Page 19 of The Sun
“That sucks.”
“Yep.”
“So you can’t see him?” she asked. “That’s what I heard your mom tell mine.”
“Can’t talk to him. Write him. Nothing.”
Daisy inhaled, a nostalgic smile shaping her lips as she leaned over her knees. “It’s tragically romantic.”
“It’s tragically stupid.”
We sat, watching the mail truck sputter up to the mailbox at the end of the drive. After he shoved a handful of letters in, he waved as he drove off. I pushed up from the step and headed down the long drive. Daisy followed me. “So you think you love him?” she asked.
“I know I love him,” I said.
“How?”
“Because,” I remembered what Elias had told me, my chest going all tight. “You know when you’ve found what you’ve been looking for.”
Daisy’s face crumpled. “You should be a poet, Sunny. Gosh. Shooting stars and looking for love.”
The hinges to the mailbox creaked when I opened it to grab the envelopes. Daisy started jabbering about Billy Weathers—this private school kid in her youth group at church. She knew she was in love with him because he looked like the blond hunk from “Saved by the Bell.” I had seen Billy, and he looked nothing like Zac Morris.
I was about to roll my eyes when I glanced down at the letter on the top of the stack, addressed to me without a return address. Adrenaline snapped through me like a live wire, and I couldn’t have hidden the grin had someone threatened me with death.
“What?” Daisy asked, peeking over my shoulder. “Oh. My. God. Is that him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Open it!” She grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Open it. Now!”
I flipped it over and jammed my finger underneath the sealed flap, tearing it open with one swipe. Just before I pulled out the letter, I eyed Daisy. “I swear to all that is holy, Daisy Fulmer, if you breathe a word of this to your momma or your daddy or your dumb schnauzer Pepper, I’ll never talk to you again.”
She made anXover her heart. “I would never.”
One last, stern look, and then I tugged the letter out, quickly unfolding it.
Sunny Ray,
Sorry I haven’t written or called before now, and sorry that this will probably be all you hear from me for a while. I just wanted you to know that I think about you every day. You mean everything to me. There may be hundreds of thousands of galaxies in the universe, but I’m pretty sure there’s only one sun for each. You’re my sun. And we only belong to each other. I love you.
I’ll write you back with an address as soon as I can.
Elias
“What’s it say?”Daisy waved her hands around in a panic. “I can’t take the anticipation.”
I read the letter to her, gushing and swooning while she clutched her chest. “I swear, love letters are a lost art,” she said. “At least that’s what my Aunt Gertrude says.” She looked from the letter to me. “What are you going to do when he sends you another one?”
And that swell of happiness shrank like a deflated balloon. I didn’t have an answer to her question. I had always been the good girl who did exactly as my parents said—aside from sneaking Elias into my room—but at some point, I had to make my own decisions. At some point, I had to do what I felt was best instead of what they thought was best. That was just part of growing up.
“I don’t know. If Daddy ever caught a letter from him, I’d be grounded until I was thirty-five.”
Daisy’s eyes lost focus, and she chewed at her lip while slowly shaking her head. “There has to be a way. You love him, so there has to be a way.” I stared at the note, at his perfect handwriting, at the words I love you until Daisy snapped her fingers. “Oh my God. Too easy. Write him back, and tell him to send the letters to me.”
“What?” I frowned.
“Tell him to mail me the letters. Put—put the name Betty Smith on the return address, that’s a girl I used to go to summer camp with. I’ll tell my mom I ran into her at the Piggly Wiggly or something.”
