A passage from my favorite Jodi Picoult book, The Pact.
"What bothers you the most?"
Chris fell silent. It wasn't that he was not being taken at his word; if the situation had been reversed, he too might have his doubts. It wasn't even that everyone in the whole goddamned school was treating him like he'd grown six heads overnight. It was that, having seen him with Emily, they could believe he would ever willingly hurt her.
"I loved her," he said, his voice breaking. "I can't forget that. So I don't see why everyone else can."
Dr. Feinstein motioned again toward the wing chair; Chris sank into it. He watched the tiny cogs inside the tape recorder chug in slow circles. "Would you tell me about Emily?" the psychiatrist asked.
Chris closed his eyes. How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as Em was with him, he was at home?
"She belonged to me," Chris said simply.
Dr. Feinstein's eyebrows lifted. "What do you mean by that?"
"She was, you know, all the things I wasn't. And I was all the things she wasn't. She could paint circles around anyone; I can't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been." Chris lifted his outstretched palm and curled his fingers. "Her hand," he said. "It fit mine."
"Go on," Dr. Feinstein said, encouraging.
"Well, I mean, we weren't always going out. That was pretty recent, a couple of years. But I've known her forever." He laughed suddenly. "She said my name before anything else. She used to call me Kiss. And then when she learned the word kiss for real, she'd get it all confused and look at me and smack her lips." He looked up. "I don't remember that, exactly. My mom told me."
"How old were you when you met Emily?"
"Six months, I guess," Chris said. "The day she was born." He leaned forward, considering. "We used to play together every afternoon. I mean, she lived right next door and our moms would hang all the time, so it was a natural."
"When did you start going out?"
Chris frowned. "I don't know the day, exactly. Em would. It just sort of evolved. Everyone figured it was going to happen, so it wasn't much of a surprise. One day I kind of looked at her and I didn't just see Em, I saw this really beautiful girl. And, well...you know."
"Were you intimate?"
Chris felt heat crawling up from the collar of his shirt. This was an area he did not want to discuss. "Do I have to tell you if I don't want to?"
"You don't have to tell me anything at all," Dr. Feinstein said.
"Well," Chris said. "I don't want to."
"But you loved her."
"Yes," Chris answered.
"And she was your first girlfriend."
"Well, pretty much, yeah."
"So how do you know?" Dr. Feinstein asked. "How do you know that it was love?"
The way he asked was not mean or confrontational. He was just sort of wondering. If Feinstein had been bitter, or direct, like that bitch detective, Chris would have clammed up immediately. But as it stood, it was a good and valid question. "There was an attraction," he said carefully, "but it was more than that." He chewed on his lower lip for a second. "Once, we broke up for a while. I started hanging around with this girl who I'd always thought was really hot, this cheerleader named Donna. I was like, totally infatuated with Donna, maybe even when I was still together with Em. Anyway, we started going out places and fooling around a little and every time I was with Donna I realized I didn't know her too well. I'd hyped her up in my head to be so much more than what she really was." Chris took a deep breath. "When Em and I got back together, I could see that she had never been less than what I'd figured her to be. If anything, she was always better than I remembered. And that's what I think love is," Chris said quietly. "When your hindsight's twenty-twenty, and you still wouldn't change a thing."
I love this book. I desperately want my book to be something close to as good as this. Oh, if only I could write. If only my characters would come alive, if only my story line would form, if only I had time and energy and brain cells to write the novel that is in my head, waiting to be put down on paper. It will happen. It will! It must. Sometime soon I will post an excerpt from my own book.....
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