by Zack Smedley
Before I go to sleep, I take the story I wrote for my father earlier tonight and put it on the ledge. I scrawl a quick sticky note to put next to it.
Mom—please give this to Mr. Caldwell.
EIGHT
I SLEEP FOR A LONG TIME.
I’m woken up by my mother, who gently knocks on my room and peeks her head in. She’s wearing a Lanham sweatshirt even though it’s August.
“Hey, college man. Just wanted to make sure you set an alarm.”
I groan and sit up—I hadn’t.
“Ready for the big day?” She perches herself on the end of my bed, then shakes her head at me. “College. I can’t even believe it.”
“Me neither,” I say, rubbing my eyes. Per my request, she isn’t coming with me to help move in. I want to make the last drive myself.
She clears her throat. “I went over to the Caldwells’ place about an hour ago and did what you asked.”
I wait for her to tell me how everyone reacted, but she doesn’t say, and I decide I don’t want to know. All she adds is that we both got an email from Dad, who reached out to Lanham’s guidance office and started the process for an NCO.
“No-contact order,” Mom clarifies. “He said you can cancel it if you want, but I think it’s a good idea. It’ll take some doing, but when they say no contact, they mean no contact. Not in classes, dorms, emails, texts … she even looks at you funny, her academic status is toast.”
“They can do that?”
“They can do that. So you’ll be safe.”
Safe.
“I got you light bulbs for your dorm.” Mom can always tell when I want a subject change. “I ran out early this morning and found them. These are special ones that sync with your phone—you can use an app to dim them. I’m assuming your roommate will be okay with it.”
“Oh, thanks. And yeah, I don’t know.” I shrug, yawning. “I’ll ask him today when I meet him.”
She shakes her head at me again. “You’re going to have so much fun in college.”
“Hopefully. Thanks for letting me go alone.”
She smiles and says, in a gentle voice, “It’s time for you to get away from here.”
We nod to each other.
“You had an awful thing happen to you,” she continues. “There was no reason for it. And I think getting away is what’s best. It’s amazing what people can do once they get a hold on us. When you love someone, you pull yourself open for them and trust them not to rearrange your pieces. And sometimes they do anyway.” She runs a hand through my hair, her eyes etched with seriousness. “But here’s the thing: No matter where those pieces of yours end up or who’s done what with them, they all still belong to you. This goes for college and everything after. Other people can do great things for your life or they can take a wrecking ball to it. But neither of those things makes it belong to them either. Because the one thing no one else can ever do is live our lives for us. That’s a job for you and you alone, so take the time to do it.”
I tell her I will.
“Will you be okay?” I ask her.
“Me? Oh yeah,” she says, giving me a thumbs-up with pursed lips. “How could I not be, right? I’m the luckiest mom in the world.”
“Every mom in the world says that.”
“Every mom in the world is wrong.”
“Except you.”
“So I did teach you something. See how lucky I am?”
“Pretty lucky,” I agree.
“Pretty lucky.”
I take my last home shower and eat my last homemade breakfast. And soon it’s time—really time. The trunk is packed, my room is double and triple checked, and all that’s left to do is hug my mom goodbye.
She does it in our front hallway, holding me tight and rocking back and forth and apologizing for tearing up. She says, “Remember what we talked about,” and I give her a thumbs-up. Then she adds, “When you make that drive, keep your eyes forward for me.”
I can’t tell if she’s offering more existential advice or nagging me with a driving tip, but I don’t ask.
We swap I love yous, I promise to text when I get there, and then I’m out the door. Walking to my car; starting it up, swallowing hard.
Then I look across the neighborhood, to the houses on the other side of the street, and I see her sitting on her front stoop: Lily, eyes drenched, head bowed. She looks up and sees me, and I see her.
She purses her lips in a grimace, raises a hopeful hand, and waves.
I put the car in gear and drive away without looking back.
NINE
To My Dear Friends in the Neighborhood:
By the time you read this, we’ll have all finished our last hangout in this place. Most of you will have packed up and moved away already, and when I go, that’ll be the end of our time here.
