Free Leaving Paradise by Simone Elkeles

something to make her smile. I swear everyone in the room was silent, watching them reunite. Does he know Brian and Kendra are a couple? The way Caleb stared at her butt when she walked away from him makes me think he’s oblivious to what’s been going on since he was in jail. Some things haven’t changed.
    I pull back my window curtains and stare out at Caleb’s window. It’s a little past three a.m. He’s probably sleeping like a baby without a care in the world.
    But he’s not. His light is on and I see his silhouette pacing his room.
    I let the curtains fall back to cover the window, turn the light off, and hurry back to bed. I can’t fall into old habits, not now after everything that’s happened.
    The reality is I had a crush on Caleb since first grade. He used to tease Leah and me as we played with our Barbie dolls and dressed up in costumes. But when we needed a boy to play a part in one of our shows, we could always coerce him into acting the part. And if we made up a ballet show, we could count on him to be an audience member as we jeté’d and plié’d our hearts out in front of him.
    But the time I fell head over heels in love with Caleb Becker was in sixth grade, when he took the blame after I broke his mom’s ceramic statue of an owl that had been given to her great-great-grandmother from some former U.S. president.
    Leah was upstairs getting ready and I was waiting for her in their living room. We were going to play tennis at the park. Caleb surprised me by flying down the stairs with a Star Wars lightsaber in his hand, waving it around. I laughed and put up my racquet as a weapon, challenging him. He came at me with the saber, and I swung my racquet to ward off his attack. I counted on whacking his saber, not the ceramic owl on his mom’s credenza.
    His mother heard the crash and came running. Caleb said it was his fault, that he was playing around with the saber. He never named me as the one who broke the statue; he didn’t even name me as an accomplice. I was too scared at the time to tell the truth, even when I knew he got grounded for a whole month. Without even realizing it, he became my hero.
    After that, I used to watch Caleb through my window when he played catch with his friends or had Boy Scout meetings in his backyard. When we were in seventh grade he started mowing the lawn while listening to music. I could hardly concentrate on my homework while I watched him weave back and forth across the lawn with the mower, his muscles bunching through his t-shirt as he gathered grass clippings and shoved them into garbage bags.
    Sometimes he’d catch me looking at him and wave. Sometimes I tentatively waved back, but then I’d close my curtains and keep them closed for a week so he’d never know how I really felt about him. Other times I’d pretend I didn’t see him, although I suppose he knew I’d been spying.
    Caleb never let on that he liked me more than a friend. That was okay by me. I just kept up hope that one day he’d see me as a girl and not his twin sister’s pesky friend.
    He had girlfriends over the years, but was never serious about any of them.
    Until Kendra.
    They started dating in the beginning of our freshman year. Kendra hung out at his house every day after school; they were inseparable from the start. Every time I happened to glance out my window and spot them in an intimate embrace, my hopeful heart crumbled little by little.
    That was also about the time my dad left. So here I was, desperately waiting for my dad and Caleb to love me as much as I loved them.
    What could I do to make the ones I loved love me back? The only thing I was good at was tennis. So I practiced and played and challenged myself every day during the summer between our freshman and sophomore year. Surely, once Caleb saw I was the only sophomore on the varsity squad, he’d notice me.
    And I sent my dad articles from the local paper about my success, never forgetting to add the tennis coach’s