The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky
Page 1
PRAISE FOR BRIANNA R. SHRUM
Kissing Ezra Holtz (and Other Things I Did for Science)
“Realistic and will resonate with many teens. Give this to readers who love witty, humorous love stories mixed with STEM.” —Booklist
“Predictable hate-becomes-love romance is given new life by an inclusive cast. . . . Worth picking up.” —Kirkus Reviews
The Art of French Kissing
“Fun, flirty, foodie, and filled with way more heat than your average kitchen, The Art of French Kissing has all the ingredients for a perfect summer romance!” —Dahlia Adler, author of Behind the Scenes
“I ate up this hate-to-love-and-back-again romance! If you love Top Chef but wish more of the show was focused on the romance and rivalries behind the scenes, you’ll eagerly devour The Art of French Kissing. Like the best sweet and savory pastries, Carter and Reid deliver both sugar and spice.” —Amy Spalding, author of The Summer of Jordi Perez (and the Best Burger in Los Angeles)
“This meet-cute romance stands out thanks to the nuanced characters and subtle treatment of bigger issues such as race, gender, and money (Carter’s family flirts with poverty). . . . A thoughtful and delicious romance.” — Kirkus Reviews
How to Make Out
“An addictive mix of heart, humor, and hot. How to Make Out is the perfect lesson in how to fall in love with YA romance.” —Gina Ciocca, author of Last Year’s Mistake
“How to write a seriously addictive book? Mission accomplished. Smart, hilarious, and un-put-down-able, How to Make Out will capture readers’ hearts.” —Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, author of Firsts
“Full of humor, heart, and some serious chemistry, How to Make Out is a fun and romantic read with dynamic characters I won’t soon forget.” —Chantele Sedgwick, author of Love, Lucas
“This is a story with an obvious lesson to it, but the lesson is delivered in an entertaining manner and will be an easy sell to teen girls.” — VOYA Magazine
“This laugh-out-loud coming-of-age novel engages readers immediately and never lets go . . .” — School Library Journal
ALSO BY BRIANNA R. SHRUM
Never, Never
How to Make Out
The Art of French Kissing
Kissing Ezra Holtz (and Other Things I Did for Science)
Copyright © 2020 by Brianna R. Shrum
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.
Sky Pony® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.
Visit our website at www.skyponypress.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Daniel Brount
Cover photo credit: Getty Images
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5780-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5781-3
Printed in the United States of America
For my cousins.
We all know the place to be has always been wherever the cousins are hanging out.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IT’S NOT THE COLD of everything around us that gets to me in these last five minutes—it’s the heat building in me.
The way my mind races hot and fast, knowing there’s no way out of this cave.
The warmth that spreads through my body against the furious wind outside, the snowy walls of this makeshift den—warmth that feels a whole lot like those last hazy seconds before sleep.
The smoke and red in Jonah Ramirez’s eyes when he grabs my jaw and says through clenched teeth, “Don’t. Hallie Jacob, if you give up on me now, if you leave me alone up here, I will never fucking forgive you.”
I blink.
Slow.
Breathe.
One Mississippi.
Snow and wind beating against the trees, the ground, everything, everything.
Two Mississippi.
Lightning, flash against a tree, snap and crackle and the clean stench of burning wood. They call it thundersnow, not that that matters now.
Three.
Three.
I breathe the cold into my lungs.
It all feels like ice. But touch it long enough, and ice starts to feel like fire.
I brush my hand over Jonah’s knuckles on my jaw.
The world lights up like a flare.
CHAPTER ONE
IT ISN’T THAT I don’t want to be here, as much as it is that if the devil were to show up at these hipster-ass crossroads in horn-rimmed glasses and a waxed moustache and happen to offer me transport out in exchange for my soul, I’d take it.
I don’t hate Colorado, I don’t hate ski slopes, I don’t even hate the sharp-toothed bite of the cold in my calves, the numb in my toes. I almost like the way it hurts when I sit by the fire in the lodge and ice-pick feeling returns to the frozen items I used to call fingers. It prickles, it hurts, but it makes me feel like life is returning to pieces of me. So no, I don’t really hate any of it.
It’s just that, god, I loved Massachusetts. I hate that I even think it past tense, like Oh, right! Massachusetts died. I don’t “loved” it. I do still love it. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the bright crisp fog off the Connecticut River, clinging to my clothes when I strayed a little too close to the water.
I shut them tight, but not so tight that it doesn’t dissipate in an instant.
Here, outside this ski lodge, it smells like weed. Like skunk rot and smoke.
And well. You know what they say.
Where there’s smoke? There’s Jonah.
I can hear him laughing over all the rest of them—who knows how many of my cousins and their significant others and their who-knows-whoevers. I want to go find them.
