Once Upon a Time, There Was You Read Online Free PDF

said. “I told you. Just let it be for now, okay?”
    “Fine,” she said. “Then let’s stop teasing each other and talk about the Tet Offensive.” She and Ron were doing summer reading for a history class they were both taking that fall when they started college at UC Berkeley. Learning about the sixties and the Summer of Love wasn’t doing much to quell her desire for a certain type of exploration.
    “How can you even think I don’t want to?” he asked. “God! I can’t wait to see those beautiful breasts and unzip your jeans and—”
    “Okay,” she said, laughing. “I’m hanging up.” But then something occurred to her, a dark thought. “Ron? Can I ask you something?”
    “What?”
    “Do you have … a communicable disease?”
    He laughed so readily and so loudly she believed him when he said no. It was something else, then. And she vowed to make it her business to disabuse him of whatever was holding him back. She wanted him to be the first. It was time, she was overdue, and she saw now why she had been waiting: it was for someone like him.
    “How was your dad?” Ron asks.
    “Same as always. He’s such a good guy. Him, I want you to meet.” She looks out into the crowd of people sitting at the gate, trying to find someone who looks like her dad. No one does. No one looks the least little bit like him.
    “Maybe sometime soon I can.”
    “He’s coming to San Francisco in a few months. You can meet him then, if you want.” Her stomach tightens at the thought—not of her father and Ron meeting, but at the notion of her and Ron staying together that long. Things can fall apart so easily.Only last week Meghan had been dumped by her boyfriend Brian without one word of warning. Meghan came over with her face still swollen from crying half the night. She sat on Sadie’s bed staring blankly at nothing and refusing Sadie’s offers to do something, anything: a movie, shopping, a walk by the ocean, a little weed. “Are you kidding?” Meghan said. “That would make me feel worse .”
    “No,” Sadie said. “It would put it all in perspective.” But even as she said it, she wasn’t sure it was true. She ended up just sitting quietly with her friend until Meghan got hungry, and then they went out to Octavia Street, to Miette bakery, where they ate the better part of a Tomboy cake.
    Boarding begins, and she tells Ron, “I have to get on the plane in a minute. But I wanted to tell you I think our trip is on. My dad said he’d persuade my mom to let me go rock climbing. She almost always listens to him, even though she says she never does.”
    “Rock climbing?”
    “Yeah, you know Tate Shiller and all those guys are going rock climbing. I said I was going with them. It would be pretty hard to get away for the weekend otherwise. I didn’t want to ask Meghan to cover for me again; she’s getting kind of tired of it.”
    “Your dad believed you?”
    “Yeah. He trusts me.”
    For just a moment, Sadie feels bad about lying to her dad. But it’s a little sin for a greater good; someday it will be a funny story she tells about what happened in the very early stages of her and Ron.
    “Upright dude. Are you sure you don’t want to tell him the truth?”
    “I can’t tell him and not my mom. And if I tell my mom, she’ll say I can’t go.” The gate agent calls out Sadie’s group number. “Ihave to get on the plane,” she says. She stands, shoulders her backpack. “I’ll call you when I land.”
    “Tell the pilot to hurry,” Ron says, and she smiles and touches the phone where his voice came out before she hangs up. She stands in line behind a woman in a navy suit and a ruffled white blouse, on her phone saying goodbye to her significant other, apparently, for she says, “Love you, babe.” She listens to something, then laughs, a deep, throaty laugh. “You first,” she says. Sadie looks at the woman’s left hand: an engagement ring, the diamond huge. Whenever Sadie sees engagement