My heart races as I write those eight words.
I think about ripping up the paper
and rewriting something less risky,
but don’t.
I take a deep breath,
take his note,
and he takes mine.
After hanging out for a little while,
I head home.
Partly because I don’t know anyone there
besides Ethan and Lou.
But mostly because I’m dying to read the note.
I can feel it in my back pocket.
It is an itch on my skin
that I have to scratch.
The farther I walk from Ethan’s house,
the more the itch begins to burn.
I make it three blocks before I stop
and take the note out of my pocket.
As I unfold it, my heart pounds.
I’m excited to see what it says.
I hope that it’s about me,
but I’m scared
that it will be something dumb, like
I wish for world peace,
and I will be humiliated.
And then the note is open
and I am reading it
and it says: To kiss you.
And before I realize it,
I am running.
Running
the three blocks back to Ethan’s house,
and then I am through his front door,
scanning the faces, looking for him.
And then I am out the back door,
and on the back deck.
I see Lou and ask if he’s seen Ethan.
He says he saw him in the backyard.
And then I am down the stairs,
and searching for Ethan’s face again.
He doesn’t see me coming at first,
but when he does, he looks confused.
In one quick motion,
I put my hand on his chest,
push him into the shadows under the deck,
and then I am kissing him.
And it is amazing.
Just the right mix
of hard and soft.
After a little while,
I can feel him smiling,
and I pull back.
“You cheated,” he says.
“You didn’t wait until you got home.”
“You didn’t look?”
“No. Should I look now?”
“Yes.”
He reads the note, smiles,
then puts one hand on the side of my face,
the other on my neck,
and kisses me.
It is warm
and it is real.
The death book wants me
to write a letter to Brian in heaven.
Dear Brian,
The last few months
have been a roller coaster.
Meeting you
and starting to get to know you
was really exciting.
But there were limits
on how close you let me get.
And I guess I did a bit of the same.
When we were together,
I was willing to take whatever you gave.
And after you died
I was able to see
how little that was.
I deserved
and still deserve
more.
I’m not sorry or regretful
about us.
There were good times.
I learned things about myself.
And it also made me see that memories—
real or imagined—
can’t make me whole.
I’ll never know
why you were the way you were.
I’ll never know if it was because of your dad.
Or if it was because you didn’t
like me enough.
But I’m going to have to learn
to be okay with not knowing.
Brian, I want you to be at peace
and I want that for myself too.
And I don’t think I’ll get that
if I keep visiting you like I have been.
It keeps me from growing.
So I’m writing to you
to tell you that I’m not
going to come around for a while.
I’ll still think of you.
You’ll still be the first guy
I ever really cared about.
But I’ve got to let you go.
Now what?
It’s not like I can look up
the address for heaven in the White Pages
and put a stamp on this
and drop it in the mail.
I know this letter was for me.
But I still want to do something with it.
The death book suggests
that I fold it into a paper airplane
or put it in a bottle and send it out to sea.
But I have another idea.
It feels a little ridiculous
to be standing at Brian’s grave
when I just wrote that I wouldn’t
be coming here anymore.
It feels very ridiculous
to be standing at Brian’s grave
and holding a soup spoon.
But leaving the letter here,
in the ground above Brian,
seems like the right place.
The dirt is still a bit uneven,
but now there are lots of wisps of grass
sprouting up from it.
I crouch down and lean forward
as if I am about to whisper Brian a secret,
and begin to dig.
After about ten scoops,
I roll the letter up
and drop it into the hole.
I fill the hole back in,
stand up, step back,
and walk away.
I had to be ready.
I wasn’t.
I had to want my life back.
I didn’t.
But I do now.
I can’t flip a switch
and make things go back to normal.
But I can try.
I need to remind myself
to make phone calls,
to seek out my friends.
So after staring at my contacts list,
I finally hit SEND.
“Hey, Maris. What’s up?” I ask.
“Hi! I’m racing to get to yoga.”
“Oh, okay. Well, we can—”
“Do you want to come?”
My instinct is to say no.
Or to lie and say I have plans
so I can spend the afternoon in bed.
But I fight it.
“Cool. Pick you up in five.”
It’s been a while since I’ve done yoga.
