I wanted him to be my friend.

Instead, he became me. And I became him.

Before, I was simply Jessica. Your average, normal, everyday suburban teenage girl. My life was the proverbial white picket fence. I lived in a reasonably sized house with a reasonably sized yard, in which I spent lazy afternoons with my reasonably normal family: The clueless father. The slightly overprotective mother. The perfect older sister. During the week I went to a Catholic school not far from home where I blended in with the rest of the all-female student body. There, I was just an ordinary, unremarkable face swimming in a sea of tartan.

If you had asked anyone to describe my personality back then, they would have said something like, “Jessica? Oh, she’s a very sweet girl. A sweet, happy girl. Very quiet, though. Very shy. Always in her own little world. Shame, really. Her sister Sarah is so outgoing and popular, you’d think it would have rubbed off on the younger one. But she does seem very sweet.”

And that would be me, from afar, in a nutshell.

A sweet, happy girl.

By age seventeen I had mastered the art of seeming happy and well adjusted. I was unhappy, but I’d managed to turn that unhappiness into a strange sort of complacency…An acceptance of the fact that my life would never be anything other than standard. I worked hard for good grades in school, never caused any trouble, did as I was told. I got on famously with my family, my neighbors, and what few acquaintances I’d managed to acquire at school. But, for the most part, I was always in my own little world. Always off in a corner by myself, drawing, or reading, or writing. Waiting. Though I wasn’t sure what for. Something to define me, I suppose. Something to make me realize who I was, really, underneath the persona I had been wearing for over a decade. Something…deeper. Something more than the “pleasant” life I had.

And then I met Tom.