Page 1 of Paper Hearts

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WHEN I WROTE A BOOK

Present Day

Look at that girl with the wrinkled dress and two-day-old mascara on her lashes.

She’s a mess.

I’ll be honest with you. She doesn’t know how to describe herself, but if you give her a pen, she can write anything in a creative way to make you smile, laugh, and cry, maybe all at the same time. She’ll stutter over her own words, daydream, and spends most of her time in the mountains. She loves coffee first thing in the morning, spends hours lost in poetry and hiking before the sun comes up.

I think the bigger question here is why is she standing in Target staring at her novel finally in print?

Got me. The last six years have been a blur.

I smile at the cover. Fucking unbelievable, right? How is this possible? How’d I do this? Well, it certainly wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, from the time I started this novel, it took years of tears, throwing it away once, and constant persistent pushes from Arya and my mom to follow my dream. I questioned my sanity, my reasons and if I was good enough to pull it off.

Apparently I had been, because here it is.

I stare at my novel on the shelf with diaper wipes in my hand for my sister so her kid doesn’t have explosive diarrhea all over my car again. Why she let a two-year-old have flaming hot Cheetos is beyond me, but she did and now she’s paying the price. Or I am? Because I’m the one buying the wipes.

Blowing out a breath, I shift the wipes from one hand to the other and reach for the book. My book released three weeks ago, and though it’s been fairly uneventful, it’s slowly been climbing the charts.

Picking it up, I smile and run my fingertips over the spine of the book, taking in the creamy white pages and the smell of a freshly published book with an actual publisher’s name attached.

Me. Hadleigh Hayes. A published author. Incredible. I wrote this. Every raw, heartbreaking word about two people who fell in love before they understood the true meaning of love.

My heart pumps wildly in my chest, reminded ofhim, a steady rhythm I haven’t felt since his touch. Do you see the couple on the front of the cover? It’s nothing close to the two who lived out this story. Or is it? I tell everyone who asks it’s fiction. But to the ones who lived it, our love is wound deep inside every word. I think all authors do this. They lie about the truth inside the novel. Why? Because they don’t want people knowing the brutal truth of everything that either destroyed them or made them who they are.

This—seeing my novel on the shelf inside Target as I hold baby wipes in one hand and a “happy you’re getting hitched” card in the other—is surreal. In truth, I never ever thought this would be a place I’d get to. When you look at how this all started, my story with the boy who stole my heart at thirteen feels like another lifetime.

Sighing, I hold the book close to my chest and smell the pages. I think of him, Eddie, and everything in between. When you’re a dreamer and living your life between pages, that’s exactly how you get lost in a reality that isn’t real. And I spent years doing it.

Pulling the book away from my chest, I try to remember a time when I have ever been so relieved to have finished something. This book had been years of writing, rewriting, debating whether to let this story out, and even longer trying to convince myself he wouldn’t know I published it. I can’t think of anything that’s ever consumed me more. Other than my time with Ender, the only one I fear reading it. His memory hits me and I flip to the dedication page.

This is how I bury my wounds. I set fire to them and burn the existence of you from my memory.

But did I?I’d decided those memories—him, those summers—wouldn’t consume me forever. They would always be a part of me, but in order to heal, I wrote them down, carried them around with me for years, reliving every detail as if they held answers I wasn’t sure I even needed anymore. Relief came when I realized maybe I didn’t need the answers. Remembering and purging those memories to paper was enough.

“Hads!” Brenna, my sister with the toddler and diarrhea, yells at me. “Did you find wipes?”

I nod and set my book down. “Right here.” I lift the wipes in the air and take one last look at the book. I’ve yet to buy copy, aside from the twenty copies at my house the publisher sent me, and though I really want to, I don’t. I leave it on the shelf.

“I can’t believe my baby sister is a published author. So wild.” Brenna picks it up. “I’m buying this copy.” She looks at the cover. “It’s so cute.”

Cute? I wouldn’t say anything in those pages is cute. Destructive, addicting, consuming… those are words I’d use.

Brenna yanks on my hand and tucks the book under her arm as she holds a screaming toddler in her other. “We’re gonna be late, and you know how Arya feels about people being late.”

I smile, thinking of my best friend and her quirky personality. If you’re late, she takes it as disrespectful and calls your ass out on it. Every time.

* * *

After a few wrong turns,a stop for junk food, and another for gas, we’re finally pulling into the driveway of my aunt Leslie’s home.

Blinking, my gaze momentarily lingers on the window of my old room that Ender broke when he threw a baseball through it. He told everyone Myles did it, and no one questioned Ender James.

Aunt Leslie lives on Lake Lanier in Georgia, north of Atlanta, and not much has changed in the last six years. I see she’s painted it, added a porch swing and some flowers to the front. I smile, thinking about the time Ender cornered me on the porch after he took me to dinner and swore, someday we’d be together forever.

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