Obviously there’s a lot of emotion with this … remembrance; hurt. It’s easy to think back on all the moments that took place here. I could spend pages just listing them out—all our walks to the neighborhood gym, talking about our day. Getting midnight McDonald’s on a snow day after a movie night. Our infamous all-nighter where we still aren’t sure why the couch got moved. Countless game nights, countless jokes, countless captured pieces of life. To anyone on the outside (and maybe even to you all) it all looks so unnotable … a couple of young people who had a few fun years together. A group of ordinary folks among ordinary houses doing ordinary things. But to have lived it—to watch our paths align knowing it wasn’t going to be permanent—makes that borrowed time all the more precious to me. It makes me wonder where it all came from. How did we create this? Something so simple, yet so loaded with joy … what did we do right and how the hell do we do it again?
I could spend pages unpacking the nostalgia, all of which would circle back to the central point of it all: how very, very much I love you. But … you know this. And the thing is, despite all the feelings that seem so big now, this was such a tiny piece of our lives. We’ve grown out of it, plain and simple. Each step we take now will be another step away from all this; time will chip away at those images until we feel like spectators to what was once the snapshot of our daily lives. And this is proper. It hurts—unbearably if you think too hard about it—but it’s a proper type of pain. All of us are moving on, taking steps into those new places to repeat this same old cycle. More ordinary people will fill these ordinary spaces and make them extraordinary, just as we once did.
You all know me, and I know you’re aware of how tough this is for me. All I want to do is hold on to this place, because most days it feels like I won’t have any direction without it. And I’ll admit, that’s a tempting idea. It feels like the thing to do. But there’s an even higher nobility, sometimes, in laying moments to rest. Letting them go becomes the ultimate act of love. And while there is that sadness, there’s also everything after. The next chapter is here, and it’s every bit as beautiful as this one was the second before we stepped into it.
I need you all to know I will never forget this group, these days, this extraordinary little era that you gave to me. And with that, I let it go.
Long live Old Friendship.
TEN
THIS IS IT—THE MOMENT I’VE BEEN PICTURING FOR four years. The car is moving; my house is shrinking. Then I make my turn onto the road, and it’s out of view for good.
Keep your eyes forward for me.
“Okay,” I say to the empty air, drumming my hands on the wheel as I drive through the neighborhood. “Okay.”
I’m passing by moments now—there’s the spot where the group had their first game of capture the flag. The mailbox that we duct taped Austin to on his fifteenth birthday. The pavilion where Lily and I discovered magnet poetry. Tiny memories, but all beautiful and all mine.
“Doing great,” I murmur as I pass the playground and turn left out of the neighborhood. “Doing great.”
Now I’m at the plaza. The first place I pumped gas. The site of Dad’s panic attack.
Next
, the library. Luke.
Eyes forward.
My GPS pops up with a notification: “Do you want to save nine minutes via an alternate route?”
“No,” I tell it. Instinctively, I wait for Dad’s voice to berate me on how I should learn to take the efficient route instead of the familiar one. Instead, the prompt shrinks and closes. I smirk at it.
“Keep the route exactly the goddamn same,” I add, for good measure. Then, “Actually, look up fast food places.”
It reads a few to me. Wait, where do I want to go? I wasn’t really serious. Except … food sounds good.
“Add option one to route,” I say, grinning. When I get to a red light, I turn on the radio. An upbeat tune begins to play. Do I want it louder?
I decide I do, so I use the thumb controls on the steering wheel to crank the volume up. Then down again.
Loud.
Quiet.
LOUD.
Quiet.
Green light.
No one is stopping me. I’m still moving forward.
I laugh like a maniac, invigorated. I have such a long way to go, don’t I? There’s more out there of what I had here—new friends I never thought I’d meet and old friends I never thought I’d lose. God, I’m young. I bet my dad looked like this when he was my age. I wonder if he had a drive like this when he left home. I wonder if he listened to music the way I am now.
I lost. That’s a fact. Everything I fought so hard to hold on to—my group, my girlfriend, the Studio, my whole life back home—is in the past and anchored there for good. It should be a crushing defeat, but it doesn’t feel that way. Instead I feel bulletproof. All my greatest fears have come to pass, and here I still am. So instead of lingering on the loss and pain I felt in the final days, I want to take all those scars and saddle them up in the backseat of my brain. To focus on everything ahead—shedding all the shit from my past and stepping into my new self.
It’s so easy for this to feel like an irreparable downgrade; like I’ll never find another Beth or Austin or Vic. There will never be another like this place, and the joy we found in it with each other. There is nothing else out there that will sweep me off my feet and electrify my life. But then I remember that I was filled with that same feeling before I met these people. There was nothing like this group, until there was. And there is nothing like the group I’ll meet next, until there will be. And there will be.
