Field Notes on Love
Jennifer E. Smith
ALSO BY JENNIFER E. SMITH
Windfall
Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between
The Geography of You and Me
This Is What Happy Looks Like
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight
The Storm Makers
You Are Here
The Comeback Season
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Jennifer E. Smith Inc.
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Liz Casal
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Jennifer E., author.
Title: Field notes on love / Jennifer E. Smith.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: Two teens, Hugo and Mae, are strangers until they share a cross-country train trip that teaches them about love, each other, and the futures they can build for themselves.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018023440 (print) | LCCN 2018029206 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-399-55942-6 (el) | ISBN 978-0-399-55941-9 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-399-55943-3 (glb) | ISBN 978-1-9848-9594-3 (intl. tr. pbk.)
Subjects: | CYAC: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Railroad travel—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.S65141 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.S65141 Fie 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780399559426
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Jennifer E. Smith
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Hugo
Mae
Hugo
Mae
Hugo
Mae
Hugo
Mae
Hugo
Mae
Hugo
Mae
Hugo
Mae
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Mae
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Mae
Hugo
Mae
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Mae
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Jack, who has many adventures ahead of him
Mae wakes, as she does each morning, to the sound of a train.
Even before she opens her eyes, she can feel the low rumble of it straight through to her toes, but it’s the whistle that finally tears at the thin gauze of sleep. She turns over to peer through the blinds. Just beyond their backyard, a long chain of silver cars is streaking past.
Two weeks from now, she’ll be standing in the middle of Penn Station, waiting for a train not so different from this one. The minute she steps on board, she’ll no longer be a fixed point on the map, the way she’s been her whole life.
On the other side of the ocean, a boy named Hugo is holding the tickets that will carry them both across the country. He’s thinking of that old math problem, the one where two different trains leave from two different stations traveling at two different speeds.
The point was always to figure out where they’d meet.
But nobody ever explained what would happen once they did.
They both sit very still, three thousand miles between them. Hugo is staring at the word printed neatly across the bottom of the tickets: California. Mae is watching out her window as the train disappears. If you saw them, you might think they were waiting for something. But what they actually are—what they’ve each always been—is ready.
The shock of it takes a few minutes to absorb. During that time, Hugo sits with his head bent, his fingers laced behind his neck, trying to process the fact that Margaret Campbell—his girlfriend of nearly three years—is breaking up with him.
“You know I’ll always love you,” she says, then adds, “in a way.”
Hugo winces at this. But Margaret seems determined to forge ahead.
“The thing is,” she says, and he lifts his head, interested to find out what—precisely—it is, this thing that’s apparently happening. She gazes back at him with something like sympathy. “You can’t stay with someone only out of inertia, right?”
It’s clear the correct answer here is “Right.” But Hugo can’t bring himself to say it. He just continues to stare at her, wishing his brain weren’t quite so muddled.
“I know you must feel the same way,” she continues. “Things have been off between us for ages now. It’s obvious that it’s not working—”
“Is it?” Hugo asks, and Margaret gives him a weary look. But he’s not trying to be cheeky. It’s just that none of this seems particularly obvious to him, and his face prickles with warmth as he wonders how he managed to get it all so wrong.
“Hugo. Come on. It’s been hard enough when we’re right across the road from each other. We must be barking mad to think we can do this when I’m all the way in California and you’re—”
She stops abruptly, and they both blink at each other.
“Here,” he says eventually, his voice flat.
Margaret sighs. “See, that’s just it. Maybe if you’d stop acting like getting a scholarship to a perfectly good uni is the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone in the history of—”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m—”
“Hugo,” she says, interrupting him. “You’ve been in terrible form all summer. I’m not the only one who’s noticed. I realize this isn’t what you wanted, but at some point you just have to…well, get on with it, I suppose.”
He scratches at his knee, unable to look at her. She’s right, and they both know it, but the fact of this makes him want to crawl under the bed to avoid the rest of the conversation.
“Listen, I get it,” she says, playing with the end of her blond ponytail. “If things were different, this wouldn’t have been your first choice.”
