Free Now You See Her by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page B

us.
    Like, there was the time we mutually decided that he would take the big blonde, Grace Carnahan, to Homecoming. Logan didn’t want people to think that we were together the way we were. It would have looked bad for me. I might have gotten kicked out of school. You weren’t supposed to date other students—well, have a sexual relationship at school—even if you were the same age. And definitely not a senior with a sophomore.
    And plus, we were starting to talk about The Plan.
    Logan brought it up one night when we were lying on the sleeping bag together at the cabin.
    “I can’t stand the idea of leaving you next year,” he said. “You’re like the whole world to me, Hope. I can’t
    imagine living without you.”
    “But what are we going to do, then?” I asked. “I have two more years here, and then college.”
    “Well, we could skip out,” he said. “We could just run away, you and me. We could work as waiters until we got work in movies or on Broadway and then when you’re twenty-one, we could get married.”
    I was totally over the sun and the moon, then. Logan was asking me to marry him! It was a big decision—a big decision to make at fifteen. But I knew he was the one. It’s like our futures were, like, entwined—we knew we were fated to be together. So I kissed him very softly and said, “Yes, a thousand times yes! I’ll go with you any- where on Earth, Logan.”
    So then we really had to start being careful. We couldn’t let anyone suspect we were together. Can you imagine how that felt? We practically had to act like we weren’t even friends: “Hi, Logan.” “Hi, Hope.” If I was going to take off with Logan when he graduated, I didn’t want it to get around that we were in love now. My par- ents would kill me, and the school would be responsible for their most famous student—well, after the play their two most famous students—sleeping together.
    What Logan explained to me was this: he was going to go to college in the fall, but at Michigan, not at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, so he could be near me.
    Then, when I turned sixteen, in junior year? I was going to quit. We were going to go to L.A. or New York, take his car, use up the credit cards, take out all the money in my account, and just go! My parents would freak, but I’d tell them I was going to go to Stella Adler or the Actors Studio. I could talk them into that, especially if I let them pay for a room at one of those “girl dorms” where acting students live, even if I really, secretly lived with Logan.
    I couldn’t believe that in a year, I would be living with Logan, waking up with him every morning, making his coffee, walking to the subway with him and holding his hand, and he’d be coming home every night if he didn’t have a rehearsal and the two of us would have a candlelight dinner. Okay, it might only be rice and beans, but it would be by candlelight! We would live way up on the West Side, or some other cheap place, as long as we could live together. Maybe we would get a big German shepherd. I imagined us walking the dog together on Sunday mornings in Riverside Park, drinking our Starbucks. I imagined Logan tackling me so he could cover me up with leaves and then us making out on the grass on some warm fall day. You probably think it was crazy for a fifteen-year-old to be thinking like this. But I wasn’t any fifteen-year-old. And it’s different with peo- ple in the business. You grow up faster. You can make
    decisions better because you’ve had to make so many decisions on the stage that had an effect on your future, because every performance affects your future.
    Anyway, you can tell that Logan and I knew we had something that was probably unique in the world—like the real Romeo and Juliet. I know that sounds nuts. But they knew even though they were made-up people. Logan and I didn’t even have to talk to each other every day to totally maintain our connection. What we said with our eyes, at