by Jen Malone
“How long will it last?” I ask.
I thought I was prepared for today, to say this final proper goodbye to Lia, and get back to my private grieving. But now I know I’m not; I need to hear her laughing at me more.
Alex is already punching away at his phone. “Got it! It’s called Rainworks.”
My limbs jiggle with adrenaline as I wait for him to click around the website.
“This’ll fade as soon as the wall dries,” he tells me. “But it says the chemical itself can last for months, maybe even up to a year, which means until then it’ll reappear every time it gets wet.”
The air catches in my lungs and I savor the exhale that follows.
A year. A piece of Lia for a whole year.
I jump into action, scrambling to retrieve the hose. “We have to get the entire wall wet—I need to see the whole thing!”
Alex ducks out of my way so I can point the nozzle again, this time staring intently—and in awe—as the rest of the colored chalk streams away and the wall saturates with water, revealing an artfully stenciled quote against the wet chalkboard backdrop.
“UNANSWERED QUESTIONS LEAVE MORE ROOM FOR POSSIBILITIES.”
—MAYBE/MAYBE NOT DYING GIRL
(WHO GUESSES SHE HAS SOMETHING TO SAY AFTER ALL)
“Lia,” I breathe.
“I know your parents didn’t want to be here, but they’d want to see this, don’t you think?” I tell Alex.
He turns his neck so I can see he already has his phone to his ear. “Mom?”
I step closer to the wall to give him some privacy.
Underneath the parentheses is a row of tiny letters I have to squint at to read: This Isn’t My Masterpiece Either.
I abso-bloody-lutely love this girl. She is a masterpiece.
She was a badass and chickenshit and fierce and flawed and perfect and messy.
She was real.
She just wasn’t invincible.
Lia’s dying changed everything for me. I no longer believe in the concept of “fair.” I no longer believe being a good person guarantees you a happy ending. I no longer believe any of us are invincible. I no longer believe I’m invincible.
A woman in yoga pants and a yellow jacket rounds the corner, juggling a coffee cup in one hand and her dog’s leash in the other. She pauses in a patch of early morning sun to squint up at the still-dripping wall and I hesitate for only a second, glancing at Alex to confirm he’s still on the phone with his parents. I cross the lot and offer the woman a friendly smile as I wordlessly ask permission to pet her corgi. She nods and I squat down to scratch the pup between his ears before venturing, “Do you reckon I could ask you a question that’ll come off as a bit random?”
Her smile is slow to form, but it’s there. “Well, now you have me curious, so I guess I have no choice but to say yes.” She lifts her chin to gesture to Lia’s quote. “Though I’m not sure if I should answer you or leave room for possibilities.”
I grin in response. “Cheers. Don’t worry—in this case the right answer leaves room for those too. I was just wondering, are you registered as an organ donor?”
Despite all the assurances Lia’s death stole from me, it also left behind one shiny new one. Because now I understand that if I’m forced to accept the positively worst things imaginable can actually happen . . . it means I have no choice but to also believe the best possible things can.
And I am here for those. We all are.
Author’s Note
I know there will be some readers who may feel betrayed by Amelia’s death, after spending the majority of the book inside her head. There is even a for-my-eyes-only draft where she does survive, because I promise, it was really hard to doom her to this fate. But although being an author means having the ability to play God with the fictional characters we bring to life, I wrote this in honor of one specific girl who wasn’t saved and, above all, I wanted to portray her story.
The spark for this book was a newspaper account of a girl in the small town where I live, who passed away at the age of twenty after a long struggle with organ failure on the very day a liver was procured for her. I didn’t know her personally, nor did I reach out to people in my circle who did, because I didn’t want the details of her condition (which was different from Amelia’s) or her specific circumstances to seep into this story in any way that might intrude upon her family’s privacy. But I was captivated by the cruel tragedy of missing out on a lifesaving donation by a matter of hours, after having waited years and years. It was only in researching this book that I learned how often this same scenario plays out across the world, because the shortage of organs means patients are forced to ride an incredibly fine and dangerous line between staying healthy enough to accept a transplant and being sick enough to warrant one.
While there are plenty of happy and hopeful endings, there are still too many that are not. All of the facts and figures Sibby uses during the school assembly that opens this story are accurate as of this writing, including the statistic that twenty-two people die every day while awaiting an organ donation.
Telling Amelia’s story challenged me to take my own ideas about what this weird thing called life is all about and put them under a microscope, but one constant that remained from beginning to end was the conviction that at least some aspect of its meaning lies in helping one another, when we can and where we can. The majority of characters in this novel were named after actual organ donors who did just that through their generosity, some while living and some following their deaths. First and last names have been scrambled to protect privacy, except in cases where permission was granted or the donation received news coverage that stated names publicly.
I was humbled by all the stories of organ donors and recipients I had the honor of hearing and reading, especially that of my close friends John and Cara Ventresca, godparents to one of my children and favorite goofballs of my other two. John, who has polycystic kidney disease, received a kidney donation in 2016 from a complete stranger several states away who simply “wanted to do something nice for someone.” When John’s wife, Cara, learned she wasn’t a blood type match for her husband, she didn’t allow that to stop her from donating her own kidney, to a stranger she knew must be feeling the same vulnerability and helplessness her family did as they searched for a match for John. That people like this exist in our world—and in my life—gives me hope for humanity.
There are others who have made organ donation and organ transplant a cause they champion daily and I also borrowed their names for this book. In particular, Sibby’s last name, Watson, is in honor of New York volunteer Roxanne Watson, who—at the time of this writing—has single-handedly signed up more than ten thousand donors (and counting).
