“Don’t drink the punch,” LaShell said, looking down at my cup in disapproval—I guess she too had heard the warnings.
It was everything I was expecting, that first college fraternity party. Full of polo-clad boys in various shapes and sizes and freshman girls all trying to flirt and fit in. I met my group outside on the patio, four soccer boys I made friends with those first few days of settling in and LaShell, who’s boyfriend Scooby was a soccer player too. I held a red plastic Solo cup of punch in my hand as I abandon the baseball team boys who’d given me a lift—making a false promise we would see each other later on—because loyalty is important to me, and I’ll always chose soccer over baseball. I wore a hot pink dress that night and the air was balmy, causing my hair to wave up loosely and stick to the back of my neck, no breeze to speak of made the closeness of bodies almost unbearable, and I got my first taste of the real Texas heat, overwhelming and intoxicating all at once, the taste on your lips always slightly salty.
“Oh, it’ll be fine,” I said, blowing her off, getting to know the soccer boys a little bit better and making conversation with strangers as I scanned the crowd for potential male bondage. Adam Wadsworth and I were still talking nightly, he was saying I love you and while I sometimes said it back, it was more routine than real, like it had been ever since that night in the swimming pool, when he said it to me and I declined to offer it back. As the Texas night wore on and the punch caught up I realized that Trinity was seriously lacking in the babe department. In fact, the only tens there were the soccer guys I was quickly becoming friends with and this was turning into another classic Ashley moment: when I realize I’ll have no one to date because I’m good friends with all the attractive guys. Shit, I thought, and I remember thinking it then, as I stared at all of the sloppy drunk coeds on the dance floor, practically undressing and grinding on anyone close to them. And next to me was Joe, who clearly had looked me over more than twice and so I grabbed him and took him on the dance floor for two songs, grinding my hips into his and feeling stares in my direction because let’s face it: Joe was a hot commodity from that first ‘let’s see if there’s any hot freshman’ party; his dirty blond hair, the sexy wavy kind, his chiseled jaw and golden skin, and his 6’2 build, that looked just about like the cover of Men’s Health magazine. I got in some sly moves and some body grazing before we all piled in the car and went to IHop for 3am pancakes. I don’t know if it was the feeling of being free or the atmosphere or the gin bucket shots that were poured into my mouth by a stranger with a turkey bester, but crammed up against him in the tiny back seat of Scooby’s two door red Lexus was where I first felt the urge to make out with Joe Houchins—and then I reminded myself I sort of had a half-boyfriend back home.
~
My dorm room was all set up, pictures framing my twin bed, my shiny new computer in its place on my built in wooden desk, and my mattress covered in the quilt my mom had made me when I was eleven. Each square a different pattern, all colors of a little girl—pinks and purples—a princess sort of feel. I brought it here and laid it on my bed, next to the newly bright colors of all the other comforters in my suite; bed sets from IKEA or Bed Bath and Beyond, mine seemed to pale in comparison, it’s pastels washing out my designated six feet of square footage, the only thing I brought that still smelled slightly of home.
The first week at Trinity was a blur: freshman orientation, placement exams, new faces; everything unfamiliar yet, somehow, unintimidating. I tried nearly every day to separate myself from my roommate LaShell, who seemed to tag along with me wherever we went: the cafeteria, the bathroom, Target. It was my first time sharing my room, my first time living with a girl (other than my mom), and thus far, I wasn’t reaping any benefits. LaShell and I were polar opposites beginning with our looks and ending with every single one of our interests. She was pre-med and I was an acting major, she was there to study, I was there to party. We fought like sisters but had no family or blood ties to make us love each other, and within that first week it was clear that my living situation would be less than ideal.
She brought sugar gliders, two of them, those little rodents that “fly” through the air by gliding with webbed appendages and that stunk up our shared closet in a mere matter of days. I was too nice to be openly annoyed, and too determined to mask the odor with my fresh scent Febreez that promised me a college dorm room that could smell sweet no matter what it was up against. But Febreez lost the battle over time and I prayed my clothes wouldn’t absorb the smell of rodent as I tried to meet new friends.
Tuesday was my first day of class, and I rolled out of bed at 10am, though I had woken up far before that to the sound of the toilet flushing when it was still dark outside. LaShell was already reading her thick Biology text book when my alarm went off, jarring me from false dreams.
