READ THIS: I'm giving you guys an extra update bc one of my best friends ever just started writing on here and you definitely need to go check out the story that she just posted because it's incredible. Her username is goawaymattie . Go comment on the preface of her story and tell her how amazing it is and follow her and basically just go love her.

"We need to get curtains," Jasper tells me on Monday as we're hanging out in our apartment.

"We have curtains," I say slowly, motioning towards the ugly green curtains hanging in the window that we'd found at a garage sale when we were going furniture shopping. They were cheap and they fit our windows so we just went with it although they're really ugly.

"Sure, but what about this gap right here," He says, pointing up to his room that we can see from the living room, where we're sitting right now on our red couch- the only thing that we bought that was unused and brand new except for our mattresses.

"What about it?"

"I'm just saying that there's this huge gap so that you can see into my room from the living room and I can see into your room from my room. So what if we had a huge curtain that ran from the ceiling and then all the way down to the bottom of my floor. That way we have that privacy."

"You mean we need a curtain so that you can bring boys over and do the hanky panky?" I wonder teasingly.

"And so you can bring boys over to do the hanky panky too. I'm not only thinking about myself here," He says with a laugh.

"Okay, but even if there was a curtain there, it wouldn't do much to mask the sound," I remind him. "So it'd still be really awkward if either one of us brought a boy home."

"Well, at least it's something," He shrugs. "Come on, we just have to get the curtains, I found something in the storage unit in the basement that we can use to hang them up."

"Does it have to be a curtain?" I ask curiously, finally giving into his wish to put a barricade up between our rooms. I guess the added privacy would be pretty nice. "Because I have tons of extra blankets that we could use instead."

"Sure, that will work," Jasper says, pulling me off of the couch. My laptop is sitting on my lap so I close it and sit it on the couch where I was just sitting before following him up the spiral staircase and then onto my floor so that it's easier to reach the ceiling.

"What were you doing in the basement anyway?" I wonder.

"Exploring," He shrugs, handing me a small tool box that he'd grabbed from his room before coming up here. "There's not much else down there but if you want to store stuff, we have a storage unit in the basement. There's a bunch of spiders though so I don't think you'd like it very much down there."

"I'm never setting foot in that place," I decide. He had me sold at 'spiders'.

He grabs the chair that's sitting on the opposite side of my room and sits it right next to the ledge. There isn't any type of barricade that would keep the chair or an actual person from falling off of the ledge but the drop from my room to Jasper's isn't really that far. It would hurt but it's only about three/four feet.

I get my stack of extra blankets and then sit them next to the toolbox and then watch as Jasper goes into motion.

"Be careful," I warn him as he steps onto the chair that's so close to the ledge.

"That's what you're here for," He says. "Make sure that the chair doesn't slip and that I don't die."

"Oh, yeah, no pressure there or anything," I roll my eyes at him sarcastically.

"I'll be fine," He assures me before asking me to hand him something from the toolbox, which I do, and then I stand near the chair and put my foot in front of the leg so that it doesn't scoot towards the ledge.

One by one, I hand him the blankets and he uses his tools and the hardware that he found in the basement to attach two of the blankets to the ceiling so that they hang down just to the floor of Jasper's room, which is the ceiling of the main floor.

Just as Jasper is finishing up the last corner of the second blanket, my phone starts to ring in my pocket so I pull it out and look at the caller ID to see that it's Scott. Surprised and a little eager, I press the green button and put the phone to my ear.

"Hello?" I ask, looking up at Jasper just to make sure that he's keeping his balance and not about to fall to a broken arm.

"Hey, Joey," Scott greets me. "What's up?"

"Oh, just some home improvement," I say as Jasper starts to step down but he stumbles and I think that he does it just to mess with me but it really works. I jump a little bit. "Oh my god, Jasper, don't do that. Just get down before you give me a heart attack."

"I'm fine, Jo," Jasper laughs as he hops off of the chair and onto the ground. "I'll go downstairs now and give you your privacy."

"Anyway," I say to Scott as I roll my eyes at my stupid best friend as he packs up his small toolbox and goes down the spiral staircase. "What's up with you?"

"Nothing really, I was just calling to see if you had plans tonight?"

I look at the clock on the wall and see that it's already 9 o'clock at night. "Well, no, I don't. We're just finishing up with this thing. Why, what'd you have in mind?"

"Do you want to come over?" He wonders. "I know that it's last minute but I know that Macy kind of got in the way of us really talking back at the pizza place and she's busy packing tonight so I thought that it'd be a good time to talk."

