You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “Make me proud, Adi,” I say, and she rolls her eyes, but her hand grazes my shoulder as she heads for the stage.

  Our relationship probably won’t ever be what it was before we started growing into our own skin. Before we hurt each other. Before the world hurt us. Maybe we’ll never fully understand each other or know all of each other’s secrets, and surely we’ll never recapture our childhood innocence. But we can have something new. Something messy and real and imperfect, because that’s what both of us are.

  Adi raises her bow, and I let myself sink into her music. It’s been a while since I really listened to her. When she was little, she hauled out her music stand and performed for our family all the time. But over the past few years, she’s kept the music locked in her room. I think it’s because I used to complain about how annoying it was. Sure, the music’s not my favorite. It’s not catchy, and it’s definitely not Nirvana, but I can’t remember why I claimed to hate it so much.

  A single buttery light illuminates her and only her.

  She glows.

  Summer

  Thirty-nine

  Tovah

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN my life, I tumble headfirst into uncertainty. The last summer before college stretches before me, and I’m not scrambling to add anything to my résumé. I have zero obligations. Nothing to do.

  I kind of love it.

  This year I’ll live at home and begin college as an undeclared freshman. I don’t need to be one hundred percent certain what I want to do with the rest of my life now, and it’s okay if it’s biology and it’s okay if it isn’t. There are so many things I want to try that I can’t believe I almost narrowed myself to just biology. I did place into a lab class, one of the prerequisites, but I’m also planning to take Introduction to Jewish Studies, History of the Olympics, and Anthropology of the Middle East.

  Unlike Adi, Lindsay doesn’t seem to think whatever happened between us this year is worth talking about. Maybe it’s because I have my sister back, but I’m not as heartbroken about it as I thought I would be. Lindsay and I were not the best friends I assumed we were, and while I may never understand why, I do know I tried too hard to force her into an Adina-shaped space.

  I see her one last time after graduation, at a beach party I go to with Zack and Adi. Adi is dipping her toes into the water, and Zack and Troy are playing volleyball with a big group, and somehow I find myself alone next to Lindsay by the likely illegal bonfire.

  “Hey,” Lindsay says, lifting her hand to wave. Her sweatshirt sleeves are pulled over her hands.

  “You were a shitty friend to me this year,” I say.

  She winces. “Did you really need to say that?”

  I stand up. “Yeah. I did. And even though you were a shitty friend, I still really hope you like college. I hope you figure out what you want to do. I hope you find what it is that you love.” I say it genuinely, and she mumbles something back that sounds like you too, but I’m already walking away.

  In the middle of July, Zack and I take another camping trip. Alone. I tell him what I want and what feels good and I’m not shy about it, so there’s one thing Lindsay wound up being right about.

  This time we have all night to figure it out. And after some stumbling and laughing and rearranging of sleeping bags, we finally get it.

  “You’re going to miss me,” I say afterward, and while I meant it as a question, it comes out as a statement.

  He holds me closer against his bare chest, fingers moving through my hair. My cheek rests on his heartbeat. “So much. But we’ll talk all the time.”

  He might be my high school boyfriend or he might be the one true love of my life. We might be back in this same place next year, commemorating the anniversary of our first time, or we might be smitten with other people. I might be a surgeon and he might be an artist, or we might be completely different things.

  Right now, though, we’re just Tovah and Zack, reckless in love with each other, and I like that most of all.

  Something on Aba’s laptop screen, open on the kitchen table, freezes me in place.

  “Aba?” I was about to go on a run, but my feet have turned to lead. I set my protein shake down on the table. “What’s this?”

  “Not now.” He shuts the laptop and the website listing long-term care homes. “But you know we’re going to have to talk about it sometime.”

  “I know.” I bite the inside of my cheek, hard. It’ll happen for Ima, and then for Adi. And I’ll visit both of them all the time. Regardless of what my own future holds, I’ll spend much of my life in a hospital.

  He slides into a chair. “Do you have time to help me practice my ivrit, or are you on your way out?”

  “On my way out,” I say in Hebrew. “Could we do it later?”

  He nods. “Betach,” he says.

  “How does dinner and a Hebrew lesson sound?” It’s something we’ve gotten in the habit of, cooking dinner and speaking Hebrew. “I can stop by the grocery store. And the pharmacy, for Ima’s meds.”

  “Todah,” he says before switching back to English. “You’ve always been my girl, right?” He squeezes my shoulder.

