First Comes Love (22 page)

She sets the bag down on the ground and folds her fingers over each other as if she’s about to pray, but I think she’s just nervous.

I make Dylan nervous? I need to mark this day down on a calendar, because it’s a first for me.

“I’m sorry I tried to stay away,” she says. “At first I thought it would be easier for me, which it wasn’t, and then I thought it would be easier for you, but I didn’t get that impression during our little phone chat.” She pauses and her eyes focus on mine. “I didn’t call you last month to break up. I really want you in my life, Gray,” she says.

I study her and think maybe I should still be bitter, but I can’t be angry at Dylan. It would be such a waste of time. I’d much rather be kissing her. And she’s here. She’s making an effort. That’s all the apology I need.

I tell her I’m sorry I hung up on her.

“All I wanted to do was avoid hurting you. That’s it. I hated the idea of hurting you. And that’s exactly what I did,” she says.

I take a step toward her.

“I want to try to make this work,” she says. “I don’t want to have any regrets. And I’d regret not having you in my life.”

My eyes rest on hers and I smile. My heart’s hammer- ing in my chest as if it’s trying to push me to take another step forward.

“Anyway, you did invite me to come down here for the holidays. Does that offer still stand?”

I nod slowly. “I missed you,” I say. “I thought about you every day. I just didn’t collect things to prove it.”

“Yeah,” she says, and she scratches her chin while she con templates this. She tells me
miss
is such a vague word. It doesn’t come close to defining how it really feels to crave someone.

“I guess
longing
might be better, or maybe
yearning,
but I hate that word. It sounds so whiny,” she says. “I mean, who actually says, ‘I
yearned
for you…’”

I listen to her ramble, something I missed, because her mind is like a kaleidoscope, always changing and rotating and impossible to predict. And I could rattle off how much I love her and try to express all the feelings that are rolling through my head, but I just grab her and pull her against me and kiss her like I’ve been dreaming about kissing her for the last three months.

I show her sometimes words can never be strong enough.

She kisses me back, and it starts out sweet and then turns into something else. She folds her arms around my neck. I pull her tight against me, and I can feel her heart pounding with mine, and everything else melts away.

I know I’ll never be able to control what happens in my life or what people will slip in and out of it, the way time slips by and you can’t get it back.

And I don’t know for sure where I’m going to end up.

But I know who I love. And I’m figuring out that might be enough to live for.

This book started as a creative writing exercise I assigned to myself. For a Challenge, I decided to write a love story from the male perspective. What began as a couple of chapters quickly spilled out into an entire novel. I simply fell in love with my characters. I fell in love with their story.

I used to live in Phoenix, and while I was there I took classes at Mesa Community College, hiked many desert trails, learned how to play the guitar, took photographs with my old manual camera, and collected memories in my journal. There is no horizon as spellbinding as a desert sunset. It is a setting I couldn’t wait to capture in a novel.

Although Arizona was a fascinating state to explore, with the most unique topography I’ve ever seen, I was miserable living in Phoenix. I hardly made any friends, so it became a long year of solitude and contemplation. It was easy to write Gray’s character, because in many ways I was brooding and annoyed, just the way he started out. I couldn’t stand the showy scene in Phoenix or the people or the constant heat. But in a lot of ways I was like Dylan, trying to soak up every experience and never waste a single moment. Phoenix is just one of the many pit stops I took while I was living like a vagabond for about four years. In a lot of ways I was Dylan, always on the lookout for a Gray—someone to share my ridiculous adventures with—and in many ways I was Gray looking for a Dylan—someone refreshing to dig me out of the depressing state I was sinking into, dust me off, and make me laugh.

The other part of this story, Gray’s struggle to deal with his sister’s death, is inspired by an amazing friend I made in Oregon. Her brother and best friend had recently passed away when we met, and she was slowly attempting to pick herself up and move forward. Her way of grieving was to talk about her brother, and she kept his memory alive by sharing stories. I felt as if I knew him even though I never had the privilege of meeting him. I even spent a day with her honoring her brother (on the anniversary of his death). We wore his photograph around our necks, we looked at pictures while she told me stories, we listened to music he loved, and this experience inspired the scene that Gray and Dylan share together.

I owe so many of my stories to the places I travel and the brilliant, hilarious people I’m fortunate to meet. Some of the scenes in this book really happened. I ran down Mulholland Drive once, with one of my best friends, while cars careened past us. We sang Bob Dylan songs and raced all the way to Hollywood Boulevard. (I’ve also driven down Mulholland plenty of times, and I recommend it to running.) I’ve hiked all over Sedona (one of my favorite places in the world) and sat for hours in mediation spots. And if you ever want to take some stunning pictures of saguaro cactus, definitely check out Picacho Peak State Park, outside of Phoenix. I went there several times to take pictures by myself.

This book is half dream and half reality, half experiences I’ve had and half experiences I would love to have. I guess that’s why I love writing. I get to live out my dreams for a while.

While I wrote, I compiled playlists that helped me build Gray’s and Dylan’s characters. Just for fun, I’m also including one of the mixes Gray made for Dylan.

