Also by Sarah Van Name
The Goodbye Summer
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Van Name
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Maggie Edkins Willis
Cover image © Luke Gram/Stocksy United
Internal design by Ashley Holstrom/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Van Name, Sarah, author.
Title: Any place but here : a novel / Sarah Van Name.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Fire, [2021] | Audience: Ages 14. | Audience: Grades 10-12. | Summary: Seventeen-year-old June feels she is nothing without her best friend, Jess, but everything changes after she is expelled and must attend a Virginia boarding school where her grandmother teaches.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020053482 (print) | LCCN 2020053483 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Identity--Fiction. | Best friends--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction. | Grandmothers--Fiction. | Boarding schools--Fiction. | Schools--Fiction. | Bisexuality--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.V353 Any 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.V353 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053482
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053483
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For Ben:
a novel, of all things
One
I arrived in northern Virginia on January 1, the metaphor of the fresh start laid out in front of me as bright and wide as the river itself. But it had been predestined. The moment that decided it had occurred four weeks earlier, in the bathroom of the cafeteria where Greenmont held its annual Jingle Bell Ball.
Jess and I were squeezed together in the last stall, downing whiskey in gulps from the bottle she’d tucked into her jacket pocket. I was already dizzy and giggling from what we drank before we came, and she had the slow kind of smile that meant she was drunk, too. We were whispering about nothing and trying to keep quiet. And it was all okay—it was fine. We had done this before.
But then I leaned hard against her, which pushed her against the door of the stall, and I guess we hadn’t latched it tight enough, because it fell open and she fell down. The whiskey fell on top of her, what little of it remained sloshing into her cleavage and the bottle clattering onto the tiles. Of course, both of us started cackling.
“Jerk,” she said, giggling, not even trying to get up.
“Klutz,” I retorted.
Which would have been fine, too. All of it could have been fine. Except right then, Mary Elizabeth Marcus opened the door to the bathroom and held it open, gaping at Jess on the floor. The bathroom opens to the dance floor because of course it does. And a few yards behind Mary Elizabeth, Mrs. Beckett, the tenth-grade American history teacher, while scanning the room for illicit teen sexual activity, saw a student collapsed on the floor and rushed in to help.
I looked in the mirror, and I swear I saw my future self: a little taller, a little sadder. You are about to be so thoroughly fucked, my future self said to me. And as Mrs. Beckett knelt beside Jess and picked up the whiskey bottle, I knew there was nothing at all I could do about it.
They didn’t expel me, because short of committing a felony, it’s hard to get kicked out of Greenmont; they don’t like to have expulsions on their record. Natalie Harmon and Carson Xiu had gotten caught having sex in the boys’ locker room during a football game; Jordan Pugh had spent several months selling drugs in the hallways; Annie Kolkow had said some horrifying things online. None of them got expelled. They were asked to leave. And that’s what happened to me, too. They asked me to leave. Which meant I wrapped up the last few weeks of the semester sitting in the back of my classes, scribbling dark lines of pen until they ate through my notebook paper. Making A’s on all my assignments and still seeing the disappointment in my teachers’ eyes when I handed them in.
They didn’t expel Jess, either. They asked her to leave, just like me. Then her parents gave a “significant gift” to Greenmont’s Annual Giving Campaign, and all of a sudden, they were asking her to stay. When we walked out of school on the last day of the fall semester, the December sun shining brightly on the sidewalk, only one of us was walking out for the last time.
That’s how I ended up going to Oma’s on New Year’s Day. The whole family drove me up, as if they were seeing me off to war rather than dropping me off at a familiar apartment four hours away. The twins were unusually quiet for most of the drive, Bryan’s face buried in a book and Candace’s thumbs moving furiously over her game console. As we passed the sign welcoming us into town, Bryan looked up, his eyes somber.
“I can’t believe this is your home now,” he said. “You’ll never be around anymore.”
“Stop being melodramatic,” I snapped. “I’ll be back for the summer. And spring break. At least.”
“That’s right,” Mom said, her voice slightly strained. “Four hours is nothing. We can come pick you up any weekend.”
“Exactly,” I said. But I stared out the window, too. A Walmart, a tire repair place, an Italian restaurant, a pawnshop, endless antique stores. The sun was sparkling over the patchy remnants of an early snow. Bryan was right. Until college—assuming I could even get into college, switching schools like this midyear—this was my home now.