“Morning!” She called over to me, though I had already told her not to greet me cheerily before my shower and coffee.
“Morning,” I grumbled back on my way to the shower, which was already occupied by my singing suitemate Janet—the oober Christian who wore jumpers and mom jeans, but was so sweet and endearing it was difficult not to love her.
After my turn in the shower I departed with wet hair, because in Texas only the crazies use blow dryers in August, and LaShell not only blew dry but also straightened. I shoveled down some Special K at the dining hall, reluctantly with 2% milk, because the small cartons of non-fat were already all gone, and I thought to myself, ‘this must be how it starts…the freshman 15…’.
I arrived at acting class in Ruth Taylor Theatre sweaty and still a little tired, looking around the room of peers that were all 5 or 6 minutes early, wide eyed and ready like me. The professor looked like a hippie, with a long flowing dress, bare feet, and an aura of ease. Her short hair and red framed glasses framed her kind blue eyes. She sat cross legged on the floor and invited us to remove our shoes and do the same. With one minute left before start time, in sauntered Joe, in a green polo shirt and khaki shorts, looking red cheeked and flustered.
“Hey,” I waved over to him and motioned for him to sit down beside me.
“Hey, I didn’t know you were in here,” he smiled, looking a little relieved to know someone.
I felt the opposite; acting class was the class that mattered to me, where I wanted to grow and explore, and the slight crush that I may or may not have felt seemed to go against my inhibitions I was priorly calling upon to help me succeed in there.
“How’s preseason going?” I asked him, but I wouldn’t get an answer because that’s when class began. We paired off for an icebreaker exercise and he and I ended up being in a silent staring pose for five minutes. Five minutes seems short until you are asked to silently stare at someone who is essentially a stranger who you find fairly attractive and you are asked to take each other in; every inch and angle. This can be intimidating, when standing across from a handsome soccer player, trying not to blush—my acting skills were faltering on day one.
“You were so uncomfortable,” Joe teased afterward, giving me the elbow. And I smiled shyly, my silence not offering a response. I shrugged my shoulders. After more icebreakers and yoga poses we were given scene assignments from Stacey—the hippie professor—and when my name was called out it was alongside Joe Houchins, who would be my scene partner, who I would spend many hours of my time within the next several weeks; rehearsing. We were then handed the scenes and as we read them to ourselves I gasped audibly when I arrived at the sex scene in the end. When he looked up, he was blushing.
Our final exercise that first day was to bring in a poem that meant something to us and read it aloud to the class. I brought in something I had written about my mom the year before; back in February when we knew that the cancer would kill her. I chose the poem because it meant something to me, and I thought nothing of it other than that it would be a short read for my first class presentation. I was third to read as we went around the circle:
“It wasn’t the day they said cancer.
It was the day after that.”
That was all that came out before the tears burst from a place I didn’t feel or see them waiting, a dark corner perhaps, hidden from me entirely. They came down so hard and fast, that I removed myself entirely from my body and sat there, watching myself cry in front of strangers, shaking my head at the mess that sat before me, unable to control it in the slightest. That’s when Joe took the paper from me, damp from my sweaty hands and finished reading it aloud,
“It wasn’t staying home from college,
It was helping her get dressed.
It wasn’t the day she started chemo,
It was the day her hair fell in chunks into my fingertips.
It wasn’t crying by myself,
It was watching my brother cry in bed next to her.
It wasn’t the hospital,
It was having to help her climb up the stairs at home.
It wasn’t when she fell,
It was seeing her use a walker.
It wasn’t the hospice bed in our living room,
It was watching her sleep in it.”
I was out of control, sobbing, now more from humiliation than anything else, and so I walked out and left class that very first day, and Joe followed close behind. I didn’t say anything for several minutes, maybe more, and when I looked back he was there, smiling patiently. I didn’t owe him anything, I knew that, but I offered it up anyway, because there was nothing but the truth waiting there now, everything else had come out already.
“She died,” I said, praying the tears wouldn’t work their way up the well again.
“In May, she died,” I looked at him and something seemed to click, like he understood everything from that poem, and he knew how to handle what I was saying now.
