The Rest of the Story

by Sarah Dessen

After loving someone you couldn’t depend on, you realize how important it is to trust someone will do what they say. It’s such a simple thing, not to promise what you can’t or won’t deliver.

There were lots of ways to love someone, I guessed, both by remembering and forgetting.

Trouble, to expect someone to do what they said they would. Then again, he was someone to whom things came easily, always: a job, a future, a girl.

But all my life I’d felt more like an observer than an active participant. Beside the wheel, not behind. It was safer there, but could be lonely too, or so I was now realizing. Maybe there was a middle ground between living too hard and living at all. Maybe, here, I was finding it.

You can make your life, or life can make you.

“Her name is Emma,” my dad told her. I knew, in my rational mind, that he was just correcting her. I was Emma to him, I always had been. But as I heard him say this with such certainty, I could feel my temper rising. He could keep me from the other side of the lake. From Roo. But I would not let him take the weeks I’d already had, and the girl I’d been then, as well. “It’s Emma Saylor,” I corrected him. “And I told you. They know me here as Saylor.”