Excellent Book
I pulled out one of the best books I’ve ever read earlier today. It’s called Remember Me and it’s by Cheryl Lanham. Basically, this girl 17 year old girl named Leeanne gets busted for a shoplifting prank that a “friend” of hers convinces her to do. Well, she gets sentences for three hundred hours community service at a hospice called Lavender House. There, she meets Gabriel Mendoza, an 18 year old guy with a bad heart. Some kind of viral infection thing that made him uneligible for a transplant or anything that would save him. He and Leeanne get steadily closer as the book progresses, and I just love this one conversation that they have. Or, more specifically, something that Gabriel tells her.
See, he’s pulled her upstairs because he wants her to see how the street looks when it’s raining. All the neon colors reflecting off the street, and such.
They all blended on the rainy street into a mass of floating streams of color.
Okay, no that wasn’t the part where the thing I want to type over is. It’s a bit later in the book. See, Leeanne has met someone at a diner near the hospice. Well, she hasn’t told him, (Nathan), that she’s at the hospice because of a probation period and it’s not just volunteer work. When Gabriel pushes her to tell Nathan the truth, and she does, Nathan gets angry and Leeanne thinks that’s the end of their relationship. Well, she’s angry especially at Gabriel because he was the one pushing the honesty issue, and about two weeks later, she and he finally hash out why she’s so mad.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I just needed someone to blame.”
“And I was a good target, right?”
“Right.”
“But that’s not all there is to it,” he said. “Something else is bothering you. I want to know what it is.”
Well, he’s right, of course, but she doesn’t want to admit it. She tells him about Nathan being so unreasonable during their argument. Of course, he had a right to be angry, but he hadn’t given her an inch. He’d made assumptions about her character, etc, and it had really hurt. Well, he takes her chin in his hand, forcing her to meet his eyes, and asks if she didn’t wonder if he had an ulterior motive for pushing so hard to tell Nathan the truth.
“Don’t be silly.” She tried to look away but he wouldn’t let go of her chin. “What motive could you possibly have?”
He smiled sadly and Leeanne was suddenly desperate not to have him say anything else, not to have the words actually spoken out loud. “Please,” she said, jerking her head away and scooting back on the bed. “Let’s forget we ever had this conversation. Everything’s okay now . . .”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “You’re not stupid. I think you know how I feel about you.”
She froze. “We’re friends.”
“Friends?” He laughed harshly. “Yeah. We’re friends all right, but even a half-wit could figure out I’ve fallen in love with you.”
He tells her, though, that he would never do something that low, and had no illusions about them being together, considering that he’s dying. All in all, he was glad she had been together with someone like Nathan, because he was a decent guy. He asks if she believes him, and doesn’t think that he was selfish creep. She tells him she does believe, and that he isn’t, and says that maybe she did wonder something like that, because she’s fallen a little in love with him herself. But Leeanne doesn’t completely understand those feelings, since she also feels so strongly for Nathan. And here is where I think Gabriel says one of the most profound things I’ve ever read from a book.
“Hey,” he said, reaching up and pulling her into his arms, “don’t let it get to you. I don’t understand it either. But what else is new? Besides, where is it written in stone that emotions come in nice neat little packages that you open whenever you want?”
And then from Leeanne diary at the end, “I guess that’s the other thing I learned. Love doesn’t come with labels or instructions; it just is. It sneaks up on you and takes a piece of your heart when you least expect it.”
–Notes–
It just means Note Me Back… it’s all good, took me forever to figure out what it was. [IMPERFECTIONSshadow]
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Man o man I can’t wait to have time to read books again! 🙂 Pertaining to your previous entry, it’s definitely awesome to have someone you can trust with everything 😉 [Jilliebean]
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hey, umm i gotta figure out a new way to get there on friday because apparantly when they fixed the transmission they made 3 other problems which they now have to fix [lost=one]