  “You can be so sappy.” I roll my eyes so he can’t tell how much this touches me. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

  “Not now, maybe,” he says. “But you will.”

  Fall, again

  Forty

  Adina

  I MISS THE COLD. I long for rain. I dream of overcast skies. In Baltimore the summer bleeds into fall, and September is punishingly hot. What I want is an East Coast winter, snow and closed streets and that fresh chilly scent. A few more months. A few more months and I will have my cold.

  I unpack in my dorm, a small bricked cube with a window the size of a piece of sheet music. I take a photo and send it to Tovah.

  My clothes fill the closet and my viola finds a spot in the corner of the room. Then I sit on the creaky bed and . . . wait. This is the first time I’ve been truly alone. Tovah and I went to Jewish day camps when we were little, and one weeklong overnight camp in Eastern Washington. But that has been it, and it barely compares.

  At first I relish my alone time before it can turn lonely. I go for long walks around campus, or I play viola in the rehearsal spaces before classes start. Then I meet my roommate, Corinne, a flute major from North Carolina who has an accent and says “y’all.”

  Corinne tacks up photos of her friends on her side of the room. “My boyfriend’s at school in Asheville,” she says with a sigh, smoothing out a picture of the two of them. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  Her eyes flash with mischief. “I saw some cuties on the fourth floor. Piano players, so you know they’re good with their fingers. . . .”

  I laugh hard at this. I have never had a friend like Corinne, who talks too much and has no filter.

  We eat dinner together in the dining hall the first night, and while there is a kosher meal option, it dawns on me that there’s no one here to say anything about my not keeping kosher. There’s no one to disappoint if I don’t spend Shabbat resting.

  This is an intensely freeing thought.

  It felt good to go to support group over the summer, learn how others like me are coping. It took a couple weeks for my body to adjust to the antidepressants, but now that I have been on them for several months, I sense a definite lift in my moods. My doctor recommended a therapist in Baltimore, and I’m going to see her next week. What I am trying to do is focus on what’s in front of me: how much I loved the dining-hall lasagna I had for dinner, classes starting tomorrow, the party I am going to with Corinne tonight.

  Evil eyes jangle on my wrist. I put on a short-sleeved dress, leave my hair long and wild, outline my lips with Siren, then fill them in. Dab. Reapply. Perfect. In this moment, I feel genuinely content, though there is something in me that could alter the trajectory of my life at any second, something not even Tovah will ever understand.

  All beautiful things in life lose
their sheen. Gardens wither. Skin wrinkles. I might be waiting for a while—hopefully for a very long while—but some parts of my future are inevitable.

  As Corinne and I wander through campus at night, my heel catches on a crack in the sidewalk, and I stumble.

  “Careful,” she says with a smile, reaching out to catch my elbow. “Clumsy, clumsy.”

  I steady myself. “Thanks. I’m okay.”

  The fear is never far away. My broken heel reminds me the disease could sneak up on me at any moment. One day I will twitch when I want to be still, rage when I want to be happy, forget when I want to remember. It has happened to my mother, and it will happen to me. We are a doomed family—but we are not done fighting yet.

  I jam my shoe back onto my foot. “This party better have good music,” I tell Corinne.

  One thing is certain: before I go, I am going to make a hell of a lot of noise.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK’S JOURNEY HAS SPANNED four years and a half dozen drafts, and this final version owes its existence to so many brilliant, generous people. I must begin with a tremendous thank-you to my agent, Laura Bradford, the first person to believe in this book. I’ll never forget what you said about Adina during our first call: “She’s not nice, but she’s interesting. You root for her.” Here’s to many more characters who are more interesting than they are nice. I feel so lucky to have you in my corner.

  Massive thanks to my editor, Jennifer Ung, for loving Adina and Tovah as much as I do, for inspiring me to dig deeper, and for just generally being amazing to work with. I’m so proud of what we made together!

  Thank you, Sarah Creech, for designing such a stunning cover that conveys the tone of the book so perfectly. I wrote this book partially because the only Jewish stories I read growing up were Holocaust narratives. We cannot stop telling those stories, but they are not the only stories we as Jewish people have to tell. Thank you to Mara Anastas and the rest of the Simon Pulse team for believing a book with practicing Jewish characters could appeal to a wide audience.

