by Gae Polisner
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Gae Polisner and Nora Raleigh Baskin
Cover art copyright © 2020 by Phil Pascuzzo
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780593119617 (trade) — ISBN 9780593119624 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780593119631
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
To all the Kings and Queens of Summer Birthdays, holders of hearts, and readers in search of a story full of love, friendship, and hope
Once upon a time, my birthday was fun.
Emphasis on once.
Judging by the sun, I’d guess it’s probably not that early. I can hear Isabel and Davy giggling outside my door, waiting for me to wake up. They’re more excited about my birthday than I am. I have dreaded my birthday for 364 days, and now it’s here.
Yippee.
I’m thirteen.
“Okay, okay,” I call out. “You can come in.”
It doesn’t take but half a second for my bedroom door to fling open and two little bodies to fly through the air and land on my bed.
“Happy birthday, Jolie,” Isabel sings. “Davy says happy birthday, too.”
My little brother doesn’t say much. He’s four and a half, and he should be talking by now. Mom worries. It’s not like I think he has a delay or anything; it’s more like he’s hiding something. I guess everyone has their secrets.
I know I do.
I still talk to you.
That’s my secret.
“I’m still sleeping, you guys,” I say. I pull the covers over my head, but I can hear the anticipation in their rapid breathing and the squeaky mouse sounds that Isabel makes when she’s happy-nervous. I swear I can even hear Davy tightening his belly muscles in preparation for some major tickling.
And for a moment I forget what day this is. I forget how hard this last year has been. This entire last year I dragged myself up and over whatever it was I had to do. The pain got smaller, but the grief did not.
From under my blankets I start counting, very slowly. It’s the slow counting that gets them every time. “One. Two. Three.” I can feel two trembling lumps, bony knees and skinny elbows, trying to hold me down.
“Four. Five…I hope you don’t say the magic word,” I call out.
Whatever word comes out of either of their mouths, that will be the magic word. All I have to do is wait. And count. They can’t help themselves. One of them will say something.
“Six. Seven,” I go on.
Isabel tries to clamp her hand over her mouth. I can hear her muffled giggles. We all know she’s going to be the one to blurt something out. It’s always Isabel.
“Eight. Nine.”
“Nooo!” she screams.
“That’s it!” I yank the covers off my head, and the static electricity makes my hair stick all over my face. I can’t see, but I manage to grab hold of my little sister and start tickling her mercilessly.
“That’s the magic word,” I roar. “The magic word is no. And you said it.”
Davy tries to slide away. He makes a half-hearted run for the door, but I reach out and capture him, too. Now I’ve got them both. We are all screams, shouts, and laughing, a tugging, twisting, twelve-limbed octopus creature. Eventually, all the covers slip off the bed like a waterfall, and we end up on the floor in a big pile of arms and legs, and blankets, sheets, and pillows.
And then, just before my mom walks in to see what all the commotion is, with a big smile on her face, and before my older sister, Natalia, steps up behind her and says, “Happy birthday,” for a split second, I completely forget what day it is.
I forget that a year ago today is the day after the last day I talked to my best friend, Lukas, for the last time.
And sometimes, in rare happy moments like this one, I can even forget that there, in my desk, in the bottom drawer, is the envelope you left for me, the first clue, on my birthday one year ago today.
“You’re not giving her that, are you?”
Justin stands at my door, nodding at the small red heart necklace I bought for Joy, which I’m about to slip in its box and wrap in red construction paper. The white envelope, full of six clues, harder this year than any year before, sits on my desk, waiting. Only the first clue will stay in there, get sealed up and slid under her front door. The other five I’ll hide in their places around town.
As for the necklace, I’m not sure where I’ll leave that. Somewhere near where the last clue leads her back to.
“Well, are you?” Justin moves into the room, stands behind me, mouth-breathing.
“I might,” I say, not turning to look at him. “What of it?”
“Nothing. Just wondering.”
No, he isn’t. “Well, leave me alone, then,” I say.
I want him to leave because there’s also a note I wrote to her, up on my desk. I’ll never hear the end of it if he reads that. But just because Justin thinks he has to act like a jerk to everyone now that he’s almost done with high school doesn’t mean I have to.
I can tell Joy how I feel, right?
