The Reality Pact

Chapter 1

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment that certain things are set into motion.

Where was the fork in the road that led you to the life you're living right now? The left or right turn that you chose? The one that made you who you are right now?

Sure, each of us are a product of a million and half decisions, but sometimes you find yourself in a surprising place—a reality you didn't know existed.

I like to pinpoint stuff.

Up until this, my junior year of high school, I had been pretty good at pinpointing stuff. Not to be braggy, but I always made the right decisions.

Like in sixth grade when I realized that soccer needed to be removed from my extracurricular schedule because accurate ball-kicking was not something that I was ever, ever going to master. So, I quit soccer and took a creative writing class the community college was hosting for middle schoolers. Because of that decision, I won a statewide poetry contest in seventh grade and got to add five hundred dollars to my college fund.

And there was the time in eighth grade when I switched from clarinet to trumpet in the school band because my dad had been teaching me on his old trumpet.

But I never got the whole pianissimo thing down. So, instead of blasting my way through the annual Blanchard Music Festival competition, I switched back to clarinet and our band won first place in the region with the judges specifically commenting on the impressive control the brass section had. Which, five-hundred-percent, would not have happened if I, Patience Adair, had been blue-facing my way through that contest.

After that competition, Trevor Mayhew, first chair trumpet, started playing his trumpet in the town square from noon to one every Saturday to raise money for the local animal shelter. Now they are a no-kill shelter.

I'm not saying I singlehandedly saved the lives of many an abandoned kitten, but would Trevor have had the gumption to do all those performances without that Blanchard trophy? Okay, there wasn't an actual trophy. But still.

See? There has to be one incident, one spark, that causes you to make a tiny decision that the previous you wouldn't have made. That little flickering spark made you choose right instead of left when the next fork came.

But, like I said, it's hard to pinpoint. And it gets harder the older I get.

Maybe it was my first real kiss.

I was a few months shy of being eighteen so, thank goodness, I wasn't ever going to have to tell anyone that no one bothered to kiss me until I was an actual grown-up. That was one perk.

The kiss itself wasn't memorable. It was Ryker Fadden. My parents might have died of mortification-induced embolisms if they'd known. He always wore a leather jacket and ripped jeans— and not the fashionable kind of ripped jeans. Ryker's jeans always looked like they were so old they were going to disintegrate the next time they were washed.

My dad said that Ryker is the kind of name that just begs to be printed under a mugshot. My mom said people who dress like troublemakers very often are troublemakers. But that was the worst they could say without actually knowing Ryker or his family. It's a Big Deal in our house that you don't judge a book by its cover. You never know someone's heart at a glance. You can only know people by their fruits and even then, you never know what someone's been through. Blah, blah.

Truth is, I didn't know Ryker that well myself. My parents are also always reminding me that bad company corrupts good character. There is, apparently, a razor-thin line between love thy neighbor and keeping the wrong company. But I didn't know if Ryker was bad company or not.