At first everything hurts,
is stiff,
and all the talk
about heart centers,
energy, and breath
seems so strange—
not at all where my thoughts have been.
During tree pose,
I try to clear my mind
and balance on one foot,
but I wobble, I tip.
The instructor says,
“Breathe easy. Maintain focus.”
But I can’t seem to do either—
especially since Marissa is watching me
out of the corner of her eye, grinning.
I don’t know how, but she manages
to maintain the pose perfectly,
even while she laughs at me.
This makes me laugh
and wobble even more.
When we go into pigeon pose
I feel a sharp pain in my thigh.
So, just like the instructor said,
I stop and go into child’s pose.
I fold over, my chest on my thighs,
my arms at my sides,
&nb
sp; and feel the weight
of my body
sinking into the floor.
And just breathe
breathe
breathe.
Acknowledgments
I am so grateful to my mother, father, and extended
family (the Bennetts, Dosiks, and Greenes) for their support
and encouragement; my editor, David Levithan, and the
other geniuses at Scholastic for their enthusiasm; my agent,
the illustrious Barry Goldblatt; Judy Goldschmidt, for
brainstorming with me; and finally, Dr. Stefania Giobbe
for her COD expertise.
Special shout-outs to Jessica Schutz, for being a super sister
and for helping me work out the kinks; Annica Lydenberg
for being my first and favorite reader; and Amy Wilson,
Emily Dauber, Emily Haisley, Emily Klein, Lauren Cecil,
and Nicole Duncan for their unwavering friendship.
And finally, to my Penguin posse: I never take for
granted that I get to spend five days a week with you.
You are the kindest, funniest, most creative bunch
of people I have ever met.
The “death book” is based, in part, on two fantastic books:
I Will Remember You by Laura Dower and Look at the Sky:
Death in Cultures Around the World by Shawn Haley.
About the Author
SAMANTHA SCHUTZ is the author of the acclaimed memoir I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, which was a New York Public Library Best Book for Teens and a Voices of Youth Advocates Poetry Pick. You Are Not Here is her first novel. Samantha lives and works in New York City as a children’s book editor. For more about her, please visit www.samanthaschutz.net.
GO THERE.
OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE FROM
Kendra
Coe Booth
Tyrell
Coe Booth
Being
Kevin Brooks
Black Rabbit Summer
Kevin Brooks
Candy
Kevin Brooks
Kissing the Rain
Kevin Brooks
Lucas
Kevin Brooks
Martyn Pig
Kevin Brooks
The Road of the Dead
Kevin Brooks
Ordinary Ghosts
Eireann Corrigan
Splintering
You Remind Me of You
Eireann Corrigan
Johnny Hazzard
Eddie de Oliveira
Lucky
Eddie de Oliveira
Hail Caesar
Thu-Huong Ha
Born Confused
Tanuja Desai Hidier
Dirty Liar
Brian James
Perfect World
Brian James
Pure Sunshine
Brian James
Thief
Brian James
Tomorrow, Maybe
Brian James
The Dating Diaries
Kristen Kemp
I Will Survive
Kristen Kemp
Beast
Ally Kennen
Heavy Metal and You
Christopher Krovatin
Magic City
Drew Lerman
Cut
Patricia McCormick
Talking in the Dark
Billy Merrell
Losers
Matthue Roth
Never Mind the Goldbergs
Matthue Roth
I Don’t Want to Be Crazy
Samantha Schutz
A Little Friendly Advice
Siobhan Vivian
Not That Kind of Girl
Siobhan Vivian
Same Difference
Siobhan Vivian
Learning the Game
Kevin Waltman
Nowhere Fast
Kevin Waltman
Crashing
Chris Wooding
Kerosene
Chris Wooding
Fighting Ruben Wolfe
Markus Zusak
Getting the Girl
Markus Zusak
You Are Here, This Is Now
Edited by David Levithan
Where We Are, What We See
Edited by David Levithan
We Are Quiet, We Are Loud
Edited by David Levithan
This Is PUSH
Edited by David Levithan
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Samantha Schutz
Cover photo © Oscar Gutierrez/iStockphoto
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
All rights reserved. Published by PUSH, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
First edition, October 2010
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
E-ISBN 978-0-545-32881-4