by Nicola Yoon
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Nicola Yoon
Cover art by Dominique Falla
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Quote this page copyright © 1994 Carl Sagan. Reprinted with permission from Democritus Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. This material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Democritus Properties, LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780553496680 (hc) — ISBN 9780553496697 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780553496703 — ISBN 9781524716301 (intl. tr. pbk.)
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Contents
Cover
Other Titles
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Irene a History
Daniel
Charles Jae Won Bae
Family
Natasha
Irie
Daniel
Natasha
Irene
Natasha
Samuel Kingsley
Daniel
Natasha
The Conductor
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Half-Life
Daniel
Donald Christiansen
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Multiverses
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Love
Daniel
Natasha
Hannah Winter
Attorney Jeremy Fitzgerald
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Hair
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Hair
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Samuel Kingsley
Daniel
The Waitress
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Fate
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Samuel Kingsley
Daniel
Natasha
Natasha Kingsley
Daniel
Natasha
Samuel Kingsley
Natasha
Daniel
Dae Hyun Bae
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Joe
Natasha
Daniel
Eyes
Daniel
Natasha
Samuel Kingsley
Daniel
Jeremy Fitzgerald
Hannah Winter
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel
Natasha
Daniel + Natasha
Four Minutes
Natasha
Daniel
Time and Distance
Epilogue Irene: An Alternate History
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Read the Book That Everyone, Everyone Fell in Love With.
For my mom and dad, who taught me about dreams and how to catch them
It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little about it.
—Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
—The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction-level events, platypuses, Homo erectus, Cro-Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and more people to churn that milk into butter. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.
To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.
Local Teen Accepts Destiny, Agrees to Become Doctor, Stereotype
It’s Charlie’s fault that my summer (and now fall) has been one absurd headline after another. Charles Jae Won Bae, aka Charlie, my older brother, firstborn son of a firstborn son, surprised my parents (and all their friends, and the entire gossiping Korean community of Flushing, New York) by getting kicked out of Harvard University (Best School, my mother said, when his acceptance letter arrived). Now he’s been kicked out of Best School, and all summer my mom frowns and doesn’t quite believe and doesn’t quite understand.
Why you grades so bad? They kick you out? Why they kick you out? Why not make you stay and study more?
My dad says, Not kick out. Require to withdraw. Not the same as kick out.
Charlie grumbles: It’s just temporary, only for two semesters.
Under this unholy barrage of my parents’ confusion and shame and disappointment, even I almost feel bad for Charlie. Almost.
MY MOM SAYS IT’S TIME for me to give up now, and that what I’m doing is futile. She’s upset, so her accent is thicker than usual, and every statement is a question.
“You no think is time for you to give up now, Tasha? You no think that what you doing is futile?”
She draws out the first syllable of futile for a second too long. My dad doesn’t say anything. He’s mute with anger or impotence. I’m never sure which. His frown is so deep and so complete that it’s hard to imagine his face with
another expression. If this were even just a few months ago, I’d be sad to see him like this, but now I don’t really care. He’s the reason we’re all in this mess.
Peter, my nine-year-old brother, is the only one of us happy with this turn of events. Right now, he’s packing his suitcase and playing “No Woman, No Cry” by Bob Marley. “Old-school packing music,” he called it.
Despite the fact that he was born here in America, Peter says he wants to live in Jamaica. He’s always been pretty shy and has a hard time making friends. I think he imagines that Jamaica will be a paradise and that, somehow, things will be better for him there.
The four of us are in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment. The living room doubles as a bedroom, and Peter and I share it. It has two small sofa beds that we pull out at night, and a bright blue curtain down the middle for privacy. Right now the curtain is pulled aside so you can see both our halves at once.
It’s pretty easy to guess which one of us wants to leave and which wants to stay. My side still looks lived-in. My books are on my small IKEA shelf. My favorite picture of me and my best friend, Bev, is still sitting on my desk. We’re wearing safety goggles and sexy-pouting at the camera in physics lab. The safety goggles were my idea. The sexy-pouting was hers. I haven’t removed a single item of clothing from my dresser. I haven’t even taken down my NASA star map poster. It’s huge—actually eight posters that I taped together—and shows all the major stars, constellations, and sections of the Milky Way visible from the Northern Hemisphere. It even has instructions on how to find Polaris and navigate your way by stars in case you get lost. The poster tubes I bought for packing it are leaning unopened against the wall.
On Peter’s side, virtually all the surfaces are bare, most of his possessions already packed away into boxes and suitcases.
My mom is right, of course—what I’m doing is futile. Still, I grab my headphones, my physics textbook, and some comics. If I have time to kill, maybe I can finish up my homework and read.
Peter shakes his head at me. “Why are you bringing that?” he asks, meaning the textbook. “We’re leaving, Tasha. You don’t have to turn in homework.”
Peter has just discovered the power of sarcasm. He uses it every chance he gets.
