The Epic Story of Every Living Thing by Deb Caletti

Author:Deb Caletti [Caletti, Deb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

It’s late, but Harper can’t avoid it any longer. Telling her mother about Beau Zane is somehow proving her right. It’s confirming what she seemed to believe—that Melinda is both all-knowing and all Harper needs.

Her mom picks up on the first ring. “Well?”

“You’re up late.”

“How was it?”

“It was a lot of things. Weird, mostly. You wouldn’t have liked him.”

She’s silent.

“Kind of a beach bum surfer type, but old.”

“Are you coming home, then?”

“No, Mom! We just got here! We maybe want to stay the whole summer, no matter what happens with him. We’re supposed to have dinner at his house tomorrow.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Are you okay?”

“I guess so. Are you?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. Everyone’s so cool. It’s great.”

“I’m glad, honey. I am! Really. I’ve been so worried. This is a lot to handle. I just hope you have the support you need.”

When she says stuff like that, Harper starts to doubt she has the support she needs. She can suddenly feel like she’s falling without a net. But nope. There she is, just sitting firmly on the bed in Wyatt’s condo. “Yeah, I do.”

“Did you see your grades? Calculus?”

She totally forgot, honestly.

“Well, A minus. There’s always next year. You did your best.”

She did do her best. But why is You did your best so often an expression of failure? Of missing the mark? And it’s weird, how little she cares. You can care so much about something, be downright obsessed with it, and then, boom, nothing. How can she keep caring, caring, caring about getting into an impressive college? How can she keep up that intensity constantly, huh? And why? Is her one single future so important that she has to destroy herself for it? And calculus? Come on, people are dying in whatever place that earthquake was.

“Oh hey! I wanted to tell you, too. I saw Yanet at QFC today.”

Harper’s stomach drops. It seriously feels like an elevator with a cut cable. Oh God. Yanet and all her lovely warmth appears in Harper’s memory, bringing a hard pang of longing with it. Suddenly she misses Ezra so bad, it hurts. Sweet, wonderful Ezra, who used to love her before he found out who she really is. “What’d she say?”

“Oh, I didn’t talk to her. I just saw her. She had her hands full. Her baby was eating a cookie and waving it around. I’m sure she hadn’t even paid for it yet.”

“QFC…” She’s about to tell her mom that QFC gives those away to kids for free, so stop judging. Harper knows, because she made a few trips there with Ezra and Binx, but what does it matter. “So, you didn’t talk?”

“She just looked at me with sad eyes, like we shared a mutual grief.”

Harper feels awful. She can only imagine what her mother’s eyes said back. Harper misses all of them so much—Ezra and Yanet and Adam and Binx. Nudo, too. She misses the crumbs all over Binx’s chubby cheeks as he ate those cookies, and the way Ezra would wipe them away with his thumb.

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