Justin reaches his flip-flopped foot out and touches the pendant with the toe. He knows it’s a gift for Joy, even though he doesn’t pay too much attention to me or any of the stuff I do anymore, because anyone who knows us knows her birthday is two days before mine. And that we always celebrate them
together.
And, yeah, we always do a scavenger hunt, too.
The hunts used to be simple. Just a few easy clues placed all in one area, and some homemade kid present we’d make for one another and stand clutching like a goofy game-show person at the end: a paper-clip bracelet, a rock painted like a polar bear, a Shrinky Dinks key chain, something like that.
But that was before middle school, before I got the dog-walking job and Joy turned eleven and could take that CPR course, which made it so she can babysit the Rogers twins boys for seven dollars an hour, but only on weekend afternoons. So now, for our twelfth birthdays, we agreed to get each other real gifts.
“Just trying to save you the humiliation, bro,” Justin says. He leans down to pick up the pendant and turns it by its chain, making me relieved I didn’t ask the lady to engrave it.
He tosses it into the air and catches it.
I’m not worried about him breaking it or anything. He can be a jerk, but he still takes care of me. It’s his job, without Dad around. He will give me plenty of crap, though, so I take care not to turn and let my eyes go to where the note is. If I do that, I’m done for.
He puts the pendant back down on the floor next to me. “It’s nice,” he says. “But you should trust me on this. Nothing ruins a friendship like declaring your undying love.”
“I’m not declaring my love, moron,” I say. But my ears burn red and my cheeks set on fire. So what if I am?
“She likes hearts, is all,” I add, trying to convince him and me it means nothing. “I saw this at the mall, so I bought it for her. No big deal.”
“Right,” Justin says. “Forget it. I’m just giving you crap, bro. It’s okay. Use your own judgment.” He squeezes my shoulder. “You two are tight, so you know her better than I do. Just don’t get burned, that’s all.” I nod, because maybe he really is trying to protect me. “Anyway, I’m heading to Chance’s. We’re gonna go take the Angler out to the Point. Mom won’t be home until late, so if I’m not back by dinner, there’s stuff in the freezer. Microwave something. She’s got a double shift at the Dolphin.”
I nod again.
The Dolphin is where Mom works, a diner with a bar in it, so it stays open till midnight on the weekends. The Angler is the inflatable fishing boat with the trolling motor that Rand left behind when Mom booted him out last November, once and for all. It’s pretty much the only good thing that came from his living here. Everything else was just sad.
Don’t get me wrong, though: the Angler wasn’t a gift or anything; Rand just couldn’t fit it on his Harley when he left, and he didn’t have his truck anymore because he totaled it, drunk driving. He says he wasn’t drunk, but the cop said he was, and that was the last straw. Luckily, no one was hurt, not even him, just the truck and the side of a dumpster on Route 35 and the lamppost that used to be right next to it. Anyway, Mom kicked him out after that, so who needs to think about him now?
“You listening, Lukas? Double at the Dolphin. Late.”
I nod again. “Yeah, I heard you.”
If you live here long enough, you learn everything in this town is called something Dolphin or Seaside something, even our crappy apartments. The Port Bennington Dolphin Garden Apartments, to be exact, not that dolphins have gardens, so why bother? And not that there’s really any garden here, unless you count the small strip of grass with a fence around it, and a few benches and a set of swings that everyone calls a playground. The space that basically separates our building from the train station and tracks.
I’m not complaining. The Port Bennington Dolphin Garden Apartments are fine, if not as nice as our house in the Estates, where we used to live, not that I can remember it so much, but Justin is always saying so.
“Okay,” I say, to make sure he knows he’s good to leave, since he’s still standing there, even as I’m also wondering if he’s supposed to be home later, to keep an eye on me. Not that I need him to, but sometimes, when Mom is out late, she likes him to be here with me, even when Rand was still here. If he’s not back, I won’t rat him out, but it does cross my mind to make him think I might, because then maybe he’d take me with him to the Point. The Point and the lighthouse at Execution Rocks are the two coolest places on earth, even if I haven’t actually been out to the lighthouse yet. Who doesn’t love a place called Execution Rocks? With or without Justin, I’m going to go one day really soon.
“Have a good time” is all I say.
When I’m sure Justin is gone, I wrap the pendant, carry it to my desk, and reread the note. I decide to add something else, something Justin made me think of. So I rip that one up and start again, writing the whole thing over with new stuff. I reread it, weird nerves squeezing my chest, but the stuff I added makes it better.
