Dedication
For Stacey, Lucy, and Jon, with gratitude
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One: Jamie
Chapter Two: Maya
Chapter Three: Jamie
Chapter Four: Maya
Chapter Five: Jamie
Chapter Six: Maya
Chapter Seven: Jamie
Chapter Eight: Maya
Chapter Nine: Jamie
Chapter Ten: Maya
Chapter Eleven: Jamie
Chapter Twelve: Maya
Chapter Thirteen: Jamie
Chapter Fourteen: Maya
Chapter Fifteen: Jamie
Chapter Sixteen: Maya
Chapter Seventeen: Jamie
Chapter Eighteen: Maya
Chapter Nineteen: Jamie
Chapter Twenty: Maya
Chapter Twenty-One: Jamie
Chapter Twenty-Two: Maya
Chapter Twenty-Three: Jamie
Chapter Twenty-Four: Maya
Chapter Twenty-Five: Jamie
Chapter Twenty-Six: Maya
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Jamie
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Maya
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Jamie
Chapter Thirty: Maya
Chapter Thirty-One: Jamie
Chapter Thirty-Two: Maya
Chapter Thirty-Three: Jamie
Chapter Thirty-Four: Maya
Chapter Thirty-Five: Jamie
Chapter Thirty-Six: Maya
Authors’ Note
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Books by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Jamie
“Oranges don’t have nipples,” says Sophie.
I park our cart by the display pyramid, pointedly ignoring her. You could say there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to discuss nipples with my twelve-year-old sister in the Target produce section. And that part of me. Is all of me.
“They’re tangelos,” Sophie adds. “Tangelos have—”
“Good for tangelos.” I tear a plastic bag off the roll. “Look. The sooner we get everything, the sooner we can leave.”
Which isn’t a diss on Target. No way. Target’s the best. It’s kind of my personal wonderland. But it’s hard to catch that anything-could-happen, big-box-general-merchandise vibe when I’m here as my cousin’s errand boy. Gabe is the assistant campaign manager for a special election in our district, and he never seems to run out of random jobs for Sophie and me. This morning he texted us a snack list for his volunteers: oranges, grapes, chocolate, pizza bagels, Nutri-Grain bars, water bottles. NO APPLES. NO PRETZELS. All caps, in true Gabe fashion. Apparently, crunchy foods and political phone banking don’t mix.
“Still think they look nipply,” Sophie mutters as I reach for a few tangelos near the top of the pyramid. I like the ones that are so bright, they look photoshopped, as if someone cranked up the color saturation. I grab a few more, because Gabe’s expecting at least ten volunteers tonight.
“Why does he even want oranges?” Sophie asks. “Like, why pick the messiest fruit?”
“Scurvy prevention,” I start to say—but two girls step through the automatic doors, and I lose my train of thought completely.
Listen, I’m not the guy who can’t function when a cute girl walks by. I’m really not. For one thing, that would imply I was a functional person to begin with. Also, the issue isn’t that they’re cute.
I mean. They are cute. Around my age, dressed for Georgia summer air-conditioning in zipped-up hoodies and jeans. The shorter one—white, with square-framed glasses and brown spiral curls—gestures emphatically with both hands as they approach the carts. But it’s her friend who keeps catching my eye. She’s South Asian, I think, with wide brown eyes and wavy dark hair. She nods and grins at something her friend says.
There’s just something so familiar about her. I swear, we’ve met before.
She looks up, suddenly, like she senses me staring.
And my brain stalls out.
Yup. Yup. Okay. She’s definitely looking at me.
My friend Drew would know what to do here. Eye contact with a cute girl. A girl I’m pretty sure I know from somewhere, which means there’s a built-in conversation topic. And we’re in Target, the definition of my comfort zone. If there’s even such a thing as a comfort zone when cute girls are involved.
Dude, just talk to her. I swear to God, it’s not that deep. I wonder how many times Drew’s said that to me. Eye contact. Chin up. Smile. Walk over.
“Okay, Mr. Heart Eyes.” Sophie nudges me. “I can’t tell which girl you’re looking at.”
I turn quickly back to the tangelo display, cheeks burning as I grab one from the bottom of the pyramid.
