Dedication
This one’s for Kaiya.
Epigraph
“LISTEN. SAY ‘YES.’ LIVE IN THE MOMENT. MAKE SURE YOU PLAY WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE YOUR BACK. MAKE BIG CHOICES EARLY AND OFTEN.”
—Amy Poehler, Harvard University Commencement Address, May 26, 2011
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Game: Five Things
Game: Gifts
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before.” Zelia leans toward me. The lamplight makes her brown eyes glint with amber and caramel. On my end, I shift to the right a little so the sun stops hitting my screen.
We’re lying on our stomachs, looking at each other through our phones. Zelia pets her purring long-haired black cat, Willy Wonka. Tufts of his fur fly off and drift through the air like dandelion puffs, landing on the hardwood floor of her bedroom. He stretches, the long fur between his toes swooping like ribbons. His toes are the funniest cat toes I’ve ever seen. Behind Zelia is her unmade bed, the familiar blue comforter thrown to one side.
“Something about me? That’ll be hard. I think you know more about me than I do.” I shift my elbows on the carpet. Zelia and I have been best friends since first grade, and now we’re in sixth. If there’s a secret I’m keeping from her, I don’t know what it is. I make a quick list. Anxiety. Writing. My heart. Art. Everything that makes me crazy afraid or wildly happy—Zelia knows it all. “You first.” I wonder if the same is true for her—do I know all her secrets?
“Okay. I have one.” She flutters her lashes against her freckled cheeks. “Um. You’re not going to like it.”
My pulse pauses. What is it? Does she secretly dislike me? Does she have an identity I don’t know about? “Spit it out.”
She lowers her eyes. “I had a crush on Luke last year.”
“Ewww!” I almost hit the phone away, I’m so surprised. And grossed out. “You had a crush on my brother?” He’s in eighth grade and, granted, a lot of girls crush on him—but that’s only because they don’t know how bad his personal hygiene is.
She claps a hand over her mouth, giggling. “Just for like two seconds.”
I’m glad she kept that a secret. It definitely seems like something I didn’t need to know. I glare in pretend anger and shake my pointer finger at her. “It’s a good thing you moved to the other side of the country, young lady.”
“And then I saw him chewing with his mouth open one time when we had mac and cheese, and yeah. My crush got crushed forever.” Zelia’s laughing now, tears dripping out of the corners of her eyes, and I laugh, too, my breath fogging up the screen.
I remember something then. One of the only things I’ve kept from her. “This is pretty random. But remember when we split up the jar of Jelly Bellies?”
She nods. “What about it?”
We’d gotten one of those huge containers from the bulk store and tried to divide all the flavors evenly. I’d taken all the light orange ones because Zelia hates them. “I don’t really like the cantaloupe-flavored ones at all.”
“You don’t?” Her eyes widen. “But you said . . .”
“I never said I liked them. I said I’d take them.” I shrug as best I can, with both elbows on my floor.
“Oh, Ava.” Zelia rolls onto her back and Willy Wonka sits on top of her chest. “You should have told me you didn’t like them, either. I could have given them to my mom. I feel bad!”
I reach out toward the screen, pretending to pet Willy Wonka. He stares at my finger like it’s some weird kind of bug and takes a half-hearted swat at it. “Next time, I’ll try to tell you.” I know I won’t say anything like that because I want Zelia to be happy. Even if it means I don’t get what I want. Isn’t that what friends do? “I wish you were here. Sixth grade is horrible without you.”
“You don’t know that.” Zelia pets Willy Wonka harder, making more fur fly. “You’ve never been in sixth grade with me. Maybe it would be worse if I were there.”
“Doubtful.” I laugh. “At least at your new school, you get to be the cool kid from California. Here I’m just plain old Ava.”
“It’s only the second week. And you’re still alive.”
“You sound like my parents.” They like to point out obvious things, too. It would be annoying, but now I expect it.
“I like your parents.” Zelia turns over onto her back and grins at me upside down.
“Zelia, bedtime!” Zelia’s mom calls from a room I can’t see.
“You heard the boss lady.” Zelia rolls back over and makes Willy Wonka wave at me. “Night night!”
“Night night!” I wave back and hit end. The clock appears. It’s only seven o’clock here and I’ve got two and a half hours of nothingness before bedtime.
Zelia moved to Maine two months ago, but it feels like she’s been gone for two decades. Luke says that’s impossible since I’ve only been alive for one decade plus one year, but I know what I feel like.
In middle school, Zelia and I were going to start an anime club and cosplay at Comic-Con. I was going to write a whole book for her and she was going to help me get it published.
We were going to be the popular kids, the ones who got invited to all the parties. I mean, I actually don’t know anyone who has parties, but I’m pretty sure they exist.
“Just think, Ava,” Zelia had told me. “At a new school we don’t have to be who we were in elementary.”
“But most of the kids are the same,” I’d pointed out.
“It doesn’t matter. New school, new life.” Zelia always points out things I don’t think of.
