Sarah Dessen: The Rest of the Story

First published in the United States of America by Balzer + Bray in 2019

Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Published simultaneously in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is:

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Sarah Dessen 2019

Jacket art © 2019 by Jenny Carrow

Typography by Jenna Stempel-Lobell

All rights reserved.

Sarah Dessen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

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 HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008334390

Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008334406

Version: 2019-04-19

For Leigh Feldman.

Even when words fail me, you never do.

Thank you.

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright First published in the United States of America by Balzer + Bray in 2019 Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Published simultaneously in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk Text copyright © Sarah Dessen 2019 Jacket art © 2019 by Jenny Carrow Typography by Jenna Stempel-Lobell All rights reserved. Sarah Dessen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work. 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 HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008334390 Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008334406 Version: 2019-04-19

Dedication For Leigh Feldman. Even when words fail me, you never do. Thank you.

Prologue PROLOGUE There weren’t a lot of memories, especially good ones. But there was this. “Tell me a story,” I’d say when it was bedtime but I wasn’t at all sleepy. “Oh, honey,” my mom would reply. “I’m tired.” She was always tired: that I did remember. Especially in the evenings, after that first or second glass of wine, which most often led to a bottle, once I was asleep. Usually my dad cleaned up before he went to bed, but when he wasn’t around, the evidence remained there in the light of day when I came down for breakfast. “Not a fairy tale,” I’d say, because she always said no at first. “A lake story.” At this, she’d smile. “A lake story? Well. That’s different.” That was when I knew I could lean back into my pillows, grabbing my stuffed giraffe, George, and settle in. “Once upon a time,” she’d begin, locking a leg around mine or draping an arm over my stomach, because snuggling was part of the telling, “there was a little girl who lived by a big lake that seemed like it went on forever. The trees around the edges had moss, and the water was cold and clear.” This was when I would start to picture it. Seeing the details. “The little girl loved to swim, and she loved her family, and she loved the creaky old house with the uneven floors and the little bedroom at the top of the stairs, which was all hers.” At this point in the story, she’d look at me, as if checking to see if I’d fallen asleep. I never had, though. “In the winters, the water was cold, and so was the house. It felt like the world had left the lake all alone, and the girl would get sad.” Here I always pictured the little girl in a window, peering out. I had an image for everything, like she was turning pages in a book. “When the weather got warm again, though, strangers and travelers came to visit from all over. And they brought boats with loud motors, and floats of many colors and shapes, and crowded the docks through the days and nights, their voices filling the air.” A pause, now, as she shifted, maybe closing her own eyes. “And on those nights, the summer nights, the little girl would sit in her yellow bedroom and look across the water and the big sky full of stars and know everything was going to be okay.” I could see it all, the picture so vivid in my mind I felt like I could have touched it. And I’d be getting sleepy, but never so much I couldn’t say what came next. “How did she know?” “Because in the summers, the world came back to the lake,” she’d reply. “And that was when it felt like home.”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

About the Author

About the Publisher

There weren’t a lot of memories, especially good ones. But there was this.

“Tell me a story,” I’d say when it was bedtime but I wasn’t at all sleepy.

“Oh, honey,” my mom would reply. “I’m tired.”

She was always tired: that I did remember. Especially in the evenings, after that first or second glass of wine, which most often led to a bottle, once I was asleep. Usually my dad cleaned up before he went to bed, but when he wasn’t around, the evidence remained there in the light of day when I came down for breakfast.

“Not a fairy tale,” I’d say, because she always said no at first. “A lake story.”

At this, she’d smile. “A lake story? Well. That’s different.”

That was when I knew I could lean back into my pillows, grabbing my stuffed giraffe, George, and settle in.

“Once upon a time,” she’d begin, locking a leg around mine or draping an arm over my stomach, because snuggling was part of the telling, “there was a little girl who lived by a big lake that seemed like it went on forever. The trees around the edges had moss, and the water was cold and clear.”

This was when I would start to picture it. Seeing the details.

“The little girl loved to swim, and she loved her family, and she loved the creaky old house with the uneven floors and the little bedroom at the top of the stairs, which was all hers.”