“You can talk to me,” he said, looking me in the eyes and then, unexpectedly, hugging me for how long I needed to be hugged. I realized then that I hadn’t hugged anyone in two weeks, since I hugged Ryan and Chase goodbye. My mom hugged me every day, and it’s so stupid, the small things like that that you remember later, when someone hugs you unexpectedly and you hold on too tight, trying to make up for the loss, trying to feel something that’s not meant to be felt again. Joe’s hug felt real, strong, safe, it felt like home three thousand miles from anything like it.
“Let’s go get something to eat,” he said, and he kept his arm around me the whole way to the Coates cafeteria, and it felt comforting, in a way that a family touch does, and we sat down and ate tuna sandwiches and talked about her—my mom. I hadn’t told anyone here about her, it was easier that way, and I didn’t know then if the black blob inside of me would release a little bit now, or continue to tighten and feed itself all these miles away, the guilt of leaving mixed with the pain of losing her that grew daily here, that bread from the sun and the new people and the fake life I was living without her.
~
Joe came over for rehearsal that Friday, sweaty from practice he sat on my bed and we practiced the kissy stuff first, to “get it out of the way.” He’d never acted before and when we started kissing and touching and he stuck his tongue in my mouth I didn’t stop him. I expected to feel something, or an inkling of something, but there was nothing, and I was relieved. Then we got down to business with the lines and the memorization and the acting that had nothing to do with the kissing. We worked well together, great chemistry and an easy flow for dialogue; I was a little excited about acting again.
When we finished I opened the door, to find LaShell and Scooby eavesdropping outside, and the four of us sat down on the carpeted floor and had a bowl of cereal and talked until it got too late for anyone to consider walking back to their dorm rooms, (even though they were only minutes away), and so we had our first sleepover, Joe and I at least, the two of us huddled in my twin bed, pretending not to spoon, while LaShell and Scoob openly spooned on her bed by the window. It all felt so comfortable that I eased into it without thinking about the fact that Joe and I were sleeping together, with nothing sexual in the mix, except the rehearsal make-out session that we both knew was business casual. He never mentioned that he had a sort of girlfriend back home, just as I never mentioned Adam Wadsworth, because if there was really nothing going on between us, what did it matter?
The sleeping thing became routine, so much in fact that it became expected, and on the few nights that Joe didn’t show up at my door in the evening or after class, I would find myself slightly sad and disappointed. We wasted hours together watching bad TV and making each other laugh—and somehow we became the talk of the tiny Trinity population, the “will they or won’t they” couple who ate breakfast together every morning and slept together every night but just wouldn’t fess up to being in love. The funny thing is; we weren’t, and regardless of the comments or the unusualness of the relationship, it was everything I needed at the time. Our acting scene went phenomenally well, and I had become a regular at all the soccer games, painted shirt, screaming voice, and a seat beside the players’ families in the bleachers. All of my activities became the four of us; Me, Joe, LaShell, and Scoob—the couple and the non-couple, and by the time the fall officially blew in I felt at home in the Lone Star state.
~
Fall in Texas doesn’t really count, because the weather stays similar and you still don’t need a jacket when it gets dark at night. The mosquitoes start to quiet down and the humidity doesn’t kill you upon contact, but nothing really marks a significant change to tell you it’s arrived. Back home you could smell fall coming in the air, right around my birthday, October 9th, my mom would smell the air outside and say that fall had officially arrived. It’s really the only season you can smell coming, the fall, but in Texas I felt cheated out of my favorite season, I couldn’t feel her there with me without the fall. So on my birthday I didn’t want to celebrate, because I was melancholy and estranged, and I went to bed at 10pm when I heard a light knock on my door that I thought was just the wind. When I ignored it, it got louder and so I went to the door and peeked out in my nightgown—a long T-shirt I had stolen from my brother.
“Happy Birthday to you…” Joe sang in his best singing voice and he hugged me hard and handed me a mixed CD.
“Thanks,” I said, and I slipped the CD into my player and laid down on my bed, not caring that I was in my underwear and a t-shirt, and him not seeming to either.
“I put a bunch of stuff on there I think you’ll really love. Damien Rice, Imogen Heap, and some other stuff,” he said, lying down beside me.
We listened in silence to Damien Rice’s “Delicate” and it reminded me of Joe even as he lay there, then, beside me in bed. That was the first time I wished for him to kiss me, but he didn’t, and instead he slept over just as he had done for a month and a half, but somehow tonight was different, even though fall hadn’t come, something else had happened in its place. I was 20 now, and I felt like I had earned the extra candle this year.
