After their tears had been shed, Burt asked Minnie to go to New York. She was dumbfounded. It took all that she had to keep her mouth from dropping open. Her gaze flitted to her daughter, who had fell back asleep, and did so soundly in a bassinet in the corner of the tiny kitchenette. 

"Why?" She asked. 

"Quinn hasn't spoken to me in months. He had a conscience, Minnie. He felt..awful about leaving you. I think he really left...

The two of them headed onto the middle of their lives without one another. Quinn packed up his dad's Ford tin-can and headed to Topeka Regional with a ticket to New York in the pocket of his jeans. On a cold January morning six months after Quinn's departure, Minnie's mother rushed her to the hospital. Twenty minutes after arriving, she gave birth to her daughter in a bleak, whitewashed room, with a sweet nurse in polka-dotted scrubs holding her hand...

Minnie's mother had pressured her to tell Quinn right after she peed on that stupid plastic wand. 

Minnie was inconsolable, begging and pleading for her mother not to be angry. Instead her mother rested her hands on her daughter's shoulders and told her to lift her eyes to meet her own. 
If she could tie down Quinn and woo him just enough with promises of being a good wife, they could move to the next town over, and buy a...

A certain sort of shyness fell over the two of them as they planned for the day that they could get to the middle of their lives. The flight from Kansas would be short, only two and a half hours. But the drive to the airport would take four hours at the least. Quinn knew his dad wouldn't be willing to drive them, not in his old Ford tin-can. But he needed to keep his promise to Minnie. 

The summer...

Thank you.

That was what Minnie had answered when Quinn managed to form those three words and let them fall from his lips. They slept with their arms wrapped around each other, all through the night. But he wasn't asleep the whole time. He felt his body go stiff as he heard his father's heavy footfalls start down the unevenly-slatted floorboards that lined the hall. He only hoped he wouldn't try to open the door. 

The footfalls persisted, and...

Quinn had lost his mother, Minnie had lost her father. Whispers rustled the wavy grasses that were made of the lip-gloss smacking girls that twisted their locks about their fingers and giggled. 
If they got together, they would be so cute. 
       
         I mean, maybe they can help each other heal. So wholesome. 

I ship it. 

And they did get together, but not because of their shared parallel that had to do with their...

Quinn Carlson loved his girlfriend.

But he knew she wouldn't love the fact that he paraded around his room flaunting press-on nails with glittery decals. He loved to run them through his golden curls and imagine that they were being tossed about by the salt-drenched summer air. 
It just didn't fit the ragged aesthetic he'd built from years of constant heartbreak. But he wore them anyways. 

The girl in question? Minnie Ripple, who stuck out like a sore thumb among the...