1. My Lie, The White Buffalo
   
2. This Is Such a Pity 
   Weezer
   
3. Mysterious Ways 
   U2
   
4. To Be Young 
   Ryan Adams
   
5. Joy Ride 
   The Killers
   
6. Nearly Beloved 
   The Wallflowers
   
7. I Want You 
   Bob Dylan
   
8. Rock and Roll 
   Eric Hutchinson
   
9. Just Like Heaven 
   The Cure
   
10. July, July 
    The Decemberists
    
11. Never Had Nobody Like You 
    M. Ward
    
12. Whatever You Like 
    T.I.
    
13. Tear It Off 
    Method Man and Redman
    
14. Fool in the Rain 
    Led Zeppelin
    
15. Hang Me Up to Dry 
    Cold War Kids
    
16. Elevation 
    U2
    

1. Kodachrome 
   Paul Simon
   
2. Optimistic Thoughts 
   Blues Traveler
   
3. I Don’t Know Why 
   Alison Krauss
   
4. When You Feel It 
   Brett Dennen
   
5. Five Years Time 
   Noah and the Whale
   
6. Sweetest Thing 
   U2
   
7. All Summer Long 
   Phoebe Kreutz
   
8. Rain King 
   Counting Crows
   
9. Rudie Can’t Fail 
   The Clash
   
10. The Underdog 
    Spoon
    
11. If You Want Sing Out, Sing Out 
    Cat Stevens
    
12. I Hear the Bells 
    Mike Doughty
    
13. The Littlest Birds 
    The Be Good Tanyas
    
14. Say Hey 
    Michael Franti
    
15. Live Your Life 
    T.I.
    
16. True or False 
    Bishop Allen
    

1. California 
   Joey Ryan
   
2. Fresh Feeling 
   The Eels
   
3. Lover 
   Devendra Banhart
   
4. Don’t Be Shy 
   Cat Stevens
   
5. The Book of Love 
   The Magnetic Fields
   
6. Yellow 
   Coldplay
   
7. Let’s Get It On 
   Jack Black
   
8. Romeo and Juliet 
   The Killers
   
9. It’s Love 
   Chris Knox
   
10. Crazy Love 
    Adam Sandler
    
11. I’ll Keep It with Mine 
    Bob Dylan
    
12. Burning Love 
    Elvis Presley
    
13. Hawkmoon 269  
    U2
    
14. Hallelujah 
    Jeff Buckley
    
15. Peaceful Easy Feeling 
    The Eagles
    

Thanks to Helen Breitwieser for being my agent, my sounding board, and sometimes my therapist. Thanks to Julia Richardson, my editor, for helping to shape this book into its best form. Thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for taking on this book and believing it was special. Thanks to Ryan (with whom I’ve actually run down Mulholland Drive) for making me fall in love with Bob Dylan—although my love will never surpass yours. Thanks to Gail, my grandmother, for always encouraging the wild and adventurous Dylan inside of me, and to my parents for all of their love and support. Thanks to the town of Sedona for, well, existing. Thanks to some of my hilarious, strong, and creative friends, such as Jill Weidenbaum, Karin Morris, Becky Bechtell, Marcia Doran, and Val Peck, who have inspired as well as participated in some of my greatest moments. Thanks to Mark Thompson, my guitar teacher in Phoenix. Thanks to my sister for your recommendations on my three greatest passions: books, movies, and music. Thanks to Kelley Croco for your feedback on my rewrites. Thanks to the Wisconsin Woodchucks for making me fall in love with baseball (and making my summer nights much more memorable), and, always, a huge thanks to Adam for being so consistently wonderful.

In the year 2060, the world is completely plugged in and tuned out…

But when Madeline meets Justin, he shows her there’s a different—
better—
way to live.

Keep reading for a sample chapter from

awaken

by Katie Kacvinsky

www.hmhbooks.com

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

My mom gave me an old leather-bound journal for my seventeenth birthday. At first the blank pages surprised me, as if the story inside was lost or had slipped out. She explained sometimes the story is supposed to be missing because it’s still waiting to be written. Leave it to my mom to give me something from the past to use in the future.

They don’t make paper books anymore
—
it’s illegal to chop down real trees. They still grow in some parts of the world, but I’ve never seen one. Most cities have switched to synthetic trees, and people prefer them to the living ones. Synthetic trees come shipped to your house in any size you want, so you don’t have to wait fifteen years for them to grow. Now you shop online and choose your desired size and height, and in days you have a full-grown tree in your yard, cemented into the ground and supported with steel beams anchored into the base. Instant. Simple. No fuss.

Synthetic trees never die. They don’t wither in the fall. You don’t have a mess of leaves and needles to sweep up. They’re fireproof They don’t cause allergies. And they’re always perfectly green (
constantlygreen.com
has the best synthetic tree selection, according to my mom). The

leaves can fade a little from the sun, but you just spray-paint them green again. During Halloween, people spray-paint the leaves on their trees yellow, orange, and red. It’s the colors leaves used to turn before they fell to the ground. My mom said she can remember seeing the fall colors when she was young. She said it was the most beautiful time of the year. It’s hard to imagine anything becoming beautiful as it dies. Then again, it’s hard to imagine much that Mom insists used to “be. ”

When trees were dying off in fires and overharvested, books were the first to go. These days books are downloaded digitally and you can order any book you want to be uploaded into your Bookbag in seconds, which I convert onto my Zipfeed. It reads the words out loud to me on my computer. Simple. Convenient. I know how to read, of course. We learn it in Digital School 2. I still read my chat messages on my phone. But it was proven that audio learning is a faster way to retain information, according to some Ph.D. researchers who studied rats in a cage. By observing rats they figured out the best way for humans to learn. Some politician thought this theory sounded glamorous, so they changed a law that changed the world. That’s why I listen to almost all of my books.

I didn’t escape the chore of using my eyes to read. Mom still enforces it. She saved all her old novels and stores them in these wooden cabinets with glass doors called bookshelves. Every year she hands down a few of her favorites to me. I have a collection slowly building in my bedroom. I have to admit, I like the look of them. I also like to escape inside their world, tucked behind their colorful spines. It forces me to fully invest my mind into what I’m doing, not just my ears or my eyes. I think barricading them behind glass is a little obsessive, but Mom says the paper in books will yellow if they’re exposed to air. Just like the leaves on the trees that couldn’t survive in this world. Hey, if you can’t acclimate, you disintegrate. I learned that in Digital School 3.