by Paul Cody
We stood up, and she held her glass and the wine bottle in one hand and took my hand with the other.
We went up the steps slowly, and on the second-floor landing, there was a table with a small light burning.
We went up a third flight, on polished oak stairs, and there was moonlight from a half-full moon falling through windows on bare wood. There were three doors, and we went through the one on the left.
The room was long, and had three large windows at the far end, a queen-size bed, a few stuffed animals—a frog, a bear—a comforter, a couch and an easy chair, a desk, and a small coffee table in front of the couch.
Please, sir, have a seat, she said, indicating a place on the end of the couch.
I sat, sipped wine, and she said, So, tell me, please, how long have you been having these problems?
And when I looked up, she had leaned forward, and she had begun to kiss me, lightly, her lips tasting like wine from New York State, only warmer, softer, possibly sweeter.
Forty-two
Sam
I sat down next to him, and we kissed, slow and light and soft. We sipped wine, and made small sounds, and kept going very slow, but became somehow deeper too.
Then we were no longer sipping wine, and we had begun to use our tongues and hands, the braids in my hair were undone, and he whispered, Soft, and then I was unbuttoning his shirt, and his shoes were off, and then his socks.
I don’t know how or when exactly, but we were on the bed, and his shirt was off, and my top and bra were off, and he was licking and kissing, making sounds, saying, God, God, so lovely, so, so lovely.
And it was.
Then the pants and shorts, and we were only skin, just flesh.
I had set out a condom and laid a towel down before, because this was indeed a first time. But we were still slow. We were entwined, and we kissed.
And everywhere, we touched, and stroked, and his skin was smooth and warm and cool, all at the same time. His body so long, and so beautiful, like I’d known, like heaven, or beyond that too.
And it was beyond imagination, it was my love, my Levon, and he said Sam Sam Sam, oh sweetheart, he said.
And then I shuddered, I thought I would die or fly, and then he shuddered, and we were sweaty, and we were one person, we were together, and we were breathing together—our bones, blood, breath.
Then we were lying on our sides, and he kissed me, and I said, Levon, and he said, Sam, and I asked if he was cold, and he said he was, a little, and I pulled the duvet up, and, underneath, we held hands. And it was very late then. And we were, I was, as happy as I had ever been in my life.
I guess I should end the story there, when everything was kind of just perfect. That was, forgive me, the climax of the story.
But stories go on, time goes on, and stories don’t end, even, I guess, when people die. I mean, they have kids who live on, and the things the dead people did in life continue to have some kind of influence on the living, even if it’s subtle and unseen.
Meg had given us full-bound copies of our project, with the title, Sam and Levon, on the cover.
It was over three hundred pages with all the outside contributions. We leafed through it, and talked about it, and then decided we should wait one year before we read the whole thing. Too much had happened, and things were going too well, and we just thought we should get some distance before we plunged back into the year.
So we finished the semester, and we had this really great summer, hanging out. My first real Ithaca summer, and in some way, Levon’s first Ithaca summer, hanging out with friends—with Noah, Anna, Sierra, Avery, and some others.
I got a job at a day-care place up on campus, just twenty hours a week, but it was fun, and Levon worked in a lab in, of all departments, physics, which I found kind of interesting. We all went swimming a bunch, and went to hear live music, and drank beer, and smoked a little weed, and Levon and I were fucking as though we had invented the act, which is to say, almost every night.
It was the best summer of my life, and we all talked about college, and what we were gonna do. We gave Avery a lot of shit about NYU and Manhattan, and Anna about Oberlin, Ohio, but I guess all of us had one eye on college. Noah had surprised a lot of us by deciding on NEC, the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, to study cello, which was slightly weird, because a lot of us didn’t even know he played cello, and NEC was one of the great music schools. Maybe that was one of his disabilities. Intense humility. Which I would call a virtue.
Then in August I did something really dumb with Levon. I don’t know if I was worried or testing him or what. I guess I had heard about couples going off to college and kind of playing it loose, saying, Yeah, you can kind of see other people, you can sort of date other people. Not be tied down, start a new phase of life. But maybe it was a test, a stupid dare. We had been together constantly all summer, and maybe part of me wanted to see how he’d react, to see if he really, truly, deeply loved me.
So one night, in bed, I brought up the idea that maybe we should go to school, to Cornell, fresh and unencumbered. Unattached.
You mean split up? he almost shouted.
Not split up exactly. But kind of go with a clean slate. And see what happens. Just a kind of experiment.
Are you serious?
Well, college is a new start.
You don’t love me?
Levon, I love you beyond anything.
So for weeks we went around and around.
He thought it was crazy, then he saw the sense of it.
I thought it was sensible, then I thought it was stupid. We cried, we laughed, we raged.
Shouldn’t he have said, No fucking way, in the first place? And stuck to that?
But then again, shouldn’t I have never come up with the whole moronic idea?
As move-in day approached, we had sort of agreed to try it. We’d talk, have lunch, but we wouldn’t be lovers, and we were free to see other people.
Then move-in day came, and it was nuts. Twenty thousand students from around the world, classes, new people, new everything. I was taking two English, a history, and a biology class for nonscience majors, and Levon shocked me when he texted that he was taking two physics, one calculus, and the Course of Justice, kind of a philosophy/political science/English class.
And things were full. I was busy all the time. Classes, a lab, just the effort of meeting people, getting used to the pace, the social scene, the sheer size of life on the hill. I mean, there were something like sixteen libraries.
Levon and I would text and email; we only spoke once on the phone, but neither of us was ever much for the phone. He was always brief. He said he loved physics, and found it strange; one course was called What Is Light?