I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I’ll find others—more friends, more relationships, more homes. More chapters of my life. Eighty years ahead against the eighteen I’m putting behind me. And someday when I’m old and my whole life is laid out, I’ll have an entire collection—bunches of friends and neighborhoods and relationships and chapters. And I’ll be able to look back on this one and say, with a sated smile, “I’ve still never forgotten you. How could I, when you were my very first?”
This story is coming to a close now, but I’ll tell it to others. I’ll tell them about how, on one rainy afternoon, five friends hugged each other goodbye under that pavilion, then went home to their new lives and didn’t come back. I’ll tell the story of how so much love happened here, in my tiny little Town with Two of Nothing. And as I speed down that highway with my windows open, I know with everything I am that all of it will stay with me. Because it’s the story that made me who I’m leaving as now: a man who lost all he held close to his heart, but finally won his war.
At the next red light, I raise my head and stare at myself in the pull-down mirror.
For once, I don’t flinch.
Instead I revel at where I’m at. Hell, six months ago I couldn’t even drive. And now here I am … facing the open road with my life packed in the backseat and my hands on the wheel. Alive and unshackled and full of love. Laughing until I lose my air, smiling so hard it hurts. Look at me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FIRSTLY TO MY SUPERSTAR AGENT, ALLISON REMCHECK, I would simply say the same thing you told me when you learned I was on the spectrum: “Thank you for being exactly who you are.”
To my editor Lauren Knowles, my publicist Lauren Cepero, my copy editor Heather Taylor, designer Julia Tyler, and the rest of the incredible team at Page Street: Thank you for believing in my words, for helping me use them, and for all your patience as I found this story piece by piece.
To my fellow authors, reviewers, and friends in the publishing industry: There are too many of you to name, but thank you for providing me all the support, guidance, and community that you have for these past few years. And to all the titan authors who gave me the time of day to lend their support—particularly Angie Thomas, Laurie Halse Anderson, Stephanie Kuehn, Brigid Kemmerer, Bill Konigsberg, and Caleb Roehrig—thank you all for treating me as a complete equal even when I was a complete unknown. I won’t ever forget it.
An abundance of thanks are in order to those outside of publishing. Mom, Dad, and Jackie: for your unwavering support and love. My high school crew—Phil, Andy, Kevin, Paige, Callie, Emily, and Allison: for all the joy I couldn’t even come close to capturing in this book, and an unforgettable senior week. My amazing mental health care team, particularly Jeff Taulbee, Eddie Lomash, and Yael Schreiber: for helping me navigate my own explorations of life, love, and the ever-elusive world around me. Michael Rowley: for being the person I spent my first Pride with, and for forever revolutionizing my music library. (That flag is still on my desk and always will be.) My neighborhood crew: for creating lightning in a bottle, and for the best Halloween party ever. Brodie Spade: for the magical night we met, and every day since. And Emily Rittenour: for so many things, but in particular for the idyllic era of our final days of high school. Thank you for the snowman we built, our movie theater in the woods, our forest escapades, our adventures at the Square, watching shooting stars the night before we left for college, and for every other chapter in our story. No book I write will ever come close to its beauty.
Honorary shoutout to second book syndrome, COVID-19, health anxiety, and all the other blights of 2020: for infusing this project with more headaches and misery than I could ever quantify. Words cannot express how overjoyed I am to forever escape your vile presence.
Finally and most importantly, to all my readers: for every fan letter and thank-you message you’ve shared with me about how my writing helped you. My wall is full of your kind words, and this book wouldn’t exist without them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zack Smedley was born in 1995, in an endearing southern Maryland county almost no one has heard of. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Deposing Nathan, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2019 selection, an ALA Rainbow List selection, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and winner of the 2019 YA Bisexual Book Award.
Alongside writing, he has a degree in Chemical Engineering from UMBC and currently works within the field. He spends his free time building furniture, baking, programming, screenwriting, and tinkering with electronic systems.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Story One: The Boy with the Broken Arm
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty
-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Story Two: Nail by Nail
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Story Three: PPP
One
Story Four: The Men Made of War
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletter Sign-up
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Zack Smedley
First published in 2021 by
Page Street Publishing Co.
27 Congress Street, Suite 105
Salem, MA 01970
www.pagestreetpublishing.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
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eISBN 978-1-64567-333-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932093
Cover and book design by Julia Tyler for Page Street Publishing Co.
Cover illustration by Julia Tyler