It was everything I was expecting, that first college fraternity party. Full of polo-clad boys in various shapes and sizes and freshman girls all trying to flirt and fit in. I met my group outside on the patio, four soccer boys I made friends with those first few days of settling in and LaShell, who’s boyfriend Scooby was a soccer player too. I held a red plastic Solo cup of punch in my hand as I abandon the baseball team boys who’d given me a lift—making a false promise we would see each other later on—because loyalty is important to me, and I’ll always chose soccer over baseball. I wore a hot pink dress that night and the air was balmy, causing my hair to wave up loosely and stick to the back of my neck, no breeze to speak of made the closeness of bodies almost unbearable, and I got my first taste of the real Texas heat, overwhelming and intoxicating all at once, the taste on your lips always slightly salty.
“Oh, it’ll be fine,” I said, blowing her off, getting to know the soccer boys a little bit better and making conversation with strangers as I scanned the crowd for potential male bondage. Adam Wadsworth and I were still talking nightly, he was saying I love you and while I sometimes said it back, it was more routine than real, like it had been ever since that night in the swimming pool, when he said it to me and I declined to offer it back. As the Texas night wore on and the punch caught up I realized that Trinity was seriously lacking in the babe department. In fact, the only tens there were the soccer guys I was quickly becoming friends with and this was turning into another classic Ashley moment: when I realize I’ll have no one to date because I’m good friends with all the attractive guys. Shit, I thought, and I remember thinking it then, as I stared at all of the sloppy drunk coeds on the dance floor, practically undressing and grinding on anyone close to them. And next to me was Joe, who clearly had looked me over more than twice and so I grabbed him and took him on the dance floor for two songs, grinding my hips into his and feeling stares in my direction because let’s face it: Joe was a hot commodity from that first ‘let’s see if there’s any hot freshman’ party; his dirty blond hair, the sexy wavy kind, his chiseled jaw and golden skin, and his 6’2 build, that looked just about like the cover of Men’s Health magazine. I got in some sly moves and some body grazing before we all piled in the car and went to IHop for 3am pancakes. I don’t know if it was the feeling of being free or the atmosphere or the gin bucket shots that were poured into my mouth by a stranger with a turkey bester, but crammed up against him in the tiny back seat of Scooby’s two door red Lexus was where I first felt the urge to make out with Joe Houchins—and then I reminded myself I sort of had a half-boyfriend back home.
~
My dorm room was all set up, pictures framing my twin bed, my shiny new computer in its place on my built in wooden desk, and my mattress covered in the quilt my mom had made me when I was eleven. Each square a different pattern, all colors of a little girl—pinks and purples—a princess sort of feel. I brought it here and laid it on my bed, next to the newly bright colors of all the other comforters in my suite; bed sets from IKEA or Bed Bath and Beyond, mine seemed to pale in comparison, it’s pastels washing out my designated six feet of square footage, the only thing I brought that still smelled slightly of home.
The first week at Trinity was a blur: freshman orientation, placement exams, new faces; everything unfamiliar yet, somehow, unintimidating. I tried nearly every day to separate myself from my roommate LaShell, who seemed to tag along with me wherever we went: the cafeteria, the bathroom, Target. It was my first time sharing my room, my first time living with a girl (other than my mom), and thus far, I wasn’t reaping any benefits. LaShell and I were polar opposites beginning with our looks and ending with every single one of our interests. She was pre-med and I was an acting major, she was there to study, I was there to party. We fought like sisters but had no family or blood ties to make us love each other, and within that first week it was clear that my living situation would be less than ideal.
She brought sugar gliders, two of them, those little rodents that “fly” through the air by gliding with webbed appendages and that stunk up our shared closet in a mere matter of days. I was too nice to be openly annoyed, and too determined to mask the odor with my fresh scent Febreez that promised me a college dorm room that could smell sweet no matter what it was up against. But Febreez lost the battle over time and I prayed my clothes wouldn’t absorb the smell of rodent as I tried to meet new friends.
Tuesday was my first day of class, and I rolled out of bed at 10am, though I had woken up far before that to the sound of the toilet flushing when it was still dark outside. LaShell was already reading her thick Biology text book when my alarm went off, jarring me from false dreams.
“Morning!” She called over to me, though I had already told her not to greet me cheerily before my shower and coffee.
