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comments was a birthday wish from my high school boyfriend, Joe. My truest love. The man I had never forgotten.
    Loving Joe had been like sliding on eyeglasses after a lifetime of poor vision. Joe was my revelation.
    “Happy birthday, old friend. Good one? Hope so.” Eight words. Our first bit of direct contact in fifteen years.
    Though we had been Facebook friends for a few years, we had never messaged each other, had never posted on each other’s walls.
    I stared at the wish, an almost supernatural bridge from the past to the present, as if I could feel the tug of leaving one dimension for another. I captured the screen with his wish on it, printed it, and cut it out with scissors. I stared at it as if it were a prophecy.

    As I brushed my teeth before bedtime, I remembered the gift from Dad. I went to my bag and pulled out the rectangular box. Inside was a necklace with a silver charm. In my palm, I examined it closely. It was a saint, but not one I recognized. On the back of it was engraved “St. Brigid, patron saint of safe travel.” Also inside the box was an Expedia travel voucher with a note. “Take a month, take two! Travel, explore! Happy birthday, Daughter.”
    I sat down at my vanity, picked up the phone, and called Dad. “Thank you,” I said.
    “Will you do it?” he asked. “Take a big trip?”
    “Someday,” I said, staring at my reflection in the mirror, pressing on the blue veins pulsing against my ghostly complexion, the halo of hair that had sprung free from the ponytail.
    “Okay, Daughter,” he said. “Your choice, whatever you want.”
    “I like the necklace,” I said. “St. Brigid, huh? When did you start believing in saints?”
    “I’ve always believed in saints,” Dad said. “Your mother was a saint, if there ever was one. She’s smiling on you today, you know that, right?”
    “I know.”
    “Boy did she love you.”
    “I wish I felt like I knew her,” I said, like I always said.
    “Know yourself, and you’ll know her,” Dad said, another one of his famous sayings. “You’re a lot like her.”
    When I hung up, I sat on my bed with my gifts: Clinique skin care products from Jenny, my St. Brigid charm and travel voucher from Dad. And a wish from Joe Santelli. I picked up the piece of paper and pressed it to my chest as if it were a rabbit’s foot.

CHAPTER SIX
    Joe Santelli asked me to dance when we were both sophomores. It was the snowball dance, and I had gone with one of the neighborhood girls and he had arrived with his posse of guys. We slow danced to Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses” and he nuzzled his mouth into the hair draped around my neck. “You smell so good,” he said, and I remembered how pleased I was with myself for having done my research. I had read an article in Seventeen : “Drive your guy wild. Use coconut shampoo!”
    “What happened to your date?” I asked, because I had heard that Joe had asked Sarah Myers to the dance.
    “She asked me,” Joe said, “but, I don’t know . . . Lots of drama. Just as well. This worked out much better.”
    By the end of the night, we had danced ten times, exactly. I had kept track, assigning more meaning to each successive dance as though I were practicing ratios and proportionality in AP math.
    When he walked me to the door of the gym, he leaned in and kissed me. I closed my eyes and let the shocks radiate off my marrow. When he pulled back, I would have given up food for a week just to taste his bottom lip for another second.
    “Maybe we could get together on Monday?” he said. “Work on our science projects?”
    “Science projects?” I responded, as the air left my tires. I no longer felt that ten dances meant true love. I felt more that I was being used. That being the smart girl in all the AP classes made me a hot commodity for a guy who didn’t want to do his own work. That by Monday, Joe would ask me to “help” him with his science element project, that it would be me researching the