I don’t bother responding to him, just put my headphones on and head for the door. “Back soon,” I say to my mom.
She kisses her teeth and turns away. I remind myself that she’s not upset with me. Tasha, is not you me upset with, you know? is something she says a lot these days. I’m going to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) building in downtown Manhattan to see if someone there can help me. We are undocumented immigrants, and we’re being deported tonight.
Today is my last chance to try to convince someone—or fate—to help me find a way to stay in America.
To be clear: I don’t believe in fate. But I’m desperate.
REASONS I THINK Charles Jae Won Bae, aka Charlie, Is an Asshole (In No Particular Order):
1. Before this epic and spectacular (and wholly delightful) failure at Harvard, he has been unrelentingly good at everything. No one is supposed to be good at everything. Math and English and biology and chemistry and history and sports. It’s not decent to be good at everything. Three or four things at the most. Even that is pushing the bounds of good taste.
2. He’s a man’s man, meaning he’s an asshole a lot of the time. Most of the time. All of the time.
3. He is tall, with chiseled, sculpted, and every-romance-novel-ever adjective for cheekbones. The girls (all the girls, not just the Korean Bible study ones) say his lips are kissable.
4. All this would be fine—an embarrassment of riches, to be sure; a tad too many treasures to be bestowed on a single human, certainly—if he were nice. But he is not. Charles Jae Won Bae is not kind. He is smug and, worst of all, he is a bully. He’s an asshole. An inveterate one.
5. He doesn’t like me, and hasn’t liked me for years.
I PUT MY PHONE, headphones, and backpack into the gray bin before walking through the metal detector. The guard—her name tag says Irene—stops my bin from traveling onto the conveyor belt, as she’s done every day.
I look up at her and don’t smile.
She looks down into the bin, flips my phone over, and stares at the case, as she’s done every day. The case is the cover art for an album called Nevermind by the band Nirvana. Every day her fingers linger on the baby on the cover, and every day I don’t like her touching it. Nirvana’s lead singer was Kurt Cobain. His voice, the damage in it, the way it’s not at all perfect, the way you can feel everything he’s ever felt in it, the way his voice stretches out so thin that you think it’s going to break and then it doesn’t, is the only thing that’s kept me sane since this nightmare began. His misery is so much more abject than mine.
She’s taking a long time, and I can’t miss this appointment. I consider saying something, but I don’t want to make her angry. Probably she hates her job. I don’t want to give her a reason to delay me even further. She glances up at me again but shows no sign that she recognizes me, even though I’ve been here every day for the last week. To her I’m just another anonymous face, another applicant, another someone who wants something from America.
NATASHA IS NOT AT ALL correct about Irene. Irene loves her job. More than loves it—needs it. It’s almost the sole human contact she has. It’s the only thing keeping her total and desperate loneliness at bay.
Every interaction with these applicants saves her life just a little. At first they barely notice her. They dump their items into the bin and watch closely as they go through the machine. Most are suspicious that Irene will pocket loose change or a pen or keys or whatever. In the normal course of things, the applicant would never notice her, but she makes sure they do. It’s her only connection to the world.
So she waylays each bin with a single gloved hand. The delay is long enough that the applicant is forced to look up and meet her eyes. To actually see the person standing in front of them. Most mumble a reluctant good morning, and the words fill her up a little. Others ask how she’s doing and she expands a little more.
Irene never answers. She doesn’t know how. Instead, she looks back down at the bin and scrutinizes each object for clues, for some bit of information to store away and examine later.
More than anything, she wishes she could take her gloves off and touch the keys and the wallets and the loose change. She wishes she could slide her fingertips along the surfaces, memorizing textures and letting the artifacts of other people’s lives seep into her. But she can’t delay the line too long. Eventually she sends the bin and its owner away from her.
Last night was a particularly bad night for Irene. The impossible hungry mouth of her loneliness wanted to swallow her in a single piece. This morning she needs contact to save her life. She drags her eyes away from a retreating bin and up to the next applicant.
It’s the same girl who’s been coming every day this week. She can’t be more than seventeen. Like everyone else, the girl doesn’t look up from the bin. She keeps her eyes focused on it, like she can’t bear to be parted from the hot-pink headphones and her cell phone. Irene lays her gloved hand on the side of the bin to prevent its slide out of her life and onto the conveyor belt.
The girl looks up and Irene inflates. She looks as desperate as Irene feels. Irene almost smiles at her. In her head she does smile at her.
Welcome back. Nice to see you, Irene says, but only in her head.
In reality, she’s already looking down, studying the girl’s phone case. The picture on it is of a fat white baby boy completely submerged in clear blue water. The baby is spread-eagled and looks more like he’s flying than swimming. His mouth and eyes are open. In front of him a dollar bill dangles on a fishhook. The picture is not decent, and every time Irene looks at it she feels herself take an extra breath, as if she were the one underwater.