I look at the clock again—only five minutes have passed. I could go watch television with my parents, or even go outside because the sun hasn’t set yet. Instead, I act like I’m on the opposite coast with Zelia. I change into my pajamas and climb into bed with my journal. At least we’re still close, I tell myself. Even though we’re thousands of miles apart, she and I are in the exact same position, doing exactly the same thing.
School just started and I’m already behind. I bend my head over my work, ignoring the clang and chatter coming in through the open windows. I’m using my lunch period to work on the English homework that’s due right after the bell. Mostly so I don’t have to eat alone.
Unfortunately, this is the worst English essay in the history of English essays. I’m so going to fail. My stomach feels like it’s got a thousand itchy ants in it, and my limbs go numb. Fi
ght or flight or freeze. I’m freezing. I shouldn’t be.
It was the most boring of times, and then it still was the most boring of times.
There’s no sound but the rhythmic tapping of the keyboard as the librarian checks in books or whatever librarians do. I stare up at the bulletin board that’s covered with club and activity flyers. Chess. Leadership. Engineering. Builder’s Club. Soccer. Football. Improv.
Improv was Zelia’s thing. She taught me a couple games from it, like Words of Wisdom, where we each said random words until it made a sentence. Those were fun to do with her where nobody could see, but I’d never do them onstage, in front of people.
Thinking of her while I’m alone hurts like getting lemon juice on a paper cut. My parents keep telling me to pick an activity because they say it’ll be good for me. I can’t imagine walking into a club and awkwardly hanging out by myself. Well, actually I can—that’s why I don’t want to go.
Besides, trying new things without Zelia feels disloyal, somehow. Like secretly watching an episode of a series alone, when you’re supposed to be watching it with your family on Friday nights.
I put my head down on my table, inhale and exhale deeply, noticing what’s nice about my surroundings, like Mr. Matt, my therapist, tells me to do. I love how a library smells, even a library where a bunch of stinky teenagers have been hanging out. The sunlight streams in through the waving leaves of the trees outside the windows. My back somehow fits snugly into this ancient plastic chair, which they probably bought when Dad was a student here.
It’s my favorite place at school, probably because it’s the quietest. The hallways are deafening with shrieking kids. The lunch arbor hurts my ears. Even the classrooms are usually noisy. We always have to do group table work, and the kids at my tables talk over me. Like the person with the biggest voice automatically wins.
The library kind of helps me recharge. And the librarian has the most perfect name that a librarian has ever had—Ms. Bookstein. She told me once that she’d planned to not change her name if she ever got married. Then she met Mr. Bookstein. “His name was probably thirty-three percent of the reason I liked him,” she said.
I’d thought that was funny. My mom kept her last name, Tanaka, when she married my dad. I can’t imagine ever getting married, but if I did, I don’t think I’d change mine, either. I like my name, Ava Andrews.
My thoughts have gone off topic again. I sit up straight and hold my pencil above the paper. I have to write this, not think about last names. We read an excerpt from A Tale of Two Cities and now we have to write like Charles Dickens. I’m afraid the teacher, Mr. Sukow, is going to think I’m making fun of it.
What I wrote sounds like something Mom would say. In fact, I’m pretty sure Mom put it into my head. “Dickens?” my mother had said when she saw the assignment. “You should just write snooze over the whole paper.” But Mom thinks anything without a spaceship in it is yawnworthy.
Dad just grumped that Mr. Sukow should have had us read all of A Tale of Two Cities instead of a few pages. Even though that probably would take me all three years of middle school. “When I was your age, I read Moby Dick,” he said. From how he talks, when Dad was my age he read college-level books and invented fire.
I grab my writing journal. My real journal, with my story for Zelia in it. I’d much rather work on that. “Ava?” Ms. Bookstein’s hand rests on my shoulder, and I jerk my head up. “How’s it going?”
My stomach clenches again and I think about faking a stomachache to get out of fifth-period English. But no. I did that last week so I could skip a group talk about grammar. Dad isn’t going to fall for it another time.
I shrug and show Ms. Bookstein my Dickens line. “I’m having trouble with this.” My voice sounds weak and hesitant, even in this quiet room. Although I’m only talking to gentle Ms. Bookstein, I want to yell with frustration, but these emotions won’t come out through my mouth. I don’t know why—it’s like I’m Dad’s record player, with a stuck needle that keeps playing the same part over and over again.
Ms. Bookstein chuckles, her short fingernail skimming the words. “This is good, Ava.”
“Really?” I look up at her. Ms. Bookstein has been so nice to me this year, letting me come into the library whenever I want. Never nagging me to go talk to kids. She lets me be. I shouldn’t need her permission or whatever to write, or think I’m good, but I like it anyway.
“You’d better hurry. Only ten minutes left.” She points at the clock.
I put pencil to paper.
Chapter 2
In English class, we hand in the homework, then do some grammar-type stuff on our own. I sit in the aisle closest to the door. It’s one of the accommodations in my 504 medical plan for school, which lists the things I do to manage my anxiety and my heart condition. The ability to leave makes me feel less nervous about having to sit in a class. My first choice would be the back row, but Mom says I only want that so I can hide. Which is true.
