NIC STONE is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of William C. Morris Award finalist Dear Martin, Dear Justyce, Odd One Out, Jackpot, Clean Getaway, and the Shuri novel series with Marvel Comics.
ANGIE THOMAS’s award-winning, acclaimed debut novel, The Hate U Give, is a #1 New York Times bestseller and major motion picture from Fox 2000. She is also the author of On the Come Up and Concrete Rose.
ASHLEY WOODFOLK worked in children’s book publishing before becoming an author full-time. Her novels include the highly acclaimed The Beauty That Remains and When You Were Everything.
NICOLA YOON is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Instructions for Dancing; Everything, Everything; and The Sun Is Also a Star. She is a National Book Award finalist, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book recipient, and a Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner. Two of her novels have been made into major motion pictures. She’s also copublisher of Joy Revolution, a Penguin Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color.
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Books by the Authors
Blackout
Books by Tiffany D. Jackson
Allegedly
Monday’s Not Coming
Let Me Hear a Rhyme
Grown
White Smoke
Books by Angie Thomas
The Hate U Give
On the Come Up
Concrete Rose
Copyright
Quill Tree Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
BLACKOUT. Blackout copyright © 2021 by Dhonielle Clayton. “The Long Walk” copyright © 2021 by Tiffany D. Jackson. “Mask Off” copyright © 2021 by Nic Stone. “Made to Fit” copyright © 2021 by Ashley Woodfolk. “All the Great Love Stories . . . and Dust” copyright © 2021 by Dhonielle Clayton. “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” copyright © 2021 by Angela Thomas. “Seymour and Grace” copyright © 2021 by Nicola Yoon. 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.
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Cover art and design by Erin Fitzsimmons
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935320
Digital Edition MAY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-308811-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-308809-2
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FIRST EDITION
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1The truth: I’ve never had a love story. Only 1 in 562 people find love. Supposedly. I read that yesterday and added it to my scrapbook on relationships. I cut out the meet-cute and wedding stories they print in the newspaper. But I think finding love is as rare as finding identical snowflakes.
2The truth: I have something to tell you. And I don’t know how, so I’ve been lying. When Dad does his whole therapy talk, he says people lie for three reasons: (1) Because they fear the negative consequences of telling the truth, (2) Because they want other people to believe something about them that isn’t true, and (3) Because they want to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. But what happens when those feelings are yours?
3The truth: But will you? Or will you find another girl who fills the space I leave behind? Your memory is so bad. Not episodic like mine. Will you remember everything the way I do? Will you replay it like I do? What happens when we both leave?
4The truth: I don’t know how I feel anymore. I fill my scrapbooks and bullet journals with my feelings: magazine clippings of confusing words, ink stamps, thick paint swirled around the pages. It all mirrors my mind and its ramblings. Papa says writers need to unlock their feelings in order to tell the truth on the page. But what happens when it’s not the page you’re pouring your heart out to, when you have to say the words out loud?
5The truth: I don’t know if I can say the words out loud just yet. Even though our family rule is: There are no mind readers in the Beauvais-Simmons house. So words and feelings tumble out over cornbread and tchaka. But I don’t know how to do that now.
6The truth: Because I don’t know how to let myself. It wasn’t always this way. How do you like someone so easily? Let your hard parts soften up and hope they won’t be bruised? I’ve wondered what this type of real love feels like. Another person’s hand entwined with yours. Another person’s mouth pressed to yours. Another person who wants to be all tangled up with you.
7The truth: I just wanted us to have our adventures together away from anyone we might run into. The people we are in Brooklyn aren’t the same people we are in Manhattan or the Bronx or Queens. Do you think you can be a totally different person in a different place? Your insides and outsides transforming into another you?
8The truth: Except for what could come after I tell you this thing. I have a closet full of secret fears. If you go into it and push the clothes apart, there’s a little hidden door into a little hidden room. I never showed you this, despite the thousands of times you’ve been in my house. I scrapbook all the things I don’t want the light from my bedroom window to find in there. All the feelings I haven’t made sense of.
9The truth: I’d die to get a letter like this from you. Because my brain would imprint it. Every single word, the way the cursive e’s might curl or the l’s might loop, would be singed into my memory. I would be able to recite it forever.
10The truth: Easy to love. Papa believes people come in two emotional shapes—easy and hard. That there are those who move like water over rocks, cresting, sliding, veering left and right. They don’t fight the current. Then there are those who move like mud, full of sediment and rocks and sometimes bugs, and the mud needs added water to unstick itself before moving.
I’m mud.
11The truth: I can’t concentrate when kissed. My brain travels to other moments. Ones with him.
12The hard truth: Because I’ve been waiting . . .
13The truth: I think you don’t see me.
14The truth: Does he want to know me forever?
15The truth: Some girls want him to spend money on them. They see it as a way to have him and prove his love for them. But he would give me the last dollar he had and I still wouldn’t want it.
16The truth: Everything feels different now. Even the texture of your familiar hands.
17The truth: Everything we do together is a memory I never want to forget. Each joke, each touch, each experience. My notebooks spill over. Too big to hold all that is him . . . all that is me . . . all that is us together.
18This will make for a really good story.