“I still don’t get why you have to live here,” Candace said quietly.
“
Me neither, Candace.”
But I did get it. I was being made to leave because of Jess, and the irony of it, the unfairness of it, still made me ache. It was both of our faults equally, but still. Last night, our last night together for months, we had sat together in the park, and I’d held her close as she sobbed I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. All I wanted was more time with her, and she was the reason, according to my parents, I had to go away.
“We’ve had this conversation,” Dad said. “We are not having it again.”
The car fell silent. My throat burned, but I dug my fingernails into my palms, and I didn’t cry.
My grandmother was waiting for us at the gate to the condominium, eating an apple and beaming. As we parked in a visitor spot, she tossed away the apple core. Bryan was the first out of the car to give her a hug. I was the last.
“June,” she said, opening her arms to me. “You’ve really gotten yourself into a pickle, haven’t you?”
“Hi, Oma,” I said while hugging her. Mom, pulling a suitcase out of the trunk, shot me a glare. I had received a comprehensive guilt trip from my parents the night before. Your grandmother never expected we’d have to ask her to do anything like this, she’d said. You should be very, very grateful.
“Thank you for…” I started.
Oma pulled away and raised her eyebrows.
“Everything,” I finished.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “We’re gonna get you sorted out. Now, how much luggage do we have to deal with?”
Her condo was exactly the same as it had always been: A long rectangle that stretched along a continuous window looking out at the river. The front door opened into an expansive, open kitchen and living room; the skinny guest room and skinnier hall bathroom were in the middle; and her bedroom was on the end.
Then there was the dog. Eleanor Roosevelt barreled toward me, howling in delight, and wriggled around my legs in spasms of joy. The twins dropped their bags immediately to pet her. I pushed past her, my parents trailing behind me, to drop my things in the guest bedroom.
I shoved my bags into the closet, taking a moment to stand apart from the sounds out in the hall: the twins laughing, my parents complaining about the drive, the dog’s nails clicking on the hardwood floor. I leaned against the wall and looked around. This would be my room for at least the next five months. The walls were painted light blue. There was a framed painting of a beach on the wall and a tall window. It was a small space with little furniture to crowd it, just the bed and its nightstand and an enormous, empty chest of drawers.
Ellie dashed in and did a lap before jumping on me. She was a big dog, seventy or eighty pounds of eager yellow mutt, and she licked me on the neck before I was able to push her away. Candace followed her in, breathless.
“Come look at the river, June!” she urged, then ran away again. Ellie galloped after her.
“I know what the river looks like,” I said to the empty doorway. But I got up and followed her anyway.
My whole family was gathered in the living room, bags discarded in a pile on the floor. The river stretched out in front of them. Oma kept the condo warm, but near the window, it was colder. I stood beside my mom and let her put her arm around me, though it felt awkward and heavy.
“Wow,” Dad said.
“It’s so beautiful,” said Mom. “I know I say that every time we visit. But it’s true.”
“Sometime, I want to go out on a boat,” said Candace.
“You can’t do that now,” Bryan said.
“I know. I’m not stupid. I mean when it’s warmer.”
“We can do that,” said Oma. “When it’s warmer.”
Mom squeezed my shoulder, but I said nothing. One by one, they drifted back toward the living room and kitchen to get glasses of water, use the bathroom, flop onto the couch. Ellie walked among them, ears perked and tail wagging, waiting for someone to pet her. But I stayed by the window. The water was gray and wide and glittered with an otherworldly light. Even from five stories up, you could barely see the opposite bank. Oma joined me there, crossing her arms.
“If you’re anything like me,” she said, “you’ll wake up one morning after living here a while and think, what a stupid river.”
I felt myself smile, just a little, before swallowing it away.
But Oma hadn’t noticed, or if she had, she didn’t say anything. “Dirty and brown and cold,” she continued. “Practically useless for fishing, from this part of town anyway, and making the air cooler when it’s already winter. But then the next morning, you’ll wake up and you’ll feel like you’ve never seen anything so beautiful. It just takes your breath away. You feel…” She paused to choose her next words. “Immeasurably lucky.”
She looked right at me. Her eyes were dark gray, like newly poured concrete.
