Chapter 5

By the age of seventeen, I had fallen in love with Jacob three times.

The first time I fell in love with Jacob, I was five. I’d just started kindergarten, and it was the first time I was away from home all day. I usually spent most of my time pulling up dandelions from the field next to the playground, my mission in life to find every dandelion in existence. It was a tough job, considering that dandelions were everywhere I looked. 

But I had a legitimate reason for this obsession. My name was Dandelion, and each flower I found was an extension of myself. Except I didn’t think of it in those terms at that age. I mostly just liked ripping the plants out of the ground and enjoyed the sound the roots made when they tore. I was a bloodthirsty little weirdo in those days.

Jacob joined our kindergarten later in the year when his family moved into our little Wallingford, Seattle neighborhood. Initially, my parents were happy to make vegan casseroles galore for the Wests—until my parent