I went to a few parties. Met lots of people, but nobody who particularly caught my attention. I was kind of amazed that even in a school this big, I had never once run into Levon.
Then in late September, walking across the arts quad, at the far corner near the architecture buildings, I saw Levon—I could tell even from a distance—near the middle of the quad, walking with an absolutely gorgeous, perfect, half-Asian, half-Anglo girl. She wore boots, and a white scarf and tweed coat, and she was leaning forward and into him at the same time and they were laughing.
The sight went through me like a blade. She was so lovely, and he, of course, was gorgeous, and I thought, So this is what you wanted? This was unencumbered. This was the clean slate.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. So much so that I went to a party that weekend, got half-drunk, and started talking to this big, handsome, drunk guy, who was hitting on me hard. I was just a little tempted, thinking of Levon and the beautiful girl, but I blew him off. I think his name was Jason or Mason.
I went back to my room and took a shower, then got in bed, and I felt even more miserable afterward. Just low, and lonely and kind of purposeless. Not the way I felt at Groton, not that level at all. But as normal life goes, pretty low on the shitty sca
le.
Then one night in October, a Thursday toward the end of the month, I was getting ready to leave Uris, the main undergraduate library on the arts quad. It was after ten, and I’d packed up my junk and was coming down the main interior steps when my phone vibrated.
I pulled it out, and it was a text from Levon, who I hadn’t heard from in at least a month.
Hey, he said.
Hey yourself.
Where r u?
Ithaca.
Where on campus?
Why?
Need to c u.
Now?
Yes. Very now.
Why
Can’t do this no see shit.
Really?
This sucks. I hate it what were u thinking.
I hate it 2.
Where r u
Uris. U?
Rockefeller
Rockefeller was about three buildings away.
Can u walk toward the rock? Levon wrote.
& u walk toward uris?
Yes
Yes.
I zipped my coat, stepped outside, hoisted my backpack. It was cool, but a lovely fall evening. That clear, clean air, perhaps a quarter waxing moon, and the leaves just about in full turn.
There were not many people out.
I started slowly up the very slight hill, past Olin, then I saw him come out the south door of Rockefeller. A tall young man, with wild curly hair, carrying a courier’s bag over one shoulder.
Here we were in moonlight, I thought, two fools, late of a Thursday, desperate to see each other, full of hope like every two fools who had ever loved each other.
And I thought, Here as well as any other place, to end the story that never really ends. Because next week Levon might withdraw and I’ll want space. Or I’ll get sad and Levon will get hurt. Much as I’d like the story to end in this moment of moonlight, it will go on.
Levon, my love, I thought, and imagined him thinking, Sam, Sam, Sam. Oh Sam. It was awful without you.
And that was why love was like light. Why it was both wave and particle—so slippery and elusive and so terribly hard to keep and hold and even begin to understand.
A mystery and a paradox. But also strange and beautiful. And why we kept trying.
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to my brilliant editor, Katherine Jacobs, to Elisabeth Weed, Elizabeth H. Clark, Martha Collins, John Lauricella, Ed Hardy, Julie Schumacher, Professor Paul McEuen, George Witte, Madeleine Moss, Dr. Adam Law, Professor Ted Everett, Jennifer Sale, John Vasile, everyone at The Book Group and Roaring Brook Press, and always and especially, to Liz, Liam, and Austin—who move the moon and the stars.
About the Author
Paul Cody earned an MFA at Cornell University, and has published several novels and a memoir for adults. He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Holmes, and their two sons. Love Is Both Wave and Particle is his first novel for teenagers. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
One: Levon
Two: Sam
Three: Meg
Four: Chloe
Five: Sam
Six: Elliot
Seven: Levon
Eight: Nathan
Nine: Sam
Ten: Noah
Eleven: Levon
Twelve: Vera
Thirteen: Avery
Fourteen: Levon
Fifteen: Susan
Sixteen: Anna
Seventeen: Carrie
Eighteen: Sam
Nineteen: Meg
Twenty: Noah
Twenty-one: Trevor
Twenty-two: Sam
Twenty-three: Sierra
Twenty-four: Levon
Twenty-five: Sam
Twenty-six: Trevor
Twenty-seven: Anna
Twenty-eight: Avery
Twenty-nine: Levon
Thirty: Ron
Thirty-one: Vera
Thirty-two: Nathan
Thirty-three: Sam
Thirty-four: Levon
Thirty-five: Avery
Thirty-six: Kendall
Thirty-seven: Levon
Thirty-eight: Sam
Thirty-nine: Susan
Forty: Meg
Forty-one: Levon
Forty-two: Sam
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Text copyright © 2017 by Paul Cody
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing
Holdings Limited Partnership
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
fiercereads.com
All rights reserved
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Cody, Paul, 1953– author.
Title: Love is both wave and particle / Paul Cody.
Description: First edition.|New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2017.|Summary: In this love story set in Ithaca, New York, at an alternative high school whose two requirements for admission are academic excellence and psychiatric disability, a boy and girl work on their yearlong senior project to write their life stories as informed by the points of view of people who have known them through their lives.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016038469 (print)|LCCN 2017008529 (ebook)|ISBN 9781626726888 (hardback)|ISBN 9781626726871 (ebook)
Subjects:|CYAC: Love—Fiction.|Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.| Identity—Fiction.|Gifted children—Fiction.|Mental illness—Fiction. |Alternative schools—Fiction.|Schools—Fiction.|Ithaca (N.Y.)—Fiction.|BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Dating & Sex. |JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Depression & Mental Illness.| JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Parents.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C633 Lo 2017 (print)|LCC PZ7.1.C633 (ebook)|DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038469
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eISBN 9781626726871
First hardcover edition, 2017
eBook edition, August 2017