  Thank you to Rachel Simon, one of my very first critique partners, my online BFF turned real-life friend. Your generosity and enthusiasm are unparalleled in the book world, and you have the kindest heart. I know I can always count on you for an honest opinion.

  I am grateful to have had such insightful feedback from this book’s early readers: J. C. Davis, Nikki Roberti, Natalie Williamson, Natalie Blitt, Richelle Morgan, Maya Prasad, Jamee Kuehler, and Paula Garner, who first encouraged me to venture into a darker place. A special thank-you to Jennifer Hawkins. Without you, I may have put this book away forever.

  Thanks too to my more recent readers: Heather Ezell, Tracy C. Gold, Rachel Griffin, Carlyn Greenwald, Kelsey Rodkey, Allison Augustyn, Brianna Shrum, Gloria Chao, Jeanmarie Anaya, Jenny Howe, Sarah White, and Al Rosenberg.

  I feel so fortunate to have found the Pitch Wars community, and through it, some very meaningful relationships. Thank you, especially, to Joy McCullough, Helene Dunbar, Kit Frick, and Brenda Drake, for making it all possible.

  To my fellow Electric Eighteens, I cannot imagine a more supportive, talented group of writers. I can’t wait to fill my shelves with your words and see where your careers take you.

  I doubt I’d have written this book, much less shown it to anyone, if I hadn’t summoned the courage to share my first finished manuscript in the Seattle critique group formerly known as Ladies of the Write. Thank you for being so nice when I showed up with three info-dumpy chapters of character backstory in a thinly veiled autobiography that will never see the light of day again. Thank you in particular to Janine Southard and Lara Doss, my first post-college, “real-world” friends.

  Thank you to the helpful folks at the University of Washington Genetic Medicine Clinic, especially Robin Bennett, who took me seriously during this book’s early stages, when I wasn’t yet sure what it would be. Thank you to the Huntington’s Disease Youth Organization, a group providing young people with so many valuable resources. Thank you to the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, also at the University of Washington, and especially Hadar Khazzam-Horovitz, for the Hebrew transliteration help and for letting me borrow the “die, die” story.

  My life would not be as rich without the community of dancers and teachers at eXit SPACE. Rachael Enderle, thank you for listening to me talk about publishing in between tap classes.

  To Ivan Vukovic, thank you for listening to my author neuroses and assuming weekend mornings are for writing. Thank you, too, for agreeing to go to El Chupacabra many more times than you would like. You bring out the good parts of me.

  Thank you to my sister, Michelle, for the enthusiasm and inside jokes. Please don’t read too much into the sister relationship in this book. I swear, it’s nothing like ours.

  Last, thank you to my parents, Jenny and Brad. I don’t know if I was an exceptionally good kid or you are exceptionally good parents, so let’s just go with both. Thank you for always assuming when, not if. I love you.

  About the Author

  RACHEL LYNN SOLOMON lives in Seattle and loves tap dancing, red lipstick, and new wave music. A former journalist, she has worked for NPR and produced a radio show that aired in the middle of the night, and she currently works in education. Once she helped set a Guinness World Record for the most natural redheads in one place. You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone is her debut novel. You can find her online at rachelsolomonbooks.com and on Twitter @rlynn_solomon.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

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  First Simon Pulse hardcover edition January 2018

  Text copyright © 2018 by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  Jacket photograph of young women copyright © 2018 by Ildiko Neer/Trevillion Images

  Jacket photograph of leaves copyright © 2018 by BSANI/Thinkstock

  Helix interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by julichka/Thinkstock

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  Jacket designed by Sarah Creech

  Interior designed by Mike Rosamilia

  Author photograph by Ian Grant

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Solomon, Rachel Lynn.

  Title: You’ll miss me when I’m gone / by Rachel Lynn Solomon.

  Other titles: You will miss me when I am gone

  Description: First
Simon Pulse hardcover edition. | New York : Simon Pulse, 2018. | Summary: Eighteen-year-old twins Adina, a viola prodigy, and Tovah, a future surgeon, find their relationship tested when they learn that one of them will develop Huntington’s, the degenerative disease ravaging their mother.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017008359 | ISBN 9781481497732 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481497756 (eBook) Subjects: | CYAC: Sisters—Fiction. | Twins—Fiction. | Huntington’s disease—Fiction. | Sick—Fiction. | Jews—United States—Fiction. | Family life—Washington (State)—Seattle—Fiction. | Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction. Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S6695 You 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008359