by Karen Rivers
“Stop screaming,” you want to tell them. “Let’s go gently into this good night.” It doesn’t make sense. This is not good. It is not night.
You would choose to live, if you could.
Screaming isn’t choosing. The noise is unbearable.
“Shhhhh,” you say, pointlessly. “Shhhhh.”
You know that it’s all going to take a long time from now, the stretching taffy of time means this second is forever.
“I love you,” you say to Josh Harris, after taking off your mask. What does it matter? “I always loved you. I will love you forever.”
“Elyse Schmidt,” he says. “What is happening?”
“Just kiss me. Please call me Elyse.”
“We’re going to die! We’re crashing! The plane is crashing!” His voice is high with hysteria. His hand is gripping your arm too tightly. He thinks you don’t understand but he’s wrong, you understand everything.
Umbrellas, you think. Conundrum.
Then it is just you and Josh Harris, alone, acting out this scene.
“I’m sorry I didn’t know you, Elyse,” he shouts, and then he kisses you. It’s hard because gravity has run amok. Arms, legs, everywhere. So much noise. The noise is terrible. The noise is tearing you apart.
The screen with Benedict Cumberbatch’s face on it is frozen, then it flickers and shuts off. The novel that Josh Harris had been reading flies out of the seat pocket in front of him and lands on you. Wa a Pea, says the torn cover.
“I’m pretty sure there is peace at the end,” you try to say, when before you are quite ready for it, you really aren’t ready yet, the mountain rushes up and crashes into you with such unbelievable force that you can feel all your molecules tearing apart, one from another, and you wish you couldn’t feel it because the pain is unbearable and also familiar.
Your mouth is full of blood and teeth and regret for all the things you didn’t do and you are crying for the year when you were seventeen, which isn’t going to happen.
Things like this are not survivable.
The thing is that there isn’t a choice, there isn’t always a choice, sometimes the choice is made for you, and you’re left in that split second between dead and alive and that part can be filled in with a whole life of lakes and lightning, of kissing and falling stars. Just a splice in time when all of the everything can happen that will ever happen and now you can just stop trying so hard, you can just let go.
It’s okay.
You have to.
Just release.
You unbuckle and fall forward, blood in your mouth, blood in your eye, so much blood, hitting the ground hard, your bones crumpling on impact, but you roll anyway. It feels necessary to do this part, this effort of rolling, it’s important. The mountainside is steep and covered with gravel and ice and bits of grass and somehow, impossibly, wildflowers that you can smell, a tangy overpowering scent.
The light is everywhere.
The light is all around you, over and under you, and you keep rolling in slow motion because you know this is how it goes, this is what you are meant to do.
And then there is the smell of the jet fuel closing up your nose and mouth and throat and you are suffocating and a tiny purple flower, perfectly encased in ice, is right in your sight line. You could stop rolling and you could just look at it, see how perfect it is, each tiny petal, but blood has run into your eyes and everything is hazy and blurry and you have to keep rolling.
Then there is the explosion you knew was coming and the ball of light and heat and the thrust that pushes you into the ravine, and the searing and you’re falling now and you land on a body, which you know is Josh Harris.
He is breathing.
“Elyse,” he says.
“I am the leaf,” you say. “I’m sorry.”
The leaf is dark green, pink-veined, crumpling and tearing into a million pieces, but safe for cats and dogs.
And then there is the inferno of heat that tastes like fuel and life and death and it is strangling you.
The heat is too much, you are both curling up—you and Josh Harris and what you could have had together—around the edges like paper in a flame, blackening and vanishing into ash and you can feel it, you shouldn’t be able to feel it, but you can and this is what it is, this is death, and this is you and Josh Harris and Kath, and the girl who is not Poppy and the Other Max and the Right Max and Danika Prefontaine and Charlie Martin and the baby and Mr. Appleby and the flight attendant and all of you are light, it’s amazing that all this white light has come from all that black destruction, ash, and flame. Two hundred and eighteen bolts of lightning all moving in reverse, up toward the sky, not away. It is happening to everyone from your class and it is happening to the other passengers on the plane and it is happening to Josh Harris and it is happening to you. You suppose that by the time the rescuers come, all of your light will have vanished up behind the curtain of night.
No one will see this.
No one will understand how you are the light, the lightning, the rain, the stars; how you are love and umbrellas and conundrums.
And now you are the everything, all of you, not just you and Josh Harris anymore, but everyone, and there is no more sound and nothing hurts and no one is screaming and you are the trees and you are the golden leaves and you are the birds and the peaches and the music and the red truck with the keys tucked up in the visor and the coyote’s howl and the dog barking at the siren in the night and the white horse tossing his mane and galloping across a field of wildflowers somewhere in a state you’ve never known, where you’ll never be, that you carry in your heart, in a small suitcase: What could have been, what isn’t, what wasn’t, and what will never be.
Acknowledgments
To the amazing team of people at Algonquin, who feel more like a family, and who continue to support me even when I say, “But what if I write this one in the second person?”—thank you.
To my agent, Jennifer Laughran, who has never once confirmed my secret fears, even when I present a very convincing argument—thank you.
To my mum, who has supported me forever, and who listens when I say, “I don’t think I can do it!” and gently corrects me. I love you. And thank you.
To my dad, who is always my first and most supportive reader. Thank you for always saying the right thing. I love you.
To my local friends, who seem okay with the fact that I drop out of sight for months at a time, only to emerge when they are just starting to forget who I am—thank you.
To my faraway friends, who, via the internet, have saved me over and over and over again—thank you.
To all the writers whose books I read and love and learn from and fall asleep with every night—thank you.
To the plane crash survivor who, in a news interview, said, “It looked like the mountain was coming toward us. It took me a second to figure out what was actually happening.” That description stuck with me and spawned this story. Thank you.
To Uma, who walks with me and listens to all my crazy ideas unspooling in the woods and reminds me what’s important—thank you.
To the gatekeepers, who understand that while one book is rarely right for everybody, all books are right for at least one somebody—thank you.
And to my kids, who sometimes forget how deadlines turn our lives upside down in fits and starts, you’ll both have my heart always and forever.
And of course, to the readers, who see what they need to see in the words I’ve written. It’s all for you. ♥ Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I’m so grateful.
Published by Algonquin Young Readers
an imprint of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
&n
bsp; New York, New York 10014
© 2018 by Karen Rivers.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Carla Weise.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rivers, Karen, 1970- author.
Title: You are the everything / Karen Rivers.
Description: First edition. | Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Young Readers, 2018. | Summary: When sixteen-year-old Elyse Schmidt and her crush, Josh Harris, are the sole survivors of a plane crash, she believes that everything is perfect and their love story is meant to be, but she finds that fate is not always what you expect it to be.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011476 | eISBN 9781616208752
Subjects: | CYAC: Love—Fiction. | Fate and fatalism—Fiction. | Aircraft accidents—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.R5224 Yo 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011476
First Edition