Page 36 of The Best Worst Mistake
Have fun.
That’s it.
It’s been a whole year since I’ve been gone, so if you haven’t given yourself permission to do so yet, enjoy a good belly laugh or two. Do it often and without reserve. If I were there, I’d want you to laugh so often that your face feels permanently sore from stretching itself out with pure, unadulterated joy.
Be the girl you were before all this stupid stuff happened. I sent you on this trip with Silas because he’s the best person I know for letting loose, for changing the very makeup of a person when they need it the most.
When I met him at boarding school, I was a shadow of the man you met in college. Iwas painfully shy and I think that’s the real reason my father sent me off to live elsewhere. To grow. Silas and his father were practically estranged from the time his mother died, so boarding school was the obvious choice to get him out of the house, but my own upbringing could not have been more different from his. You know my parents and I are close, so I think it nearly killed them to make the decision to send me off to Fox Glenn, but they did it to bring me out of my shell. Nothing they could give me at home could compare to the social immersion I would experience while away at school. There was no one to speak up for me, or to make necessary changes to my schedule when I needed it. I was on my own island there, which was exactly what I needed to find my voice. Except I figured out how to be alone while surrounded by other people.
And maybe that sounds familiar to you by now? Or maybe it doesn’t.
At any rate, when Silas introduced himself as my new boarding school roommate, I was this nerdy kid with coke-bottle glasses and tube socks pulled high, almost up to my knobby kneecaps, when in walks the coolest kid I’d ever seen.
Most of the other kids at Fox Glenn were polished and clean, or a little nerdy just like me, but then comes this striking example of what Fox Glenn’s admin would never want invading their brochures. He paraded into our room like he owned the place. Skinny arms hanging outthe sleeves of his cut-off tank, big headphones covering both ears, and his too-long hair curled over the nape of his collar—well past what the dress code policy would allow. Which I would know because I’d studied the school handbook before arriving, like there was going to be a special exam over it.
Nothing about our friendship made sense. He was too cool for school while I was the type to memorize the handbook. But we quickly became as inseparable as boyhood roommates often become.
When people saw Silas, there I was, and he to me. He brought me out of my shell. Gave me permission to break a rule here and there, as long as it wasn’t too big of a deal. We balanced each other out. Me, keeping our borderline expellable adventures small enough to maintain enrollment, while he made sure our time there was memorable in all the best ways. Late nights out on the track field, eating stolen leftover chocolate cake from the cafeteria under a blanket of stars, or sneaking out past curfew to meet the girls from the school down the road. I think even my parents were secretly half-giddy every time I got a demerit sent home because it meant I was having a good time. That I was straying just enough from the absolute straight and narrow path I’d been on since birth to have a fantastic childhood. One I never would have gotten as an only child of two woefully busy parents. They knew that if I’d been paired with any of the other kids, whosenoses had practically been flattened from being stuck inside textbooks from sunup to sundown each day, I never would have crawled out from my thick shell, or gained any confidence as a kid to carry me into the world with any sort of backbone.
The truth is, without Silas, I would never have become the man you fell in love with. A lot of the things you love about me were brought out by him.
Let go of your misgivings about the past where Silas is concerned, stored up in your most recent memories of him. He was better than that before his father died, and you had a front-row seat to the old him for so many years. Let him breathe some life into you as he did for me. You have only the future to look forward to now, and your future can be everything you dream of, as long as you’re willing to let go of what you thought it would be with me.
Only onward and upward! Quite literally, Jules.
Tomorrow you’ll board a plane that you won’t be landing in. Remember me trying to convince you to do this back home? And you said, “Why do I need to see Massachusetts from a parachute when I can see it with my own two feet on the ground?” Here, in Interlaken, you’re going to see it all from the sky. Mountain lakes, as light as the turquoise stone in your grandmother’s ring. Glacier milk, they call it, surrounded by towering mountain ranges andglowing green hillsides draped in tiny yellow wildflowers. There’s no way to get that view with your own two feet planted firmly down on the ground, so, wheels up at 10 a.m. No arguing. Silas has done this before. You’re in good hands, my love. Always. Remember that.
Imagine me getting giddy from above as you earn your own demerits on this trip, doing everything you possibly can to surprise yourself—rebelling from the straight and narrow path you’ve always been on. There’s fun to be had when you step outside the lines, so find your lines and blow past them, sweetheart.
Just live.
And when you feel the wind whip past your face tomorrow, know that it’s me, rushing down to join you. And that I’m so proud of you.
Above all (no pun intended), thank you, always, for letting me love you,
Grant
Chapter 15
Silas
The moment we arrived at our suite, Jules disappeared into her side and locked the door. I heard the ripping of the envelope followed by a stone-cold silence. Silence that stretched on for an hour while I paced around and tried to keep myself busy, wondering what she was going through on the other side of that door, until I finally heard her shower turn on.
At some point, she must have ordered room service, because shortly after hearing the water turn off, there’s a knock at our door.
A tall, lanky man wearing a smart maroon uniform rolls in a cart with two silver domes sitting beside a bottle of dark, red wine and a few empty glasses.
“Danke schoen,” I say to him, slipping the worker a few extra bills for delivering the food before shutting the door behind him.
Then I hear Juliet’s bedroom door crack open. She appears in a fluffy white robe with her wet hair combed back from her freshly scrubbed face.
“Did you order dinner?” I ask.
“Oh,” she says, not moving to get the tray. “I ordered that thinking I’d be hungry by the time I got out. But that hasn’t happened yet. I was starving until I read that letter. Now, I can’t tell if I’m still hungry.”
“Jules,” I say, sounding more stern than I mean to sound.
Her eyes flick up to mine, but she looks exhausted. All the fight — the bravado and toughness from earlier — is gone.