Mr. Sukow is reading my purple journal with AVA ANDREWS on it in green gel glitter pen, his reading glasses perched on his little ski-jump nose, and I can’t sit still. He frowns, he smiles, he shakes his head, and each movement makes my heart jump. Mr. Sukow is a very expressive reader. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get a zero, and then my parents will ground me. My brothers will make fun of me. It’ll go on some kind of permanent record and I’ll be stuck in sixth grade for two years. I’ll be the only twenty-year-old to graduate high school.
This is what Mr. Matt calls catastrophic thinking. I interrupt the imagination train like he said to. I ask myself, Is that really true? No, my parents probably are not going to ground me, I admit. The only time they grounded anyone is when my oldest brother, Hudson, snuck out in the middle of the night to go to a party. This isn’t nearly that bad.
My fourteen-year-old brother, Luke, might make fun of me—but he’d also make fun of me just for thinking any of this could be true.
I force some deep breaths in and out, wishing like crazy that Zelia was sitting in front of me. She always calmed me down. With her in the lead, all I had to do was hold on, like Zelia was the racehorse and I was the little cart she pulled.
Without Zelia, it’s impossible to make friends. Dad says I just need to talk to people. “If you sit there saying nothing, people assume you want to be left alone,” he’s told me. But it’s easy for Dad. He runs a business where it’s literally his job to teach kids to have manners and be social butterflies. Every kid but me. I’m probably Dad’s greatest disappointment, a fact I try not to think about because of the molasses string of sadness it pulls out of me.
The boy behind me pokes my spine. Ty. “Do you have a pencil I could borrow?” he whispers.
I do, in fact, have an extra pencil. I can even give him my special blue sparkly one. But my whole body stiffens at the thought of talking to him, as though Ty just poked me with a pocketknife and not his finger. Yay, anxiety. I try to force my voice to talk, but all that comes out is a little squeak.
I guess he expects me to actually say yes or no, though, because he lets out a disgusted little noise. “Never mind. I’ll ask someone else.”
Wait, I want to say, but he’s already borrowed one. I sag down toward the earth. Too little, too late. I return to my work, apologizing silently to Ty.
After a little while, Mr. Sukow dings the bell on his desk, and everyone goes still. “Let’s read some of these out loud.” He shuffles through the journals. If only I had an invisibility cloak right now. Instead, I hold my breath and try to become one with my desk.
Ms. Bookstein said it was good, I remind myself. You won a writing award in fifth grade. Zelia loves your stories. There’s nothing to worry about.
But that was elementary school, and Zelia’s not here.
I can feel my heart thumping in every far-off part of my body. My fingertips, my toes, my scalp.
Mr. Sukow waves the journal and gives me a questioning look—May I? he mouths. Alarms go off in my he
ad. Does he want me to read it or is he going to? If I were a robot, there’d be smoke coming out of my ears. My systems go into overdrive, like my brain thinks I’m in the Serengeti and just spotted a lion about to pounce on me.
I think I’m going to die.
I try to deep-breathe, but my chest hurts, my heart going wonky. The stress of it overwhelms me and my bladder both. I should read it. Participation’s part of my grade. I nod at Mr. Sukow but also raise my hand for the bathroom pass, an index finger pointed to the ceiling, the signal my teachers agreed on that I can use, no matter what else is going on in class. It’s my get-out-of-jail card.
Mr. Sukow nods and I go up to the front and grab the yardstick that we use as our bathroom pass, accidentally meeting Ty’s glare. His eyes remind me of the National Geographic photo I saw of Arctic ice on a cloudy day—blue green but kind of dark. He wrinkles his freckled nose at me. I turn and shuffle-run out of there, faster than I’ve ever gone during the PE mile, as if Mr. Sukow is going to haul me back in like an escaping fish.
“How come she gets to leave whenever she wants?” I hear Ty complaining as the door closes, but I don’t care. My lungs were like plastic bags stuck together and now they’re filling with air. Is it my heart or my anxiety? It has to be my anxiety, but thinking about my heart makes me more anxious. I put my hands on my knees and gulp in oxygen, then go down the hall to the bathroom, taking as long as I dare, not wanting to hear whatever’s going on in my classroom.
Chapter 3
When I get back, everyone’s working at their desks. I sit down. I got out of reading my work but now I have to worry about reading it tomorrow. I’m going to think about it all night.
After class, Mr. Sukow stops me. “Ava, I read your story to the class while you were out.”
A surge of heat overtakes me. I had nodded at him—and nods mean yes, so I don’t know why I’m surprised that Mr. Sukow can’t read my mind. I look past him, at a ding on the doorjamb. I imagine the whole class snickering with glee, all of them saying, That Ava is so stupid, thinking her story’s good. My little brother wrote a better one when he scratched his crayon on the wall.
Five Things About Ava Andrews Page 1