“Morning,” I grumbled back on my way to the shower, which was already occupied by my singing suitemate Janet—the oober Christian who wore jumpers and mom jeans, but was so sweet and endearing it was difficult not to love her.
After my turn in the shower I departed with wet hair, because in Texas only the crazies use blow dryers in August, and LaShell not only blew dry but also straightened. I shoveled down some Special K at the dining hall, reluctantly with 2% milk, because the small cartons of non-fat were already all gone, and I thought to myself, ‘this must be how it starts…the freshman 15…’.
I arrived at acting class in Ruth Taylor Theatre sweaty and still a little tired, looking around the room of peers that were all 5 or 6 minutes early, wide eyed and ready like me. The professor looked like a hippie, with a long flowing dress, bare feet, and an aura of ease. Her short hair and red framed glasses framed her kind blue eyes. She sat cross legged on the floor and invited us to remove our shoes and do the same. With one minute left before start time, in sauntered Joe, in a green polo shirt and khaki shorts, looking red cheeked and flustered.
“Hey,” I waved over to him and motioned for him to sit down beside me.
“Hey, I didn’t know you were in here,” he smiled, looking a little relieved to know someone.
I felt the opposite; acting class was the class that mattered to me, where I wanted to grow and explore, and the slight crush that I may or may not have felt seemed to go against my inhibitions I was priorly calling upon to help me succeed in there.
“How’s preseason going?” I asked him, but I wouldn’t get an answer because that’s when class began. We paired off for an icebreaker exercise and he and I ended up being in a silent staring pose for five minutes. Five minutes seems short until you are asked to silently stare at someone who is essentially a stranger who you find fairly attractive and you are asked to take each other in; every inch and angle. This can be intimidating, when standing across from a handsome soccer player, trying not to blush—my acting skills were faltering on day one.
“You were so uncomfortable,” Joe teased afterward, giving me the elbow. And I smiled shyly, my silence not offering a response. I shrugged my shoulders. After more icebreakers and yoga poses we were given scene assignments from Stacey—the hippie professor—and when my name was called out it was alongside Joe Houchins, who would be my scene partner, who I would spend many hours of my time within the next several weeks; rehearsing. We were then handed the scenes and as we read them to ourselves I gasped audibly when I arrived at the sex scene in the end. When he looked up, he was blushing.
Our final exercise that first day was to bring in a poem that meant something to us and read it aloud to the class. I brought in something I had written about my mom the year before; back in February when we knew that the cancer would kill her. I chose the poem because it meant something to me, and I thought nothing of it other than that it would be a short read for my first class presentation. I was third to read as we went around the circle:
“It wasn’t the day they said cancer.
It was the day after that.”
That was all that came out before the tears burst from a place I didn’t feel or see them waiting, a dark corner perhaps, hidden from me entirely. They came down so hard and fast, that I removed myself entirely from my body and sat there, watching myself cry in front of strangers, shaking my head at the mess that sat before me, unable to control it in the slightest. That’s when Joe took the paper from me, damp from my sweaty hands and finished reading it aloud,
“It wasn’t staying home from college,
It was helping her get dressed.
It wasn’t the day she started chemo,
It was the day her hair fell in chunks into my fingertips.
It wasn’t crying by myself,
It was watching my brother cry in bed next to her.
It wasn’t the hospital,
It was having to help her climb up the stairs at home.
It wasn’t when she fell,
It was seeing her use a walker.
It wasn’t the hospice bed in our living room,
It was watching her sleep in it.”
I was out of control, sobbing, now more from humiliation than anything else, and so I walked out and left class that very first day, and Joe followed close behind. I didn’t say anything for several minutes, maybe more, and when I looked back he was there, smiling patiently. I didn’t owe him anything, I knew that, but I offered it up anyway, because there was nothing but the truth waiting there now, everything else had come out already.
“She died,” I said, praying the tears wouldn’t work their way up the well again.
“In May, she died,” I looked at him and something seemed to click, like he understood everything from that poem, and he knew how to handle what I was saying now.
“You can talk to me,” he said, looking me in the eyes and then, unexpectedly, hugging me for how long I needed to be hugged. I realized then that I hadn’t hugged anyone in two weeks, since I hugged Ryan and Chase goodbye. My mom hugged me every day, and it’s so stupid, the small things like that that you remember later, when someone hugs you unexpectedly and you hold on too tight, trying to make up for the loss, trying to feel something that’s not meant to be felt again. Joe’s hug felt real, strong, safe, it felt like home three thousand miles from anything like it.
