David Levithan - 19 Love Songs

Published in the United States in 2020

by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2020

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited,

2 Minster Court, 10th floor, London EC3R 7BB

Text copyright © 2020 David Levithan

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2020

ISBN 978 1 4052 98056

eISBN 978 1 4052 98063

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

To Mayling and Lynda, there at the start

and

To my parents, there long before the start

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Published in the United States in 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited, 2 Minster Court, 10th floor, London EC3R 7BB Text copyright © 2020 David Levithan The moral rights of the author have been asserted First e-book edition 2020 ISBN 978 1 4052 98056 eISBN 978 1 4052 98063 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

Dedication To Mayling and Lynda, there at the start and To my parents, there long before the start

Track One: Quiz Bowl Antichrist

Track Two: Day 2934 (An Every Day Story)

Track Three: The Good Girls

Track Four: The Quarterback and the Cheerleader (A Boy Meets Boy Story)

Track Five: The Mulberry Branch

Track Six: Your Temporary Santa

Track Seven: Storytime

Track Eight: A Better Writer

Track Nine: 8-Song Memoir

Track Ten: Snow Day (A Two Boys Kissing Story)

Track Eleven: The Woods

Track Twelve: A Brief History of First Kisses (Illustrated by Nick Eliopulos)

Track Thirteen: As the Philadelphia Queer Youth Choir Sings Katy Perry’s “Firework” . . .

Track Fourteen: The Vulnerable Hours

Track Fifteen: Twelve Months

Track Sixteen: The Hold

Track Seventeen: How My Parents Met

Track Eighteen: We

Track Nineteen: Give Them Words

Liner Notes

Back series promotional

I am haunted at times by Sung Kim’s varsity jacket.

He had to lobby hard to get it. Nobody denied that he had talent—in fact, he was the star of our team. But for a member of our team to get a jacket was unprecedented. Our coach backed him completely, while the other coaches in the school nearly choked on their whistles when they first heard the plan. The principal had to be called in, and it wasn’t until our team made Nationals that Sung’s request was finally heeded. Four weeks before we left for Indianapolis, he became the first person in our school’s history to have a varsity jacket for quiz bowl.

I, for one, was mortified.

This mortification was a complete betrayal of our team, but if anyone was going to betray the quiz bowl team from the inside, it was going to be me. I was the alternate.

I had been drafted by the coach, who also happened to be my physics teacher, because while the five other members of the team could tell you the square root of the circumference of Saturn’s orbit around the sun in the year 2033, not a single one of them could tell you how many Brontë sisters there’d been. In fact, the only British writer they seemed familiar with was Monty Python—and there weren’t many quiz bowl questions about Monty Python. There was a gaping hole in their knowledge, and I was the best lit-boy plug the school had to offer. While I hadn’t read that many of the classics, I was extraordinarily aware of them. I was a walking CliffsNotes version of the CliffsNotes versions; even if I’d never touched Remembrance of Things Past or Cry, the Beloved Country or Middlemarch , I knew what they were about and who had written them. I could only name about ten elements on the periodic table, but that hardly mattered—my teammates had the whole thing memorized. They told jokes where “her neutrino!” was the punch line.

Sung was our fearless leader—fearless, that is, within the context of our practices and competitions. Put him back into the general population and he became just another math geek, too bland to be teased, too awkward to be resented. As soon as he got the varsity jacket, there was little question that it would never leave his back. All the varsity jackets in our school looked the same on the fronts—burgundy body, white sleeves, white R . But the backs were different—a picture of two guys wrestling for the wrestlers, a football for the football players, a breaststroker for the swimmers. For quiz bowl, they initially chose a faceless white kid at a podium, probably a leftover design from another school’s speech and debate team. It looked as if the symbol from the men’s room door was giving an inaugural address. Sung didn’t feel this conveyed the team aspect of quiz bowl, so he made them add four other faceless white kids at podiums. I was, presumably, one of those five. Because even though I was an alternate, they always rotated me in.

I had agreed to join the quiz bowl team for four reasons:

(1) I needed it for my college applications.

(2) I needed a good grade in Mr. Phillips’s physics class for my college applications, and I wasn’t going to get it from ordinary studying.

(3) I derived a perverse pleasure from being the only person in a competitive situation who knew that Jane Eyre was a character while Jane Austen was a writer.

(4) I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom.

An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell you’re doing, even if the other person isn’t doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because it’s a crush that you haven’t even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there—you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone else’s. But you don’t know why. You don’t know that you’re doing it. You’d follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.