This is only half-true. Hugo certainly wouldn’t have minded trying for Oxford or Cambridge or St. Andrews, all of which would’ve been options had his A levels been the only consideration. But the University of Surrey is highly regarded too. It’s more that he never had a choice in the matter, that his path was set out for him long ago, and something about that has always made h
im feel like an animal at the zoo, penned in and pacing and a bit claustrophobic.
“But if things were different,” Margaret continues, “you wouldn’t have been offered the scholarship at all.”
She says this as if it were nothing, an incidental detail, and not the very thing Hugo has been torturing himself over for years now. Because he didn’t get a scholarship to the University of Surrey for being a brilliant essayist (which he is) or a maths genius (which he’s not). He didn’t get it for his skills as a pianist (though he’s decent) or his ability on the football pitch (he’s completely rubbish). It’s not the result of any particular skill or talent or accomplishment.
No, Hugo got the scholarship—as did his five siblings—simply for being born.
The minute they arrived in the world—one after another, Hugo bringing up the rear—they were showered with gifts. The local market gave them a year’s supply of formula. The pharmacy sent a truckload of free nappies. The mayor came to visit with keys to the city: six of them, one for each of England’s fifth-ever set of sextuplets, affectionately dubbed “the Surrey Six.” And a wealthy donor presented their exhausted and deeply overwhelmed parents with scholarships to the local university for each of their half-dozen newborns.
The man—an eccentric billionaire who made his fortune through a chain of upscale coffee shops—had gotten his start at the University of Surrey, and was elated at the thought of the publicity that would one day be generated by having the sextuplets there. When he died a few years ago, he left the scholarship in the hands of the university council, and they’ve been equally enthusiastic, making all sorts of plans for their arrival.
It’s only Hugo who isn’t thrilled. He knows he’s a complete monster for being anything less than grateful. It’s just that he hates the thought of accepting something so big simply because of the unlikely circumstances of his birth. Especially when his whole life has been about that.
“Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” Margaret is saying. “About us. About why we’re—”
“Not an us anymore?”
She flinches. “I know I’ve been hard on you, but I don’t want you to think this is happening just because you’ve been moping all summer. Or because of the distance. It’s more that—well, I suppose it feels like it’s time, doesn’t it?”
Hugo scrubs at his eyes, still trying to absorb all this, and when he looks up again, Margaret’s face has softened. She moves over to sit beside him on the bed, and he automatically leans into her, their shoulders pressed together. They’re both quiet for a moment, and he tries to focus his thoughts, which are zipping around in his head. Somewhere inside him, buried so deep he’s never thought to examine it, is the knowledge that she’s right about them, and his heart sinks because he’s somehow the last to know everything, even his own feelings.
“What about the trip?” he asks, and she looks almost relieved, as though she’s been given permission to move on to the business end of things. Three years, Hugo thinks. Three whole years, and here they are, working out their future like a long-married couple debating the fine points of a divorce. Margaret picks at a loose thread on her jumper, which is gray with little foxes on it. Hugo realizes it’s the same one she wore on their third date, when they’d gone to the cinema and kissed for the first time during a fight scene.
It’s only now occurring to him that maybe that was a sign.
“I think you should still go,” she says, and he looks up in surprise. The whole thing had been her idea. Margaret thought a train trip would be a romantic way to see America, where she’d be spending the next four years. She was the one who found the promotion online and booked the tickets, surprising Hugo for his birthday a few months back. They were meant to go from New York to California, with a few stops in between. And then Hugo would drop her off at Stanford before returning to Surrey, the place where he’d lived his whole life and was apparently never leaving.
“Why me?” he asks, staring at her. “Why not you?”
“Well, you’re the one staying behind. So I figured it might be nice for you to…” She pauses when she notices his expression, and her pale skin flushes a deep pink. “Sorry. I’m mucking this up, aren’t I?”
“No,” he says, thinking of the plans they’d been making all summer, the photos of the train, sleek and silver, moving west across America. “It’s just—how could I go without you?”
“You’re a bit hopeless sometimes, it’s true,” she says with a smile, “but I think you could probably manage to get there in one piece.”