And everything comes crashing down.
First the pyramid trembles—followed by the thwack thwack thwack of oranges raining to the floor. I turn to Sophie, who claps both hands over her mouth and stares back at me. Everyone’s staring at me. A mom pushing her baby in a cart. The guy manning the bakery. A kid, pausing mid-tantrum near the packaged cookie display.
Of course, the two girls are front and center. They stand frozen by their cart, with matching uh-oh expressions.
Thwack thwack thwack. And again. Without pause.
And.
Thwack.
The last tangelo falls.
“I’m—”
“A cartoon character,” Sophie finishes.
“Okay. Yeah. I can fix this.” I squat down right where I’m standing, and start passing tangelos up to Sophie. “You take these.”
I tuck a few more into the crook of my arm and attempt to stand, but I drop a bunch of them before I’m even upright. “Crap.” I bend to grab them, which sends a few more tumbling down, rolling toward the apple display—which you’d think wouldn’t happen with tangelos. Shouldn’t the nipples keep them from rolling? I scoot on my knees toward the apple display, hoping nothing slid too far under, when someone clears his throat loudly.
“Okeydokey, my dude, let’s keep you away from the apples.”
I look up to find a clean-cut guy in a red polo shirt and a Target name tag. Kevin.
I scramble up, immediately squishing a tangelo beneath my sneaker. “Sorry! I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” Sophie says. “Jamie, look at me.” She’s holding her phone up.
“Are you filming me?”
“Just a little Boomerang,” she says. She turns to Kevin, the employee. “Meet my brother, Butterfingers von Klutzowitz.”
“I’ll help you clean this,” I say quickly.
“Nah, you’re totally fine. I got this,” says Kevin.
Sophie peers down at her phone. “How do you send stuff to BuzzFeed?”
Out of the corner of my eye, a flicker of movement: the girls in hoodies veering quickly down a side aisle.
Getting the hell away from me, I guess.
I don’t blame them one bit.
Twenty minutes later, Sophie and I park at the Jordan Rossum state senate campaign satellite headquarters—technically the side annex of Fawkes and Horntail, a new-age bookstore on Roswell Road. Not exactly the Georgia State Capitol building, or even the Coverdell Building across the street, where Mom works for State Senator Jim Mathews from the Thirty-Third District. The whole state capitol complex looks plucked from DC, with its columns and balconies and giant arched windows. They’ve got security teams at the entrances, like an airport, and once you’re in, it’s all heavy wooden doors and people in suits and fidgety groups of kids on field trips.
And those bright, gleaming Coverd
ell Building bathrooms.
I know all about those bathrooms.
No suits or security teams at Fawkes and Horntail. I cut straight to the side-access door, hoisting two dozen bottles of water, while Sophie trails behind me balancing the snack bags. We’re here so much, we don’t even bother knocking.
“Hey, bagels,” greets Hannah, the assistant field coordinator. She means us, not the snacks. There’s a bagel chain in Atlanta called Goldberg’s, and since we’re Jamie and Sophie Goldberg, people sometimes . . . yeah. But Hannah’s cool, so I don’t mind it. She’s a rising junior at Spelman, but she’s staying with her mom in the suburbs this summer, just to be near the campaign office.
She looks up from her desk, which is stacked high with canvassing flyers—the ones Gabe calls walk pieces. “Is this for the phone bankers tonight? Y’all are the best snack team ever.”
“It was mostly me,” Sophie says, handing her the snack bags. “I’m like the snack team captain.”
Hannah, halfway across the room with the snacks, looks back over her shoulder and laughs.
“Except I drove,” I mutter. “I pushed the cart, carried all the water—”
“But it was my idea.” Sophie jabs me with her elbow and smiles brightly.
“Mom literally made us.”
“Okay, well I’m the one who didn’t knock over a display, so.”
Hannah walks back over and settles into her desk. “Hey, y’all are coming tomorrow night, right?”
“Oh, believe me,” Sophie says. “We’ll be there.”
