Of course! But once the trust is gone, it's really hard to get back. Not impossible, but hard.

I do... I'm much better at faking my happiness in real life.

Prologue

So, there was this boy and he broke my heart... But isn’t that always the way these stories begin? And really, my heartbreak is no different from yours. It isn’t more intense or special in any way. It hasn’t made me want to compose sonnets of sorrow or pull out my hair in mourning or even rend my clothing in grief. Still, I feel compelled to share it with you. This story isn’t particularly interesting, nor is it very original. It all just started with a boy and a girl.

The boy of my story isn’t the sweetest romantic hero who ever lived, who comes in to sweep this girl who needs saving off her feet. The girl isn’t a great beauty who could have any guy in the universe, but chooses to be with the sweet, if slightly geeky boy who lives next door. They are just a boy and a girl who grew up on the same street and finally fell in love. But like love stories all too often do, this one has an end that almost came before it even began.

I suppose, if I’m going to tell this story, you deserve to know who I am. My name is Cleo January Burton. My twin brother, Thaddeus, and I were born in Tulsa, Oklahoma during a blizzard in January 1980. I grew up in a quiet suburb southwest of downtown. This neighborhood was literally filled with kids. Unfortunately, they were almost exclusively boys. I was basically the lone girl in a world of boys (sure, there were girls down the street and on the block behind us, but the boys thought they were too prissy to play “blood” soccer or full body tackle tag. And the boys were probably right). The boy of my story grew up in a house through the block, behind his cousins, just across the street from me. Their yards connected to make an enormous yard. A place where my brother and I spent almost every afternoon for the first 15 years of our lives (or at least the portion I can remember).

That is until the afternoon of August 27, 1996. That afternoon, the family that lived across the street left on a journey that literally took them around the world. And my brother died. My brother and the boy who lived next door to me went swimming. I was mad at him for leaving me home alone, but my leg was in a cast and I couldn’t go with them. “See ya’ Dickhead” were the last words I spewed at my beloved brother. He drowned, which always sounds so weird since he was the strongest swimmer I had ever met. Really, on that day, an essential part of me died...

But, this story isn’t about him or how I lost him; it’s about a boy.

In the years since that day, I lived the life laid out for me. I had skipped kindergarten, 6th and 11th grade, when I graduated from high school (at 15, not long before my brother died), from Hill Haven Christian Academy (a school where I wasn’t very well liked), my parents wouldn’t let me go to school out of state because I was too young and they had lost Thad so recently. So I stayed in Tulsa and attended school. Where I earned bachelor and masters degrees in English, history and education. I had the typical college experience with a steady boyfriend (who was still in high school and ironically enough the boy next door), I eventually joined a horrid sorority (I was a tri-Delt, how mortifying) and basically moved through my life in a perpetual fog (people always complained it was impossible to tell if I was actually listening to them or even aware they were in the room. I was, I just didn’t want them to know I was). Then, one fateful day, soon after graduation, I was offered a job, a very good job working as a tutor for the boys I’d grown up with.

So, now, I sit staring at my blank computer and feel compelled to tell you a story that will inevitably make me sad. Maybe this compulsion stems from my intense need as a member of the human race to share the ugliness of my scars, but this scar is so well hidden, I can’t display it for you. I have to tell you, describe the shape and the color. So, I begin my story with telling you, there was this boy and he broke my heart...