When I have it all wrapped and I’m ready to go, I glance back at it all. I’m still not sure but I have a whole day to make up my mind.
I never had the chance to open Lukas’s envelope, the first clue, which would have led me to the first stop on my Birthday Scavenger Hunt. I never had the chance, and then when I did—days later, after things calmed down, after the police came to our door, after the funeral, after everyone had come and gone, family, friends and strangers, teachers and kids—I didn’t want to anymore. I put it away in my desk, and I never looked at it again.
“You’re not eating,” my mom says. She pushes my bowl of milky, sweet rice cereal, topped with fresh strawberries, closer, but I’m not hungry.
“I will, Mom.” I look up across the table and smile. “Thanks.”
I’ve learned to smile, because if I don’t, everyone gets all worried. For a while, my mom and dad wanted me to see a therapist, someone aside from the lady doctor who came to our school. But Lukas Brunetti is my friend, my best friend, and I didn’t need my own special doctor to tell me that.
I still can’t talk about Lukas in the past tense. I just can’t.
I take a big spoonful of my birthday breakfast as Isabel and Davy come clomping down the hall. From the sound of their footsteps, I can tell they are carrying something big. Usually I know what present my family has gotten me before I open it; usually because it’s something I asked for or because Isabel can’t keep a secret.
But this year I haven’t asked for anything, so I have no idea what my little brother and sister are lugging into the kitchen. Whatever it is, my dad is right behind them.
“Surprise!” he calls out.
We are all crowded around our kitchen table, but I am the only one still sitting down. Natalia came running in from the bathroom, her wet hair half up in a towel twisted like a turban, shouting, “Wait, wait for me. Don’t start singing yet.”
Isabel gives the present one last shove along the floor, and she tells me, “Open it, Jolie.” Davy stands next to her, with his arms stiffly at his sides, because he is trying so hard not to tear into the wrapping himself. Lukas used to think that was so funny.
Then, even though I don’t want my brain to do it, there is a flash of a memory from when we were in school. I am eight years old, and so proud and excited, standing in front of the whole class. I can smell the confection, the sugar, the homemade sweetness, still softly rising into the air.
Now there is something telling me that if I don’t remember this, it will all float away. If I don’t tell the stories—of cupcakes and scavenger hunts and holes in the sand—they will be lost forever.
I must have that sad, faraway look on my face, because Isabel is stamping her feet, and Davy’s baby morning breath is warming the back of my neck, and Natalia is looking at me, with concern, from across the table. My mom puts her hands on my shoulders like she needs to hold me up, and my dad lifts the box and puts it on the table in front of me.
“Happy birthday, my sweetheart,” he says.
“What is it?” I slide my fingers under the crinkly paper, and I am smiling. I am excited. The first bit of writi
ng from the cardboard box underneath appears: ELECTRIC.
“What could it be?” I ask. My hands are moving faster to keep up with my heart beating.
But Isabel can’t wait one more second. She dives in, pulls off the last, long sheet of wrapping paper.
“It’s a…” She stops. “What is it?”
It’s a guitar.
It’s an electric guitar, and it’s real. According to the writing on the box, it comes with its own case, plugs, wires, and a small amplifier. I draw in my breath. “Oh, I love it,” I whisper.
“You’ll be a real kickass now,” Natalia says. Our mom looks, but she doesn’t reprimand my sister for her language.
My dad is already cleaning up the wrapping paper. “You’ll have to take lessons,” he says. “But now you can play and sing along with yourself.”
I want to sing. I do. I used to sing a lot. All the time.
“They told us at the music store that it’s actually easier to play an electric guitar,” my mom is explaining. “Something about the weight of the strings. But if you want, we can return it and get the other kind. Whatever you want.”
I take it out of the box, and it’s resting in my hands like it belongs there. It’s red and shiny and skinny and totally awesome. Davy reaches up and plucks one of the strings. It makes a muted, whiny sound, not much like music.
“You’re a natural, Davy,” I tell him. He looks at me and grins. He might not talk a lot, but he’s got a great sense of humor.
More presents.
Natalia got me an Ariana Grande easy-chord songbook. We both love Ariana. Isabel hands me a little box of psychedelic guitar picks. And everyone has a handmade birthday card for me, and suddenly it all becomes too much, too much for one person.