I want to distract myself with what they’re smoking. I want to know what it is Jonah’s laughing about so loud, but I’m not really allowed. I don’t know how intensely your parents can really ground you two months out from eighteen, but if I’m hanging out alone in the dark anywhere Jonah Ramirez is, and I come back into the suite smelling like weed, I’ll find out.
My parents are kind
of assholes about my dad’s brother’s kids—Jolie and Jaxon (maddening, the same-letter-first-name thing. Thank god they stopped at two). Everyone knows it’s more about the super Family Drama on the CW history between my dad and my uncle than it is about Jolie and Jaxon. But my cousins have given my parents enough reasons, I guess, for them to feel okay about being total jerks. Jolie is cool but a little artsy, a little follow-your-heart, a little vegan for their tastes. And Jaxon, well. Jaxon is a fucking disaster.
I like him because he always shows up to family gatherings in clothes that are super politically inflammatory and his hair is always cut weird and different and he always finds me and talks to me like he cares what I think about anything. He drops f-bombs too loud and has too many tattoos, and the same shit I think is great about Jaxon Jacob is the same shit my parents can’t stand about him.
Side note: Dad and Uncle Reuben pretend they hate each other because of four decades of bad blood that everyone knows about but no one’s allowed to mention. But, I don’t know. If I’m putting money on it, I’d say it’s gotta be this bullshit: Jaxon and Jolie Jacob. Jaxon. And Jolie. Jacob. How much can you really trust people who do this to their children on purpose?
It’s complicated, I guess. Always eggshells when we’re together because my parents make a big show out of being Disapproving™ of Uncle Reuben and, by extension, his wife and their offspring. And Uncle Reuben plays back, and I have to pretend I’m not on my cousins’ side. But they don’t outright ban me from hanging out with them. There’s a line, I guess.
They just . . . say uppity things the second we leave, acting like we escaped something when we head back to Massachusetts after a weekend (because that’s all they can handle), getting to big family events as late as possible and leaving as early as semi-politeness allows. They don’t like to hear me talk much about what we do when we’re together either; mostly we see them or they see us and then everyone leaves and we pretend, as a family, that it never happened.
Well. Guess that’s all in the past now.
Anyway.
Jaxon and Jolie, and my Favorite Cousin relationship with them, my parents can pretend to ignore.
Jonah, they can’t.
Jonah has been Jaxon’s best friend since middle school so they’ve been attached at the hip since we were all kids. It’s almost like he’s one of them—requisite J name and all.
My parents have made it extremely clear that, in their minds, all of Jaxon’s activities are at least 75 percent Jonah’s fault, and that’s totally not true if you ask me, but they never do.
So.
Here I am.
On this cool family-bonding ski trip, listening to my parents and my dad’s five siblings laughing adultily over their chardonnay or whatever in the common room in front of the fireplace. And I’m just sitting here in the stairwell.
Alone.
Bonding as hell.
I scrape my teeth over my lip and lean my head against the wall; it’s kind of unsettlingly wet, but I’m assuming that’s because of the, you know, snow everywhere. People tromp into a ski lodge with their boots all iced over and their coats covered in powder, stuff gets a little wet. It’s not a big deal.
None of this is a big deal.
Moving away from Massachusetts my senior year isn’t a big deal, and neither is navigating this big family weekend that I’m already kind of tired of, and neither is the reason we had to move here in the first place. My zayde basically dying—one foot in the grave at the very least—isn’t . . . it isn’t a big . . .
I’m sniffling now, in this dark hallway in a very fancy ski lodge all alone, which is totally pathetic.
I feel even more pathetic when the door opens and my cousin Tzipporah’s tall, sleekly braided, absurdly gorgeous girlfriend about trips over me.
“Oh my god.” She catches herself on the cement corner of the wall and I just cough.
“Sorry,” I say.
“For what? Existing?”
I raise an eyebrow.
“I should have been watching where I was going. Peripheral isn’t as good from this height.” She winks and yeah, it’s abundantly clear why Tzipporah is into her. In addition to the old Tall Dark and Handsome—well, not handsome. Tall, Dark, and Stunning—combo, she’s super funny, laid back, not just cool. Good lord, am I sweating?
“Nah,” I say. I smile; she has a face you want to smile at. “I shouldn’t have been sitting . . . you know. On the floor.”
She tilts her head and says, “Hallie—is that right?”
“Yeah. I totally forgot your name; I’m so sorr—”
“Samantha. Everyone forgets it. Well, I don’t know why I said that; it’s Sam. I like Sam. Samantha just has like, so much straight girl energy to it.”
I smirk and snort and she sinks down beside me. Usually I’m not super into small talk, but Sam is genuine. This will at least be medium talk, and medium talk I can do.
