Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd always tell her, why can't I do both? Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?

So this had been all I wanted, a boy who understood how I felt. Now, though, I sometimes wished for more.

Life is full of screwups. You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existance.

After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.

He wasn't what I'd thought he was; maybe he never had been. I wasn't what I'd thought I was, either.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.