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for me to quit.
    “Are you done being pouty?” I ask, and she nods. I get up off of her and she stands up, groaning. “Noah, this was a new shirt!” she says, gesturing to the dirt stains all over the front.
    “I’ll buy you a new one,” I tell her. I brush the dirt off of her and say, “Come on. Let’s go see what’s so special about this house you want.”
    I take off at a run down the hill and she follows me, laughing. She’s almost just as fast as I am, but not quite. I slow down just enough for her to catch up and we jog side by side through the tilled fields and to the white farmhouse. We halt just before the sagging building, the black tiles sliding off the roof, the steps leading up to the porch with holes in them.
    “It’s beautiful,” she hushes, and I squint my eyes to try and see what she sees. Grabbing my hand, she starts pulling on me. “Come on! Let’s go inside!”
    “What? I don’t know if it’s safe,” I say.
    “Of course it’s safe,” Rosemary scoffs, though she doesn’t know. “Don’t be a chicken!”
    “Trespassing, why not?” I sigh. “I swear, if the house falls on us when we’re in there I’m using you as a shovel to dig us out.” I let her pull me inside, careful where I put my feet. When she opens the door a great wave of dust and mildew hits me, and I start coughing.
    Now that it’s light out instead of dark, you can clearly see the outline of the house. Wood floors match the old fashioned wallpaper, only a few discarded paintings and broken pieces of furniture lying around the empty spaces.
    “Wow, it’s so old,” Rosemary says. “This place had to have been built in the twenties.”
    “It definitely hasn’t been updated since.” I kick a discarded chair leg across the room.  A cabinet is slightly cracked open and, curious, I nudge it with my foot. “Whoa,” I say, eyes widening as I look at all the dusty, unopened bottles. “Somebody liked to drink back in the day.” 
    “It has an upstairs!” she says, pointing. She starts running up before I can stop her.
    “Rosie, we don’t know how stable this place is! Be careful!” Just as I say that my foot breaks through one of the stairs and I struggle to pull myself up through it. “Ugh.” This girl is going to kill me one of these days.
    “Found the bathroom,” she says when I crawl into the hallway. She looks out a dirty window and says, “It’s in better condition than I thought.”
    “I guess it’s not too bad,” I say fairly. “But it needs a lot of work. A lot of work.”
    “It’d be a fun project,” she says, heading back down the stairs. “I can’t wait to start on it.”
    “You need to get the money, hun,” I say, carefully following her, grabbing onto the baluster that shakes for dear life as I start back down the stairs. “How about you get that degree first?”
    “I will, one step at a time,” she says and we walk out the front door together, back through the field and towards her house. “I’ve got to finish up my associate’s.” She pauses. “And you need to pick what you want to do, too.”
    The tilled mounds crunch beneath my feet. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”
    “Noah...” she hesitates, and I freeze. I know what’s coming. “We’ve been out of high school a year. It’s time to start deciding.”
    “It’s not like I’ve been doing nothing. I’ve been working nonstop. I’ve got tons of money put away,” I say, and I do. I have thousands, more than I know what to do with right now.
    “Then start putting it towards your education,” she says. “You can’t do anything with a high school diploma anymore, Noah. I know you love working on the farm, but it’s not going to be able to support you forever.” She looks away, and whispers, “Or support me.”
    “I don’t want to rush into anything just because it’s what everyone expects me to do,” I tell her. “I’m working on a plan.”
    “What, Noah? You told me you were going to