“Every morning, you get to choose how you look at the river,” she said. “I recommend feeling lucky.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Do,” she said. “Because you can’t choose whether to look at it or not. You’re here now, for better or for worse.”
She walked away from me, her stocking feet padding quietly on the floor, and I heard the coffee grinder start whirring. The river beneath me was both brown and blue, both dirty and bright. The light from the sun hurt my eyes. But I didn’t want to turn my back on it. So I just kept staring, trying to make a choice.
* * *
My family had a three-day stay planned. School started on Wednesday, January 4, in both the twins’ middle school and my new school here, St. Anne’s. After they left, of course, I would be staying in the guest bedroom, which Oma told me I should think of as mine. Until they went home, though, my parents were sleeping in the double bed in that room, the twins were sharing the pull-out couch, and I was on an air mattress.
It seemed to me deeply unfair that despite being the only one who would actually live here for several months, I was sleeping on a mattress that deflated throughout the night so I woke up flat on the floor. But when I tried to protest while unpacking with Mom, she just shrugged.
“Tough,” she said. “It’s only for a few nights, and your dad has back problems. This makes the most sense.”
“Make Candace and Bryan sleep on the air mattress,” I retorted.
“It’s a twin mattress. There’s not enough room.”
“Then buy another mattress!”
“June,” she said, a note of warning in her voice. “You know how much we were spending on Greenmont before you got yourself kicked out. St. Anne’s is going to cost us, too, even with the faculty discount from your grandmother. Do you really want to suggest that we take on unnecessary expenses right now?”
A flood of words rose inside my throat, but I shut up. Instead of screaming at her, I slammed the dresser drawer closed, and when I turned around to pick up the bundle of socks from my suitcase, she had left. In the living room, Candace and Bryan yelled as they played video games.
During the three days we were all there, Oma and I didn’t spend much time alone together. Not that we ever had. I loved her, and I knew she loved me, but we had never been close. She visited us at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we spent Labor Day weekend with her, along with two or three other weekends throughout the year. But we didn’t talk about each other’s lives in a real way. She didn’t know what I liked to read or who my friends were; I didn’t know how she spent her time, apart from teaching and going on walks with Ellie.
I didn’t even know where to begin, and during those long, cold days before school started, it seemed that neither did she. We played board games, watched movies, and cooked dinner together, but my parents or the twins were always with us.
It wasn’t until the night before school started—after the rest of my family had packed up their things and not mine, after Mom had teared up standing in front of the dresser she had
helped me unpack, after Bryan lost his book and couldn’t find it for twenty minutes, after Eleanor Roosevelt had started howling in anxiety at all the activity, and after they had finally driven away—only then, after all of it, were Oma and I alone. Having waved them off from the balcony together, we came inside and sat on opposite ends of the couch. I texted Jess, recounting the day’s events. Oma picked up a book, opened it, and put it back down. Outside, it was only four in the afternoon, and the sky was already darkening.
“Should we order Italian food, maybe?” Oma suggested.
“That sounds good,” I said. I felt a wave of tightness, breathed, let it go. At home, there was a place called Cucina; Jess and I would go sometimes on Friday during happy hour, dressed up in heels and dresses, and linger for hours over a basket of free bread and a plate of arancini.
Oma passed me a folded paper menu from the end table drawer. I gave her my order, and she called it in. While she was speaking, I texted Jess. looks like dinner is night-before-school penne alla vodka.
She instantly responded. I feel physically sick I miss you so much.
same, I said, relieved. Sick, I wanted her sick. I wanted her to hurt if I hurt, wanted the two of us to share everything.
Later that night, after a quiet dinner, I went to bed with my phone lighting up the guest room walls. When I fell asleep, it was still there beside me, inches from my nose, my lifeline back to her.
Two
You know when you’re walking around in the summer, and the heat is so oppressive that you can barely breathe, and the sidewalks are so hot, it’s all you can do to take another step? You can tell that everything and everyone feels the same, bled of color, sick of being awake.
But then you feel a tension rising in the air. A heavy cloud appears overhead out of nowhere; a cool breeze drifts through. And when the rain comes, it is apocalyptic. You don’t make it inside and you’re drenched. You look down to see your shirt sticking to your skin. You’re cold for the first time in months. When the storm passes, a few minutes later, you feel reborn. The whole world does.
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