"You want to go behind your girlfriend's back?" I ask him curiously although he is right. Whenever I'd ask him a question or he'd ask me something, Macy would interrupt with something completely random and unrelated to the conversation just to get the focus of conversation off of me and Scott. It was ridiculous and annoying and the thought of being able to sit down with Scott without Macy seems really nice.

"I know that it sounds bad," He agrees with a sigh. "I'll tell her tomorrow that we were hanging out but I know that if I tell her before, she'll come over here and join us. I love her but you saw how she can get."

"Sure," I say with a small laugh. "I can come over tonight."

"Great. Um, good," He mutters and I laugh again because he seems kind of nervous.

"I can be at your house in an hour," I tell him, hurrying to my small dresser to find something to wear. Right now, I'm wearing sweats and a tank top so that isn't something that I want to leave the apartment in.

"Okay, I'll see you soon," Scott says before we say goodbye and then hang up.

I settle on a pair of skinny jeans and a t-shirt and a hoodie with my black sneakers. My hair's in a messy pony tail so I take it out and brush through it so that it looks presentable and then I grab my purse and go down the stairs to where Jasper is sitting on the couch watching TV.

"I need to borrow the truck pretty please," I tell him, batting an innocent smile in his direction.

"The keys are by the door," He says with the hint of a smirk hiding on his lips. "Condoms are in the drawer by the sink in the bathroom."

"I would tell you to shut up but I know that you won't," I sigh, leaning toward him and giving Jasper a quick kiss on the cheek before I make my way out of the apartment.

"No, I won't," He agrees teasingly. "Have a good night."

"You too," I say just before I grab the keys that are hanging on a loop next to the door and then I leave the apartment. I've driven Jasper's truck before but it's always so different than driving my tiny little car that I left back home because this truck is so much bigger and I have to adjust the seat because I'm so much shorter than Jasper.

When I eventually get on the road, I change the radio station to something that I want to listen to and then I start to think about what I'm going to tell Scott now that we have time to really talk about things. I mean, it's not like we left things in a complicated way when we were seven but I just want to know what's happened to him since then and I'm sure he's curious about how the situation with my dad had ended up. We both have so many questions for each other.

I get to Scott's house in a half an hour and park on the street by the curb. I take a few minutes in the car to make sure that my hands aren't shaking with nerves and I take a few deep breaths.

When I amp myself up enough to get out of the truck, I pull the keys out of the ignition and put them in my purse as I walk towards the door. I'm halfway up to the porch when I realize that the tree house behind the house is lit up, the light shining between the panels of the wood that covers the windows.

Assuming that that's where Scott is, I walk around the house to the wooden tree house in the back, to the one that we used to spend so much of our time in when we were tiny.

I step onto the wooden latter of the trunk of the tree and knock a few times on the wooden door that opens up on the floor of the tree house.

When the door swings open, I'm relieved to see that it's Scott and not somebody else like his brother or something.

"Hey," He offers me a smile before scooting back so that I could climb all the way up the latter and into the tree house. Looking around, I see that it's changed a lot. There isn't any arts and crafts mess on the floor or paper stars all over the place like there used to be. There's still the two bean bag chairs and the counter but it looks a lot emptier than it used to be.

"I can't believe you still have this place," I say when I shut the door behind me and then sit down in one of the bean bag chairs.

Scott does the same beside me. "Yeah, my mom's been wanting to tear it down for years but I won't let her. I've basically rebuilt it so it's not going to come crashing down or anything."

"It means that much to you?"

"Yeah, I mean, I don't come out here that much but I like having it here," He shrugs.

"I love it, this tree house," I tell him, opening the window that's beside me and I look out, I can see my old house, the brown one. I can see the window that looks into the kitchen and I remember all of the fights that I had viewed from this window between my mom and my dad. I remember one time that I saw my dad hit my sister from this window and I started crying and screaming and to protect me, Scott shut the window and then duct taped it closed. He got in trouble with his dad for using up so much duct tape just to shut a window. "Lots of memories."

"An old couple lives there now," Scott informs me.

"Really?" I wonder, somehow surprised by that. "That's weird."

"It's weird that somebody lives there?"

"No, I guess not. It just seems weird to me that they live there and they probably have no idea what had happened in that house before they were there," They have no idea how many times my mom had been r*ped in their bedroom. How many times my sister had been locked in their closet for days. How many of my tears have soaked their carpets. How much blood is under their rugs. They have no idea.

"They think that they bought the house from a well-respected doctor who decided to move his family to California," Scott says. "That was the story around the neighborhood after you left."

"Even after all of this time, his reputation is still golden," I mutter in disbelief, closing the window again. "That's incredible."

