Page 98 of The Same Backward as Forward

Two dozen glass jars.

A wooden rosary.

Three rolls of duct tape.

Twine.

A lighter.

I stare at the lighter for a moment, like a fish locking onto a lure, unable to look away and unsure why.Keep going.I shake it off and push on, stopping only when I find a hidey-hole in the wall that contains nothing but baseball cards and a decades-old checkers set. The second I see the checker set, an image begins to take hold in my mind. An idea.

I make a list of the items I still need, and when Jackson returns, I hand it to him.

“What’s this?” Jackson grunts.

“A request for a picnic blanket, twenty-four ounces of wax, three tubes of epoxy, and something that can cut glass.”

Jackson snorts.

I’ll work on him.

Slowly, day by day and item by item, I start to wear Jackson down. I still don’t have the epoxy or the glass cutter, but I have no objections to being patient, because slowly, day by day, I am also—impossibly—falling deeper and deeper in love with Hannah.

It’s the little things. It’s hearing her laugh for the first time and devoting myself to making sure there is a second. It’s cooking eggs and bacon together over the same burner, because Jackson only has one. It’s the way she spins herself out and back in when I try to teach her to dance.

It’s Hannah, showing meherscars: two on her knees, one at the base of her hand, one hidden just above her hairline.

It’s discovering things I would never have even thought to ask about.

“A zero-sum system?” I say, studying Hannah’s face and trying to detect any hint that she is testing my level of gullibility.

Hannah nods.

“Salt and pepper?” I press. “As a child, you genuinely thought—”

“That pepper was the anti-salt,” Hannah confirms. “That they canceled each other out.”

She is not much of a cook, even now. I love that about her just as much as I love the way she has started writing her own Hangman puzzles on my arm in permanent marker.

I’ve solved every one.

Hannah is with me all the time now, unless she is at work,and every minute we spend together makes me that much more sure that falling for someone you already love isn’t just a matter of coming to love them more deeply. It’s the process of discovering more things about them to love.

More, more, more, more, more.

One night, I slip her a paper star, folded just so. She unfolds it to find another tiny slip of paper at the center.

“I wrote you a poem.”

She reads it silently, and I watch for the slight, telltale movement of her lips as she does, letting the words echo through my mind as well as hers.

I became real that night

And now I am a rebel who fights

To worship you

Hannah looks up from the paper and narrows her eyes at me.