive were thick envelopes rich with yearning.

Our AC unit broke down. Even in our tents with our water and our fans, people are passing out. December seems so far away.

I used to think all I wanted was to go out and find adventure. All I can think about now is the Jersey suburbs, and how much I miss the smell of the fresh cut grass. I even miss the beaches. I think about going there with you and watching the sun set in your hair.

Alex closed her eyes, trying to lose herself again in that joy she used to feel when she thought of him, but thinking of him now only brought her pain. She'd been too earnest, too transparent, and now she would have to build walls around her heart. Nobody else would do. Nathan was a prince in a storybook and every other man on the planet was just scenery.

Her glass lay sideways on the bed, a few red droplets on the bedcovers. Laura took it from her, set it on the nightstand and tucked her in. "Goodnight, baby Alex."

"Thank you," Alex said, her voice choked with tears.

"Shh. You're coming down."

"It feels good to cry," she slurred through messy sobs.

The peaches from that morning came rushing up Alex's throat. "Oh no no no. I'm gonna—" She barely made it to the bathroom in time to hurl into the toilet. More and more kept coming up until her throat burned and she started gagging. She heaved for what felt like an hour, attached to the toilet like she needed it to breathe.

Laura brought Alex a glass of ice water and rubbed her back as she drank. "Poor baby. Shh."

"Thank you." Alex wiped the corners of her mouth and chugged the cool liquid. "Oh, Laura. Nathan broke up with me."

"Here we go," Laura said. "There, there, honey."

Alex sobbed into the toilet. "It makes me want to die."

"It's not the end of the world. What about the other one? Old what's-his-name?"

"Tom?"

"Yeah," Laura said. "He's a cutie."

"He's not as tall."

"Oh."

"And he's just so... what's the word... brash. He's brash. It's like choosing between Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. If Luke's not your brother, you obviously choose Luke."

"But he's a Jedi, Alex. They can't fall in love."

"Exactly," Alex wept.

She continued to feel tragic, like those days she had worried herself crazy thinking about Nathan in Afghanistan. In his letters she could feel the dry heat and see the barren tents dusted with sand. She could hear the blasts that woke him in the night. In time they began to wake her too, reverberating in her nightmares.

"I never wanted the warrior," she cried, laying her head on Laura's shoulder. "He doesn't have to prove anything. He could have never enlisted and he would still be my knight."

Laura stroked Alex's hair. "You know historically that knights were evil motherfuckers, right? Sponsored by kings and praised for their war crimes during the crusades. They had no more honor than Vikings or pirates."

"That has nothing to do with us."

"All right. Hang on, sweetie."

Laura left her and returned with a mug of peppermint tea. Alex continued to dry-heave and whine, clutching her abdomen. She sipped the tea but it did nothing.

"You need weed," Laura said. "But my dealer isn't someone you want to see."

"Who's your dealer?"

"Jacob Serrell."

Alex sighed and took Laura's arm. She got up off the tiles and said, "At this point, I don't even care. Let's go."

______________________

Music: "Endlessly" Muse

This is one of my favorite love songs. When I was writing this novel, I listened to it on a loop for hours as I wrote Alex's chapters. Literally hours! It captures that all-consuming, sometimes painful feeling of romantic love.

First love is often an overpowering force. I still remember being Alex's age and having my whole world revolve around this older guy who I thought was perfect.

Do you remember your first love? Have you ever been like Alex? Or maybe you were more like Nathan?