“Let’s go get something to eat,” he said, and he kept his arm around me the whole way to the Coates cafeteria, and it felt comforting, in a way that a family touch does, and we sat down and ate tuna sandwiches and talked about her—my mom. I hadn’t told anyone here about her, it was easier that way, and I didn’t know then if the black blob inside of me would release a little bit now, or continue to tighten and feed itself all these miles away, the guilt of leaving mixed with the pain of losing her that grew daily here, that bread from the sun and the new people and the fake life I was living without her.
~
Joe came over for rehearsal that Friday, sweaty from practice he sat on my bed and we practiced the kissy stuff first, to “get it out of the way.” He’d never acted before and when we started kissing and touching and he stuck his tongue in my mouth I didn’t stop him. I expected to feel something, or an inkling of something, but there was nothing, and I was relieved. Then we got down to business with the lines and the memorization and the acting that had nothing to do with the kissing. We worked well together, great chemistry and an easy flow for dialogue; I was a little excited about acting again.
When we finished I opened the door, to find LaShell and Scooby eavesdropping outside, and the four of us sat down on the carpeted floor and had a bowl of cereal and talked until it got too late for anyone to consider walking back to their dorm rooms, (even though they were only minutes away), and so we had our first sleepover, Joe and I at least, the two of us huddled in my twin bed, pretending not to spoon, while LaShell and Scoob openly spooned on her bed by the window. It all felt so comfortable that I eased into it without thinking about the fact that Joe and I were sleeping together, with nothing sexual in the mix, except the rehearsal make-out session that we both knew was business casual. He never mentioned that he had a sort of girlfriend back home, just as I never mentioned Adam Wadsworth, because if there was really nothing going on between us, what did it matter?
The sleeping thing became routine, so much in fact that it became expected, and on the few nights that Joe didn’t show up at my door in the evening or after class, I would find myself slightly sad and disappointed. We wasted hours together watching bad TV and making each other laugh—and somehow we became the talk of the tiny Trinity population, the “will they or won’t they” couple who ate breakfast together every morning and slept together every night but just wouldn’t fess up to being in love. The funny thing is; we weren’t, and regardless of the comments or the unusualness of the relationship, it was everything I needed at the time. Our acting scene went phenomenally well, and I had become a regular at all the soccer games, painted shirt, screaming voice, and a seat beside the players’ families in the bleachers. All of my activities became the four of us; Me, Joe, LaShell, and Scoob—the couple and the non-couple, and by the time the fall officially blew in I felt at home in the Lone Star state.
~
Fall in Texas doesn’t really count, because the weather stays similar and you still don’t need a jacket when it gets dark at night. The mosquitoes start to quiet down and the humidity doesn’t kill you upon contact, but nothing really marks a significant change to tell you it’s arrived. Back home you could smell fall coming in the air, right around my birthday, October 9th, my mom would smell the air outside and say that fall had officially arrived. It’s really the only season you can smell coming, the fall, but in Texas I felt cheated out of my favorite season, I couldn’t feel her there with me without the fall. So on my birthday I didn’t want to celebrate, because I was melancholy and estranged, and I went to bed at 10pm when I heard a light knock on my door that I thought was just the wind. When I ignored it, it got louder and so I went to the door and peeked out in my nightgown—a long T-shirt I had stolen from my brother.
“Happy Birthday to you…” Joe sang in his best singing voice and he hugged me hard and handed me a mixed CD.
“Thanks,” I said, and I slipped the CD into my player and laid down on my bed, not caring that I was in my underwear and a t-shirt, and him not seeming to either.
“I put a bunch of stuff on there I think you’ll really love. Damien Rice, Imogen Heap, and some other stuff,” he said, lying down beside me.
We listened in silence to Damien Rice’s “Delicate” and it reminded me of Joe even as he lay there, then, beside me in bed. That was the first time I wished for him to kiss me, but he didn’t, and instead he slept over just as he had done for a month and a half, but somehow tonight was different, even though fall hadn’t come, something else had happened in its place. I was 20 now, and I felt like I had earned the extra candle this year.
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