Mom never lets us miss Rossum campaign events these days. Lucky us. They’re all the same: people milling around with plastic cups, making overly familiar eye contact. Me forgetting everyone’s names the moment I hear them. And then everyone gets super extra when Rossum arrives. People laugh louder, angle toward him, sidle nearer to ask for selfies. Rossum always seems a little startled by the whole thing. Not in a bad way. More like in a who me kind of way. It’s his first time running for office, so I guess he’s not used to all that attention.
But the thing about Rossum is that he’s amazing with people. I mean, his platform’s great too—he’s super progressive, and he’s always talking about raising the minimum wage. But a lot of it’s just the way he speaks. He can give you goose bumps, or make you laugh, or make you feel purposeful and clear. I always think about the people who shake the world with their words. Patrick Henry, Sojourner Truth, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King. I know Rossum’s just a guy running for state senate. But he makes it all feel huge. He makes this race feel like a moment, a brand-new dot on Georgia’s timeline. He makes you feel like you’re watching history change.
I can’t imagine being able to do that.
Tomorrow’s event is an interfaith outreach dinner at a local mosque, which means Mom’s extra excited. We aren’t the most observant Jews in the world, but she lives for this kind of religious community-building stuff.
“Should be fun,” says Hannah, opening her laptop. But then she stops short, glancing back up at us. “Oh, right, you need snack reimbursement, don’t you? Gabe’s in the VIP room. I’ll grab him.”
The VIP room? A supply closet.
Hannah emerges moments later, followed by Gabe, who’s wearing a crisp blue button-down shirt, with a picture of Jordan Rossum’s face stickered onto his chest. People sometimes say Sophie and I look like Gabe, since he’s tall and has brown hair and hazel-green eyes. But he’s got bigger lips and archier eyebrows and a weird sprouting pseudo-beard he’s always working on. And he’s twenty-three, which is a solid six years older than me. So I don’t really see it.
Gabe clasps his hands and grins. “I was wondering when I’d see your faces around here.”
“We were here on Monday,” Sophie says.
“And Sunday,” I add.
He’s unfazed. “You’ve been missing out on some sweet canvassing action. You should sign up for a slot. Or maybe you could swing by for phone banking tonight? It’s gonna be lit.” He pitches his voice high when he says it, tilting his palms up like he’s about to raise the roof. I sneak a glance at Sophie, who seems caught between laughing and choking.
“So are you in?” Gabe asks. “Rossum needs you.”
This time, I glance down at my feet. I want to help Gabe, but I’m not a phone-banking kind of person. Envelope stuffing? Absolutely. Postcards? Even better. I’ve even sent out what Gabe calls “peer to peer” text messages, though anyone old enough to vote is, by definition, not my peer.
Of course, the thing that throws me the most is canvassing. I’m not exactly great at talking to strangers. And I don’t just mean cute girl strangers. It’s everyone. I get really in my head about it. And thoughts never seem to travel smoothly between my brain and my mouth. I’m not like Sophie, who can walk into any room, befriend anyone, join any conversation. It’s not even something she tries to do. Sophie’s just fundamentally not self-conscious. Like, she farted on the school bus once in fifth grade, and was downright giddy about it afterward. Being embarrassed didn’t even occur to her. If it were me, I’d have shriveled up on the spot.
Maybe some people are just destined to always say the wrong thing. Or no thing, because half the time, I just stammer and blush and can barely form words. But hey, better that than the alternative . . . which, as I now know, involves phlegm, a touch of vomit, and State Senator Mathews’s black oxford shoes.
Let’s just say I’m not the master of persuasion you want on the front lines of your political campaign. I’m not a history changer.
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I’m just—”
“It’s super easy,” Gabe says, clapping me on the shoulder. “Just follow the script. Why don’t I put you down for phone banking tonight, and we’ll find you a canvassing slot while you’re here.”
“Um—”
“We have Hebrew school,” Sophie says.
“Oh, sweet. Big J, I didn’t know you were still taking Hebrew.”
“I’m not—”
Sophie cuts her eyes toward me, lips pursed—the patented Sophie Goldberg STFU Jamie Face. “Jamie is taking Hebrew,” she says loudly. “Because he needs a refresher so he can quiz me on my haftorah portion.”
I nod really fast. “Haftorah. Yup.”
“Dang,” Gabe says. “That’s a good brother.”