Sam looks, like really looks, at me and sees the pink in my eyes, I guess, because her voice softens. “I’m sorry,” she says. “About your grandpa.”
I purse my lips and pull them up to the side a little, like that’s going to help me not just start crying again.
“I’m fine.” The lie rolls off my tongue easier than the truth would. It’s easy to tell little untruths like that when the alternative makes people uncomfortable. It’s always been easy.
Well. It would be easy if my voice weren’t so thick from all the weeping.
I say, in a forced bout of honesty, “We’re not even super close. I don’t know why I’m being like this.”
Sam shrugs and says, “Grief is weird, man.”
And I say, “Yeah.” Then I apologize because she shouldn’t have to deal with this from a stranger. Tzipporah is pretty cool, and Sam is REALLY cool, and I suddenly feel so extremely, dictionary-defined uncool sitting here shortly next to her, feeling sorry for myself.
“Come outside. That’s where the cousins are, and you know the only place to hang out at a family thing is where the cousins are.”
I laugh, because this is pretty comfortable. And I almost just say Screw it and go with her. But I hesitate—which, honestly, I spend a fair amount of my time doing. The lines have been pretty clearly drawn by my parents. And in lines, I am comfortable. I glance out the window one last time, and I have to make myself say, “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Just—Jonah. Jonah Ramirez? Is out there? And everyone’s smoking. My parents will kill me.”
“Jonah Ramirez?” Sam starts to wrinkle her nose, then remembers and rolls her eyes. “Right. Right, your parents and all their . . .” She wiggles her fingers.
I shrug. “My parents.” I mimic the hand gesture. “And all their.”
She sighs and looks back out the window into the black, snow falling in fat flakes. “Listen,” she says, “if I just tell everyone to lay off the weed, will you—”
“NO,” I say frantically. “I mean. Just. No. No, don’t worry about it.”
Christ, what a nightmare if she actually had done that. If she’d actually made everyone stop smoking on my account. I would never recover from that hit to my reputation; I’m sure it’s damaged enough being the good girl rich kid with the asshole parents from ~Massachusetts~.
“I’m pretty wiped anyway, so I might just head to bed.”
“You sure?” she says.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Okay,” she says. “If you’re sure,” and she’s so real that it almost makes me mad. Like, how dare someone that gorgeous be perfectly kind, too?
She slides up off the floor and practically glides when she leaves, tossing this effortless “See you tomorrow?” over her shoulder.
I feel crumpled.
I feel, well, kind of weirdly comforted.
I feel . . . young. I’m seventeen, just this side of being an adult, and Tzipporah and Sam are just juniors in college, not that much older than me but, god, I feel like such a kid.
&n
bsp; I wouldn’t feel this way if I could hang with Jolie, maybe, pull her away from the weed and throw back a pint of ice cream and talk too loud and too detailed about each other’s lives, like it hasn’t been a year since we’ve seen each other.
But I have the whole weekend. And they have their Jonah and their weed.
I’m sleepy anyway, I guess. I sigh, pull myself off the floor and up the stairs.
And what do you know? I actually do go to bed.
In the morning, it seems everyone is skiing.
Communing with nature and shit.
I can see why—mountain peaks that stab into the sky, covered in snowfall like glitter. Fat, bright trees dusted with powder. Clouds like spun sugar covering the ground in white.
You know.
Snow.
It smells like snow.
It looks like . . . snow.
It feels like.
Snow.
Colorado is A+, 11/10 if you want breathtaking white, white views that sound.
Like snow.
I try to wriggle out of skiing, because I am not built for the gorgeous, breathtaking commune-y cold; I am built for hikes in the spring, summer, and fall and reading by the fire at the first bite of frost. But despite all the rules that kept me from family last night, Dad informed me this morning, like he does every year, that family was the whole point of this trip and yes, I would in fact be skiing once again. So today, spending time bonding over frostbite with family was what I was going to do.
Jolie is the first one to see me all dolled up in my skiing gear when I head outside, and that I am extremely stoked about. You’re not supposed to have favorite siblings, so I’ve heard, but I’m pretty sure favorite cousins are totally permitted, and we are each other’s favorite.
I’m full-on the kid from A Christmas Story. Skiing gear is pricey as shit. We have money but realized I’d grown out of the good gear like right when we decided we were moving and Dad was switching jobs, so ski swap it was, and here I am.
Lucky for me, Jaxon and Jolie don’t have money, so they’re not out here looking like L. L. Bean models either; we’re all marshmallows with pink noses. Jolie’s suit is bright purple, which seems right, and Jaxon’s is . . . Jaxon’s is hot pink. Which . . . you know what, also seems right.