Love,
Lara Jean
I let out a scream, so loud and so piercing that Jamie barks in alarm. “Sorry,” I whisper, falling
back against my pillows.
I cannot believe that John Ambrose McClaren read that letter. I didn’t remember it to be so...
naked. With so much... yearning. God, why do I have to be a person who yearns so much? How
horrible. How perfectly horrible. I’ve never been naked in front of a boy before, but now I feel like I
have. I can’t bear to look at it again, to even think about it. I scramble up and stuff it back inside the
envelope and push it under my bed so it no longer exists. Out of sight, out of mind.
Obviously John won’t be getting this letter back. In fact I don’t know if I should write him back at
all. Things feel... altered, somehow.
I’d forgotten that letter, how ardently I longed for him. How certain I was, how absolutely certain I
believed we were meant to be, if only. The memory of that belief shakes me up; it leaves me feeling
unsettled and even uncertain. Unmoored. What was it about him, I wonder, that made me so sure?
Strangely, there’s no mention of Peter in my letter. In the letter I say I started liking him in the fall
of eighth grade. I liked Peter in eighth grade too, so there was a definite crossover. When did one
begin and the other end?
The one person who would know is the one person I could never ask.
She is the one who foretold that I would like John.
Genevieve slept over at my house most nights that summer. Allie was only allowed to sleep over
on special occasions, so it was usually just the two of us. We’d go over what happened that day with
the boys, every detail. “This is going to be our crew,” she said to me one night, her lips barely
moving. We were doing Korean face masks my grandma had sent, the kind that look like ski masks,
and drip with “essence” and vitamins and spa-like things. “This is what high school is going to be
like. It’ll be me and Peter and you and McClaren, and Chrissy and Allie can share Trevor. We’ll all
be power couples.”
“But John and I don’t like each other like that,” I said, teeth clenched to keep my face mask from
shifting.
“You will,” she said. She said it like it was a preordained fact, and I believed her. I always
believed her.
But none of it came to be, except for the Gen and Peter part.