Page 2 of This Changes Everything

I could feel my body recoil even though I didn’t move a muscle.

“I . . . I can’t do this,” he finished.

“But we’ve already done it . . .” My eyes were stinging. I swallowed the last of the air inside the Jeep, and my stomach fell to my feet. I could still feel him inside me. I could still feel his mouth, and tongue, and breath, and teeth all over me. I could still feel him digging into my skin and hair.

“So, what, then?” I choked. “Did you come here to finally fuck me, then send me on my way?”

“I can’t believe you just said that,” he answered quietly, sounding sickened, unable to meet my eyes. “Is that what you think?”

“How can I not?” I was in disbelief.

“I came tonight to say goodbye . . .”

A lost memory of Rory when we were fourteen surged through me. I had walked through the front door of the busy juniors’ lounge at Juniper Golf Club. He was sitting with his hands clamped behind his head, and he was leaning back comfortably. He had flipped his black hat backward, and his eyes widened, then darted away from mine the moment they connected. I watched his chest lift, and his breathing pick up. An empty seat sat next to him with his rain jacket hanging over the back, and I didn’t have to ask to know he was holding it for me. It was always for me.

The Jeep Cherokee was steaming up, so Rory turned on the engine and rolled down his window.

“I haven’t been able to think since you told me about New York. Whatever you and I have ever been, that’s when it all ended. It’s over, and it didn’t even start.” Rory could barely get the words out as he white-knuckled the steering wheel.

I stopped recognizing my own reality. I looked carefully at my house. Had my sister’s bedroom light been on this whole time?

“This is it, Rory. It’s us. We’re choosing each other. I choose you, and you choose me.”

“I can’t do this . . . I won’t. I’m not choosing this. I’m not choosing you.” He started hyperventilating, burying his face in his hands. “I can’t spend the rest of my life—” He inhaled sharply, having lost his words. “None of this is real, Ellie. You. Me. Us. None of it. We’ve never been anything real.” Rory heaved, and his voice sounded like it came straight out of his gut.

“Rory . . .”

“I can’t love you, Ellie! I’m not doing it!”

I sat back in my seat. Finally, totally, and entirely composed. I grabbed my shoes and opened the door. With my hands full, I stepped outside the Jeep. I looked up at my sister’s window, overlooking the driveway, and saw her blinds move.

“What was I thinking?” Rory said quietly to himself as I slammed the door.

I sobbed with my sister throughout the entire night. I finally stopped the next morning when the plane took off, the wheels were up, and I got the fuck out of Vancouver.

Part I Everything Before

Chapter 1

NEW YORK 20 years old

I EMERGED FROM THE SUBWAY AT 72ND STREET BETWEEN BROADWAY and Amsterdam. My dad stopped me at the top of the stairs before we were snuffed out by historic buildings and blinding lights. The smell of garbage, sewer, perfume, body odor, and street food was already wafting around me and sinking into my pores. The violent rumble of trains beneath the staircase reverberated through my feet, and the constant hum of traffic and people was a symphony that landed squarely in my chest.

“Ellie, there’s before this moment, and everything after. For the rest of your life, you’re living in the after.”

I wasn’t going to tell my dad that he was wrong, and that specific, monumental moment that divided my life in two happened the night before, on the ripped fabric in the passenger side of a hand-me-down classic black Jeep Cherokee with Rory Campbell.

“I got it from here, Dad. I love you, but no one can see me with you. I won’t be Ellie McCain. I’ll be the pathetic little girl from Canada who needed her dad to bring her to orientation.” I tried to push my dad back down the stairs to the train platform, but he bested me with a bear hug. His salt-and-pepper hair pressed into my face as he breathed in his little-girl-no-more one last time.

My dad and I stood at the same height. It was jarring how much we looked like one another now that I had grown into an adult-ish kind of person. We both had blue eyes that random people would comment on. I had wavy dark-blond hair that reached down my back and teetered on the verge of a color often referred to as “mousy.” We both had smiles that pulled creases into our cheeks. But my biggest inherited trait from my father was my occasionally damaging, often delusional, blinding ambition. We were both determined to rip our roots from the ground and fly into the unknown, come hell or high water. My dad had moved out of Canmore, Alberta, to study medicine in Toronto and become a doctor. And I was going to move out of Vancouver, British Columbia, and become a goddamn movie star!

The moment I knew that I was on my way out of Canada is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday. I was fourteen. We were driving down Sepulveda Boulevard in LA on a family holiday and cruised through the Airport Tunnel. I could feel the yellow lights inside the tunnel burn into my soul as I watched them blur around our car. My dad was driving, my mom sat in the passenger seat, and my older sister, Hannah, was beside me. I closed my eyes in the sudden darkness and rolled down my window to let the warm air push into my face and rip through my hair. I said aloud, “This is it. It’s LA. I’m going to live here one day. I’m going to be somebody.” I didn’t have to open my eyes. I could feel my parents smiling to themselves from the front seat, as if they were patting my head condescendingly and saying, “That’s nice, dear.” My sister snorted out her annoyance. But I meant it, and that indescribable pull of “this is it” tugged on me and had me chasing dragons ever since, as my parents liked to say.

Yes, I was aware that New York wasn’t Los Angeles, but I had made it to the States. I was one step closer. I was on my way to orientation at Bronwyn School for the Arts. “Good luck pouring coffee for the rest of your life,” my uncle told me when I got accepted into the theater program at the prestigious conservatory. “How does it feel going into something when you already know you’ll never make your money back?” a friend asked at my going-away party. “It’s so funny how some people think they’re special,” my cousin quipped passive-aggressively. “My friends complain about having to drive over the bridge to North Vancouver to see their kids, and you want to go to New York?” my mom cried after I went to the audition.

Two years, I told them.

It’s only two years, I told Rory.