Join Jessica and Julie for a First Pages podcast featuring this page by Jasmine Rasmussen. Please feel free to follow along with the page (below) while we read and analyze the text for what works, and for what could be added to make it stronger.

Love (Chapter 1)

We stop at a grocery store on the way out of town, the one with a gas station and next to the Dollar Tree me and Ava shopped at last week. I type in Mom’s rewards number on my pump, pretending it doesn’t bother me when her name is welcomed on the screen and then jog across the vacant lot, still radiating heat from the day before, to grab breakfast. Dad stays to fill up both cars and I know when I return, my oil will be checked and my windshield squeegeed clean.

Three half-eaten apples are scattered under one of the blackened security lights. Their yellow stickers still intact, like someone might come back to finish them off. Or maybe they’ll be picked-up by a crow or a lucky squirrel. I won’t ever know. I’ll be well into my first day of the rest of forever. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there’s a part of me wishing I could sit here instead, and watch the apple cores oxidize into dawn.

When I get back, Dad is bent under my hood whistling to himself with a made-up tune. I open the glove compartment--the same one Mom did--by now her fingerprints are long gone, and pull out a bag of almonds that are always in there for just-in-case. It’s something that was hers, that is now mine. Like this car.

We sit on the tailgate of Dad’s pick-up truck that’s stuffed with meticulously puzzled pieces of laundry baskets and Rubbermaid bins and those open plastic cubes waiting to be unpacked in our freshmen dorm room. I hand him a spoon as The Eagles harmonize from the cab and we eat the cream top first before mixing the rest of the yogurt with some nuts. It’s what he taught me. It’s what we always do.

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