Page 133 of When We Were Reckless
Now I stared at the two daisy chains hanging from the door handle of my dorm room. I looked up and down the hallway, searching for the person who could have put them there. Maybe they weren’t even for me. Maybe Priya or Addison had a secret admirer. They were my roommates, and they were great. I’d lucked out in that department. We’d become fast friends. Which was lucky because we shared a triple and a bathroom.
But the daisy chains… who had put them here? It couldn’t have been him. I couldn’t even allow myself to think that, so I squashed my hopes, looped the chains around my arm, and opened my door with my key card.
As I tossed my backpack on my desk chair, my eye caught on a yellow envelope lying on the carpet. Like someone had pushed it under the door.
My name was on the front in bold print, the letters slightly slanted. My heart skipped a beat. That looked like Jesse’s handwriting. But no, it couldn’t be from him.
I sat on the bottom bunk below Priya’s and slid the notepaper—white with a daisy border—out of the envelope.
Dear Quinn,
I’m not the writer but I wrote a story for you. A fairy tale with an open ending.
Once upon a time, a princess asked a boy to marry her. He was, by all accounts, unworthy of the princess. But he couldn’t believe his good fortune, so he said yes. They were married under an oak tree at the princess’ castle. They wore daisy chains and promised to love each other until the end of time.
The boy pledged to be her knight in shining armor, to be loyal to her for all eternity. He would slay dragons for his princess and rescue her from every danger.
The princess grew up and she became a queen, and the boy became a man—a daring, reckless man. A selfish man. He returned home a broken knight with tarnished armor and a wounded heart.
You see, the knight had strayed, and in his travels, he’d lost his way. He was bitter and angry. He wasn’t the same knight the queen remembered. But the queen was so good. So true and so brave that she was able to save the knight.
The queen breathed new life into her broken knight. Because that queen, she is the Sun. She shines so bright it’s blinding. She shines so bright that the knight got greedy and wanted that light all to himself. But he never told her that. He never told the queen how fucking amazing she is. He never told her how special she is or how much she means to him.
Instead, he let her go, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t regret it.
Without the Sun, that foolish knight was banished to a cold and lonely place, left to live a life without his queen for all eternity.
Yours,
Jesse
Oh my God. I reread the story. I read it so many times I knew it by heart. But what did it mean? What was he trying to say? It was so cryptic.
The door opened, and I looked up from the letter as Addison walked in and dumped her backpack on the floor. She was wearing basketball shorts and her high school volleyball T-shirt. Addison was nearly six feet tall, sporty and smart, with long blonde hair and big blue eyes.
“Oh my God, I’m so tired. My brain hurts.” She massaged her temples as she walked over to the mini-fridge in front of the window. Our room was small, our quarters cramped, but we had an amazing view of Santa Monica and the ocean. Something I still marveled at, although today I was too distracted to notice the view.
“I need chocolate. Why did I think pre-med was a good idea?”
“Because you’re a genius.” She was, too. But the other reason was that her parents were doctors.
“I felt like the village idiot in Chem lab today. Then I got my ass handed to me on the volleyball court.”
I half-listened but was still puzzling over the letter in my hand.
She rifled through our junk food stash and grabbed a bar of Ghirardelli—dark chocolate with sea salt. Addison was the only one who liked it. She plopped down in the desk chair under her bunk bed, moaning when she took a bite of chocolate before she turned her chair around to face me.
“Cute daisy chains. Did you wear them to class?”
“They’re from Jesse.”
Her eyes widened. Addison and Priya knew all about Jesse. I still couldn’t believe it, though. Jesse made daisy chains and wrote a story for me. And not only that, somehow, he had found a way to get them to me.
Wordlessly, I handed her the letter, hoping she could help me make sense of it.
Later that night, Priya, Addison, and I spent hours dissecting it, trying to figure out what he was trying to say.
I fell asleep dreaming about a knight in shining armor.