Personal stories aside, one of the other things I find most compelling about organ donation is that it is a global health crisis that’s entirely solvable. Today. Yesterday, even. We don’t need to wait on that one brilliant doctor or on a team of dedicated scientists to discover an elusive fix—because, combined, we all hold the cure to this problem within our own bodies, whether we’re able to offer an organ while alive or gift many after our own deaths.
While there are also hopeful signs for technological and medical advances on several fronts, that elusive “someday” has not arrived yet. There remains an urgent need for organs here and now.
If you are interested in registering as an organ donor, learning more about donation, or volunteering to lead a donor registry drive in your area, please visit www.donatelife.net. You can also register to become a donor through your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, which you can link to via www.dmv.org. It is further recommended that you take a moment to discuss your wishes with those closest to you, who are now or who might become responsible for making medical decisions on your behalf. Sibby would offer a hearty “Good on ya!” and I’d have to second her.
And if a fictional character’s death can lead to saving a real life, I’m very certain Amelia would be just fine wit
h the way things turned out for her within these pages. I hope you agree!
Acknowledgments
Foremost acknowledgment goes to my editor, Alyssa Miele: If only there existed a version of Rainworks for stories, so her many contributions to this book could come shining through . . . but I hope she know that the marks she left are indelible to me. (Ha! A set of ellipses she can’t put a red line through—I couldn’t resist, Alyssa!)
Special thanks to my agent, Holly Root, for being both trusted blocker and badass jammer with respect to my publishing career.
I would not have been able to plot or execute this story without the patient (no pun intended; well, maybe just a little, in honor of Amelia’s dad) guidance of Dr. Douglas Mogul. You might think someone who holds the impressive title of medical director of pediatric liver transplant at a hospital as esteemed as Johns Hopkins would not be as gracious about answering so many of my truly ignorant questions. But Dr. Mogul was that and more as he helped me find inventive solutions to my dilemma of “How can I have a terminally ill patient who spends very little time in a hospital and is asymptomatic enough to do all these other things I want her to be able to do?” I am truly thankful for his guidance, and take full responsibility for any errors I may have made in interpreting the information he shared. I would also like to make mention here of an app that Dr. Mogul has created as part of a Johns Hopkins study to help parents of newborns identify signs of gastrointestinal illness or problems with their baby’s liver. It’s free and is called PoopMD+. Spread the word!
I also leaned heavily on other experts in their medical fields to provide information and fact-checking as I wrote. These include Lisa Bos in Endoscopy at Rhode Island Hospital; Chris Pierce, nurse practitioner at University Emergency Medicine Foundation and ED nurse at RI Hospital; Claire Watson, development and coordinations coordinator at New England Donor Services; and her clinical staff.
Further gratitude to those in the biliary atresia Facebook group who welcomed my intrusion, offered requested information or steered me to valuable resources that could and, in the exceptional cases of Jen Alpard and Amy Montgomery, allowed me to interview them about their personal relationships with the disease.
I am so appreciative of all the time given by one and all and, once again, any errors in text are mine alone.
An extra special dose of love and thanks to Pintip Dunne for helping me conceive of Will during a late-night conference sleepover and for checking me every step of the way to ensure I was accurately portraying him as a proud Thai American. I treasure all the care and time she took in allowing me to form a greater understanding of and appreciation for her experiences and her culture.
Gratitude to Dygo Tosa for taking time away from teaching Latin to high school students (including my own) to help me with the sundial mottos.
A hearty “Cheers!” to my Down Under mate (and talented author) Sharon Johnson for checking Sibby’s Aussie-speak for accuracy.
Speaking of talented authors, I have many more to thank for lending their writerly muscles and hearts to aiding me in creating, shaping, and polishing this story, including: Dana Levy, Darcy Woods, Pintip Dunne (yes, again), Jen Brooks, Kate Brauning, Lori Goldstein, and Gail Nall. You are treasures and I am so lucky to count each of you as friends.
To the entire team at Harper, so many of whom work tirelessly and anonymously behind the scenes to get books into readers’ hands and who do so with passion and integrity, a humble thank-you. Special shout-outs to editorial director Rosemary Brosnan, copy editor Jessica White, and publicist Aubrey Churchward. An extra-special thanks to Sophia Drevenstam and Molly Jacques and designer Jessie Gang for a cover I positively drool over and one so perfectly befitting a story about a chalk artist/hand letterer.
And lastly, to you readers: it’s all nothing without you! Thank you for seeking out stories to help you figure out the world—it lets us authors write them to do the same and this author, in particular, is very grateful to have that opportunity.
About the Author
Photo by John Malone
JEN MALONE once spent a year traveling the world solo, met her husband on the highway (literally), and went into labor with her identical twins while on a rock star’s tour bus. These days she saves the drama for her books. Jen is also the author of the YA travel romances Map to the Stars, Wanderlost, and Changes in Latitudes. You can learn more about her at www.jenmalonewrites.com.
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Books by Jen Malone
Map to the Stars
Wanderlost
Changes in Latitudes
The Arrival of Someday
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Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE ARRIVAL OF SOMEDAY. Copyright © 2019 by Jen Malone. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
Boot illustration © 2019 by Sophia Drevenstam
Lettering & floral illustrations © 2019 by Molly Jacques
Cover design by Jessie Gang
* * *
Names: Malone, Jen, author.
Title: The arrival of someday / Jen Malone.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : HarperTeen: an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2019] | Summary: After the liver disease she was born with flares up unexpectedly, roller derby star Amelia, eighteen, must come to terms with the brevity of life while hoping for an organ transplant.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018034258 | ISBN 9780062795380 (hardback)
Subjects: | CYAC: Sick—Fiction. | Medical care—Fiction. | Transplantation of organs, tissues, etc.—Fiction. | Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction. | Roller derby—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.M29642 Arr 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018034258
* * *
Digital Edition JULY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-279540-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279538-0
1920212223PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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