"I wasn't too happy about it either," Scott says. "After you left and everybody started talking about what a great man your dad was, I was one angry little seven year old but not many adults listen to seven year olds so my word wasn't worth much. They won't really believe that a seven year old knows about something so dark."

"You were too young to know about all of that dark stuff," I nod. "I shouldn't have ever dragged you into it. It was too much for somebody so young."

"No, it wasn't," He denies quickly without even a moment's hesitation. "I didn't mind growing up just a little fast. I can't even imagine what it was like for you. Just being there for you was the least that I could do. Maybe we were both too young but that's just life, you know? I wouldn't change it."

"Really?" I wonder curiously. "You don't ever wish that you just grew up normally, without me there to ruin your innocence with my family issues?"

"I've never wished that, no," Scott shakes his head at me. "I've never even considered that."

"I always felt kind of bad about dragging you into it," I admit, looking down at my lap.

"Well, you shouldn't," He assures me. "How are you doing now though? Over in California?"

"Everything's fine over there," I say. "My dad's dead, if that's what you mean. He died in prison when I was nine."

"Prison?" He repeats. "They really caught him?"

"Not for what you think. I guess he was a really shitty person in all aspects of life and got caught with some fraud stuff at the hospital and then he assaulted Sienna, my sister, in California when he went to track us down. I'm not sure how or why he died in prison but once we got to California, he was arrested right away so he wasn't there at all," I explain to him with a soft smile. "You don't have to worry about me anymore, Scotty."

"I never stopped worrying about you," He admits. "Anyway, so California, how was that?"

"It was amazing," I say, smiling even broader. "I met Jasper almost right off of the bat so we practically grew up together. My mom got help for her Stockholm's and she got a job of her own. Everything kind of turned around once we got to California. I tried to write to you so many times but my mom would always intercept it. She was dead set on cutting off all contact with our life over here and she made it impossible."

"It's good that you were happy over there," He tells me. "I've always wondered, to be honest."

"Well, I've wondered about you too," I assure him. "So how was life for you?"

"It was nice," Scott says. "I started playing soccer when I was ten, my mom got partner at the law firm, and Brutus died last year."

"Oh no," I gasp with a sad frown. "I loved that little dog."

"He wasn't that little for long," He tells me with a little laugh. "He grew up to be huge but he was a really good dog."

"That is so sad," I mumble. "I was really looking forward to seeing him, the poor guy. My mom hates dogs so we could never get one. I think I might try to talk Jasper into letting us get a small dog for our apartment but I'm not sure if he'll go for it. It's a really dangerous apartment for a dog anyway."

"I have something to show you," Scott says randomly as he stands up from his bean bag chair. He reaches up to the slanted roof and pushes the pointed top up until a trap door-like flap opens up, revealing a little window in the ceiling to watch the stars.

"Wow," I breathe, moving out of the bean bag chair to lay on the wooden floor so that I could get a more comfortable look at the beautiful bright stars. "It didn't used to do that."

"No, it didn't," He chuckles, lying beside me so close that our shoulders and knees occasionally brushed against each other. "I added it a while back."

"It wouldn't have been very convenient for our rocket ship," I tell him jokingly. "We'd suffocate pretty quickly."

"Sure, but we wouldn't have had to make those ridiculous little paper stars," He adds. "Because we'd have all of the stars right there and they wouldn't be paper."

"That's a very good point," I say with a little laugh. "Now all we need is a shooting star."

"They come around every now and then," Scott informs me. "But you have to watch really closely."

I turn my head in his direction with a wide and uncontrolled grin on my face. "Do you look for them a lot?"

He shrugs. "Sometimes."

"Without me?" I tease him, feigning offence.

"I don't chase them, I would never do that without you, I just keep an eye out for them," He assures me and I laugh again.

"I have to ask you a really weird question," I warn him. "And you can't ask me why I'm asking it, you just have to answer it, alright?"

"Okay, sure."

"Do you remember Lissa?" I ask him curiously.

"Lissa..." He says the name again, trying to think about it. "Oh, that girl that we used to play with? Melissa Garner. No, she moved away right before high school. I'm not allowed to know why you just asked me that?"

"Nope," I mutter, trying to hide my relieved smile that she didn't replace me. "Maybe I'll explain later."

"Okay then," He says with a breathy laugh and I return my attention back to the stars. We lay in silence for a really long time, just enjoying each other's company and the bright starry sky above us. Just me and Scott and space.

And suddenly, I feel like I'm seven years old again.

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Song: Tree House by Family of the Year

Picture: Aaron Tveit, who plays Nick