She reaches for her bag, which is slumped on the floor near his desk, and hands him a blue folder with the name of a travel company embossed across the front. When he takes it, their fingers brush, and suddenly his head is swimming with doubts. But then she leans forward to kiss him on the cheek before standing up, and something about the gesture—the sheer friendliness of it—reminds him of why this is happening and steadies him again.
“I hope you’ll still come see me,” she says. “When you get to California.”
“Sure,” he answers without really thinking about it, and the trip starts to rearrange itself in his head: instead of sitting beside Margaret, the two of them talking softly as the train rattles through the night, it’s only him now, inching his way across a strange country alone.
Alone, he thinks, closing his eyes.
Hugo can scarcely imagine what that feels like. He shares a bedroom with Alfie and a bathroom with George and Oscar too. At the kitchen table, he’s wedged between Poppy and Isla, and when they watch TV, he’s somehow always the last to dive for a sofa, which means he usually ends up on the floor with a cushion. On rare holidays, they all pile into a cottage in Devon that belongs to a friend of Mum’s, and the farthest he’s ever been from home—the only place he’s really been at all—was Paris for a school trip, which meant all his brothers and sisters were there, too, making the weekend brighter and funnier but also more crowded, the six of them laughing and tripping along the cobblestone streets, a built-in team, a six-piece band, an entire unit of their own.
Alone, he thinks again, and his chest feels light.
He stands up to fold Margaret into a hug, his throat thick. For a long time, they hold each other, neither quite ready to let go. Then, finally, he kisses her check and says, “I love you.” She leans back to look at him and he cracks a grin. “In a way.”
“Too soon,” she says, but she’s laughing too.
When she’s gone, he sits back down on his bed. There’s a dull pounding in his ears, but otherwise he feels oddly numb. An hour ago he had a girlfriend, and now he doesn’t. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
He flips open the blue folder. There’s a note inside that says Happy Birthday, Hugo! in Margaret’s neat handwriting. He moves it aside to look at the itinerary, thinking back on all their conversations about this trip. She teased him about his long legs, promising to book an aisle seat on the flight from London, his first one ever, and he rolled his eyes when she talked about going for tea at the Plaza. “We live in England,” he’d said. “We’re already drowning in tea.”
There were nights in Chicago and Denver, and also in San Francisco, where they’d planned to stay a couple of days before Margaret needed to head down to Stanford. It’s all a bit harder to picture now, and he shuffles through the pages, trying to imagine how different the trip will be.
This is when it dawns on him that every single sheet of paper has Margaret’s name on it. He looks a little closer. The train tickets, the hotels, even the general booking from the company—all of it has Margaret Campbell printed across the top.
He glances down to the bottom of the confirmation from their hotel in Denver to see the words spelled out in bold letters: nonrefundable and nontransferable.
Hugo almost laughs.
Happy birthday to me, he thinks, and his heart falls as he
realizes what this means. But just as he reaches for his mobile to call the tour company—to see if there might be any exceptions at all—the door to his room flies open and Alfie sticks his head in.
Among the six of them, there are two sets of identical twins: his sisters, Poppy and Isla, and then Hugo and Alfie, who are carbon copies of each other, right down to the flecks of green in their eyes. They have matching dimples and ears that stick out a bit, the same brown skin and black hair. At the moment, Hugo’s is longer than Alfie’s, which is cropped close to his head, but otherwise they’re almost impossible to tell apart. Except for their personalities.
“Hey, mate,” Alfie says, uncharacteristically reserved. He steps into the room and shuts the door. But instead of flopping onto his bed, he just stands there, scratching the back of his neck. “So, uh…”
“You ran into Margaret,” Hugo says with a sigh.
Alfie looks relieved. “Yeah. We did.”
“We?”
He opens the door to reveal the others out in the hall. All four of them. They file in a little sheepishly. “Sorry,” George mumbles, sinking onto the bed and giving Hugo an awkward pat on the back. George looks deeply solemn, but then he always looks solemn, as if being born first instilled in him a certain seriousness of character. “This is rubbish, isn’t it?”
“I can’t believe it,” says Isla, spinning the desk chair around and sitting backward in it, her chin resting on her forearms, her dark eyes fierce and protective. “How could she do that?”