“He is. And I’m a good sister,” Sophie says, smacking my arm. “An extremely good sister. Too good.”
I glance at her sideways. “You have your moments,” I say.
Karma, though. Wow. Sophie may have been lying about Hebrew school tonight, but from the moment we step through the kitchen door, it’s clear: we’re in bat mitzvah planning hell. My mom and grandma are huddled at the kitchen table in front of Mom’s laptop—I mean, that’s not the weird part. Grandma’s always here. She moved in with us when I was nine, right after my grandpa died. And the huddled-over-a-laptop part’s not weird either, since Mom and Grandma are both big-time tech geeks. Mom runs campaign analytics sometimes for Senator Mathews, and obviously Grandma is our resident social media queen.
But the fact that Mom’s working from home in a bathrobe at four in the afternoon is concerning, as is the way Boomer, Grandma’s mastiff, is pacing nervously around the table. Not to mention the fact that the table itself looks like a paper apocalypse, strewn with centerpiece mock-ups, printed spreadsheets, washi tape, binders, and tiny envelopes. I’d say there’s a zero percent chance I’m making it out of the kitchen tonight without a stack of place cards to fold.
Sophie dives in. “New RSVPs!”
“Soph, let Grandma pull up the spreadsheet first,” Mom says, reaching for a large binder. “Also, I need you to look at this floor plan so we can think about the flow. We’ll mostly be in the ballroom, with the dance floor there, tables here, and we have two options for the buffet. One, we can stick it on the side, near the—”
“Tessa Andrews accepts with pleasure.” Sophie slams a card down happily. “Oh. Hell. Yes.”<
br />
“Sophie, don’t cuss,” says Mom.
Sophie tilts her head. “I don’t really think of hell as a cuss word, though.”
“It’s a gateway cuss,” I say, settling in beside Mom. Boomer parks his chin in my lap, leaning in for a head scratch.
“Here, I’ve got the spreadsheet pulled up,” says Grandma.
“Sophie, are you listening?” says Mom. “Now, the other option for the buffet is this bonus room at the back of the venue. But is it weird having the food that close to the restrooms?”
I shrug. “At least it’s convenient.”
“Jamie! Don’t be gross,” Sophie says.
“Oh my God, for handwashing!”
Mom rubs her temples. “I’d like us to utilize the space, since we’ll be paying for it anyway, but—”
“Hey.” Sophie perks up. “What about a teen room?” Mom narrows her eyes, but Sophie raises a finger. “Hear me out. It’s a thing. You’ve got the adults, all of your friends, family—you all get the nice party in the ballroom, right? And then we get our own super chill smaller party in the other room. Nothing fancy.”
“That’s ridiculous,” says Mom. “Why wouldn’t you want to be with family?”
“I’m just concerned about some of the music being a bit much for the old people, you know? This way, y’all can play ‘Shout’ or whatever in here.” She pokes the middle of the ballroom on the floor plan. “And then we can have Travis Scott . . . and everyone’s happy.”
“Travis Scott. Now, isn’t that Stormi’s dad?” says Grandma.
“We’re not having two separate parties,” says Mom.
“Then why’d you ask my opinion?” says Sophie. “Why am I even here?”
“Why am I even here?” I mutter to Boomer, who gazes back at me solemnly.
I mean, let’s be real. Mom didn’t even want my input when it was my own bar mitzvah. I didn’t even get to pick my own theme. I wanted historical timelines. Mom made me do Around the World, with chocolate passports for favors.
I guess it ended up being sort of cool—in an ironic way, since I’ve only been to one other country. My dad’s been living for years as an expat in Utrecht, so Sophie and I spend a few weeks in the Netherlands each summer. Other than that, we don’t talk to him much. It’s hard to explain, but when he’s physically present, he’s present—he takes off work when we visit and everything. But he’s not really a phone guy or a text guy, and he’s barely an email guy. And he’s only been back to the States a handful of times since the divorce. I doubt he’ll come to Sophie’s bat mitzvah, especially with it scheduled so close to our summer trip. He skipped mine, though he did mail me a congratulatory box of authentic Dutch stroopwafels. I didn’t have the heart to tell him they sell the exact same brand at Kroger.
Yes No Maybe So Page 1
