“Amen!” I cry.
He looks at me like I’m insane. I think I might be.
I see Levi for the first time again at Charles de Gaulle airport. Mom brought him, Josh brought me. I had to give the crutches back to the hospital, so I’m feeling embarrassed in an airport-issue wheelchair. Levi is in pajamas and a parka, though, so we’re about the same on the ridiculous scale.
“Hey,” I say to him as Mom and Josh go to figure out how to check in.
“Hi,” he says.
“Do you like my ride?”
“Yeah.”
I—carefully, very carefully—twist the wheels so I spin in a circle.
“Lame,” Levi says.
“You should get one. We could race.”
“They wouldn’t give me one. I just need drugs.”
I laugh weakly, but it’s not funny. At all. Levi tucks his hands into the parka.
“Did they give you that coat at the hospital?”
He snuggles his ears down into the collar of the coat and nods.
“Nice.”
Mom and Josh come back, tickets and boarding passes in hand, and there’s a lot of hemming and hawing about how to go through security and eventually get onto the plane. I guide us through all the steps. Luggage check. Security. Customs. I tick the boxes on all the forms.
We separate into two lines for customs agents. Josh and Levi in one, me and Mom in the other. “You know your stuff,” she says, looking at the throngs of people all around us. “My head spins just looking around this place.”
“I guess there are some things I’m capable of handling.”
Mom playfully smacks my shoulder. “Shh. None of that.”
We clear customs, and Mom immediately scoots behind me to roll my chair.
“I can definitely handle my own wheelchair, Mom,” I protest.
“I’m all for helping you realize how capable you are, honey,” she says, steering me ahead at a quick clip, “but if I let you push this chair with a sprained wrist, I’m a terrible mother.”
We take up a whole middle row on the plane. Levi and I sit between Mom and Josh. The flight attendants give us extra pillows and blankets, and we’re in one of the rows with extra leg room. All tucked in with no strangers surrounding us—it’s miles better than our last flight.
Mom gets out the magazines she bought in the terminal but falls asleep almost immediately. Josh puts on his noise-canceling headphones to listen to the latest epic fantasy bestseller on audiobook. I have my two copies of Hunchback of Notre Dame on the little tray table in front of me, but I turn to Levi instead. He’s just looking around.
“Hey, Levi.”
He looks at me, raised eyebrows his only reply.
“Did I … did we have a good time?”
He blinks slowly.
“Well, yeah,” he says, incredulous.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It was good.”
I’m not going to get much more than that by way of a reply, but I don’t really want more.
“It was, wasn’t it?” I say softly.
Levi nods and snuggles down further into his blankets, sighing deeply. I open the French copy and start to read.
As the plane jerks to life, beginning its taxi to the runway, Levi’s head droops and nestles against my shoulder. I glance at him. He isn’t sleeping; he’s wide awake. The pressure of his head on my shoulder tells me everything he’s never going to be able to say.
I use the words he can’t.
“I love you, Levi,” I tell him.
He grunts.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An acknowledgments section is probably the closest I’ll ever come to an Oscar acceptance speech, so please imagine me standing on a stage in a gorgeous dress, clutching a golden statuette and gasping the following words into a microphone.
The first thanks have to go to my agent, Rebecca Podos, for her incredible insight and intuition. Thank you for really getting Keira and Levi and helping me bring out the nuances in their relationship that I felt but hadn’t been able to bring to life on the page. This is a much better book because of you.
Thank you to my editor, Nicole Frail. In a world where romances are a much easier sell, I’m so grateful to have found an editor who loves my sibling-focused book. Thanks also to assistant editor Kylie Brien for her hard work and everyone else at Sky Pony Press.
Meghan Congdon deserves a million thanks for being on the receiving end of so many crazy rants, secret confessions, and random thoughts I couldn’t share with anyone else. Thank you for sitting in Tim Hortons with me for six hours, reading this book aloud. It was transformative for the manuscript, as well as a ton of fun. I’m a firm believer in platonic soulmates, and I’m so happy I found mine. Texas is so lucky.
Thank you to all the teachers I’ve had over the years who encouraged my writing, especially grade twelve English teacher Paul Demers. I was lucky enough to spend the majority of my school years in French Immersion, and the class trip to Paris in grade ten helped inspire this book. So a special shout-out to all of my French teachers for planting the seed.
Thank you to the crew and management of Squamish McDonald’s, for being my second family.
Shout-out to Andrew McMahon, whose music has been the soundtrack of my life—“I see colors when I hear your voice.” Thanks also to Kate Miller-Heidke for “Nightflight” and Regina Spektor for “All the Rowboats,” songs which directly informed Maybe in Paris.
Thank you to my critique partner, Beth Greaves, who understands my writing like no one else, and Jim Dean and Susan Gray Foster, who also read early drafts of Maybe in Paris. If I’m forgetting anyone else who helped out in the very beginning, I’m so sorry—imagine your name written here, too.
Thank you to the Absolute Write Water Cooler for being a huge source of information and support from my earliest querying days.
Thank you to each and every member of my 2017 debut group. Your support and enthusiasm have been incredible. It’s been so educational and inspirational to have a whole team of writers on your side who are going through the same things at the same time. I tear up when I think about how bright our futures are and how rich the world will be for all of our books. Special shout-outs to Heather Fawcett, Lianne Oelke, and Jennifer Honeybourn, my fellow Vancouver 2017ers, and Tricia Levenseller, who designed me some kick-ass bookmarks.
Thank you to Dad, Mom, my brother, Scott, and my sister, Grace. I promise that this book contains only grossly exaggerated facsimiles of you guys. Love you!
And finally, thanks to Jon Byerley, who makes sure I eat and sleep—or at least strongly recommends I do so—and gently pushes me back into my chair at my writing desk when I’m wandering around the house all distracted. Love you.
Maybe in Paris Page 20