“Have we been up all night?” Zoë wondered.
“I think you dozed off for a few minutes. You were snoring a little bit. It was pretty cute.”
“Adam, have you ever been love?”
“I don’t know. What does it feel like?”
“This, I think.”
The next morning came too quickly. Neither Zoë nor Adam was ready to be separated, but her youth group was boarding their bus back to Winnipeg. Zoë cried as she boarded the bus. Adam pulled her toward him one last time and kissed her passionately.
“Will you call me the minute you get home?”
“As soon as I walk in the door. I’ll miss you…a lot.”
While he watched Zoë’s bus pull away, he felt a longing he couldn’t quite grasp. What he didn’t know was the long drought he would suffer until he felt that way again.
____________________________
Jen Savin wasn’t looking forward to her family’s annual Christmas vacation to Miami. Jen, her parents, and two younger brothers always went to Florida on Christmas Eve morning and stayed through New Year’s Day. The thought of donning a bathing suit was terrifying. Jen was disgusted with how she looked, even though rationally she knew she had potential. She had just turned 15. But the combination of her incredible intelligence and shyness actually made her feel like Carrie at the prom. High school was certainly not the time of her life. She couldn’t even get people to call her Jennifer or even Jen. She was just Jenny, the buck-toothed girl with pigtails who only got Valentine’s Day cards because kids were forced to give one to everyone in the class.. She was worse than unpopular — Jen wasn’t even noticed enough to be labeled unpopular. With each academic award received, any hope she had of getting a date seemed to become even more remote. Her parents never realized her anguish because she hid it so well. They figured that as long as Jen was getting straight A’s, she must be happy and well adjusted. Jen could never blow her parents’ dream of draining their savings to send their happy daughter to an Ivy League college by confessing to them how sad she was. Pleasing her parents was her duty, or so she thought.
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