I think it’s true what they say, that misery loves company—Matt taught me that—but it’s only because to crawl out of any hole, there needs to be one person to offer a boost up, and another to stick around long enough to help pull the first one up after them.
In the end, I picked the path that led to healing. The best that I could anyway. Matt gave me that. It turns out my brother has made more sacrifices than any human being I have ever known. I don’t know when he’ll be back. Tomorrow I’ll be able to talk to him, once he knows this is over and we can have the space we need to find our way to what comes next.
In the meantime, I hope someday to memorize all the different inlets of Ringo’s face like they are spots on a continent I live on. He’s become my home in very different ways from Penny and Will, but that doesn’t make either any less real. There are a million ways I’ve been wrecked over the last few years. My new wish is that by facing them head-on, we’ll all be better off.
Ringo pulls me closer and rubs small circles on my bare arm with his thumb. My great, big, epically magnificent, cowabunga awesome birthday surprise.
I get another one of the chest pains and have to wait it out before I can breathe comfortably again. Ringo must feel this, because he squeezes me tighter. I rest my head on him. “Well?” I say. “What song fits the mood for today?”
Ringo turns his two-toned face and presses his lips to my hair. “Today,” he murmurs, “has to be ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”
I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, exactly like Penny—my best friend—taught me. “I think I like the sound of that.”
Many authors have what we call a “book of the heart,” and this one’s mine. I’m grateful to have a team who has adopted it into their hearts as well.
My agent, Dan Lazar, read This Is Not the End and became its greatest champion. It has meant the world to me to have someone who so fully understands this book and the characters in it.
Thank you also to Laura Schreiber for always crying while reading the same part that I cried while writing and for an incredibly long, but incredibly thoughtful edit letter that inspired many of my now favorite pieces of the story.
Emily Meehan, Mary Ann Naples, Cassie McGinty, Tyler Nevins, Mary Mudd, Deeba Zargarpur, Dina Sherman, and the rest of the team at Hyperion, thank you for making Disney such a welcoming and collaborative place to create books.
Torie Doherty-Munro at Writers House gave me some particularly smart notes in the early stages, as did Charlotte Huang and Lori Goldstein, who both helped me figure out what this story was really about.
Thank you also to the girls in my book club who read early copies and gave me much-needed encouragement, with a special shout-out to Lisa McQueen and her eagle-eye editing skills.
I wrote the entirety of this book in a fit of inspiration while on maternity leave, so I need to thank my daughter for being an exceptionally easy baby, and my husband, Rob, for supporting me in my crazed insistence on writing, even with a newborn.
Keep reading for a sneak peek at Chandler Baker’s young adult thriller, Alive!
I was fifteen when my heart betrayed me. Like with all truly masterful betrayals, I didn’t see it coming.
I had my eye trained on the outside world—bad grades, horny teenage boys, college admissions—and all the while the real danger was lodged square between my rib cage and spine. It hatched its plan, welcomed the poison in like a Trojan horse that pumped the disease through every artery, atrium, and valve until it turned my whole body against me.
That was two years ago. Life really isn’t fair.
The hospital bed mattress squeaks beneath me as I try to wriggle my way upright, digging my heels into the paper sheets. Even that makes me tired. I feel my breath get short and wait, still, until my pulse slows. A Bachelor rerun blares in the background. I’ve been on a two-day bender—the hospital only gets a handful of channels—and I’m holding out hope that DeAnna wins this season, only I’m not sure I’ll be around long enough to find out. I suppose I can Google it, but even the thought of that feels self-defeating.
I’ve been joking with Mom that I’m contestant material now. My athletic five-foot-nine frame has shrunk to a frail 112 pounds, burning calories overtime to keep the rest of my body functioning. Turns out not dying takes a lot of work.
I drum my fingers on the plastic side rail of my bed and Mom glances up from the magazine she’s been pretending to read. She’s been doing that a lot lately. I can tell by the way she keeps glancing toward me or the cardiac monitor—anywhere but actually at the magazine. She’s put on makeup for the first time in days. Blush sweeps across her cheekbones and the bridge of her straight nose. She must have snuck out her compact while I was sleeping. Wisps of her black hair still stick out at her temples, though, and she looks the most tired I’ve seen her in ages.
Dad took Elsie downstairs fifteen minutes ago, since she’d been crying like it was her heart that was about to get ripped out. That kind of attention-hoarding behavior is what makes Elsie the perfect replacement child. She fills up practically every nook and cranny of my parents’ attention.
I’m getting antsy when Dr. Belkin walks in, white tennis shoes squealing along the speckled tile floor. “How’s the patient?” he asks, making a beeline for the little digitized screens that will tell him exactly how “the patient” is doing. I don’t say anything, since I don’t really know. For the two years since my diagnosis with cardiomyopathy, computers have proven a much more reliable indicator of my overall health, seeing as I feel pretty much the same as always—kind of crappy, but not terrible.
“Her color’s good.” Mom folds the magazine without marking her page and sets it on the table next to her. She puts a lot of stock in my color. She adjusts the trendy Kate Spade glasses perched on her nose and reaches mechanically for her big stack of research, the voluminous file she keeps on Yours Truly. Career criminals have case reports that are shorter than my medical records.
Dr. Belkin offers a thin smile. “Everything’s still on track,” he says kindly, which is nice of him to say and all—only one problem: which track? The one where Stella Cross goes on to stay up late nights watching reality TV, attend college, and lose her virginity, or the one where she dies, like twenty-five percent of other transplant patients, but in utter teenage obscurity, having never done a single thing with her life? Ever? “Are you ready, Stella?” he asks, apparently unable to read my mind. Dr. Belkin has bushy blond eyebrows and reddish skin, the face of a man who would sunburn in Alaska.
My rotten heart hammers at the inside of my chest. “So…I’m going to be dead?” I ask, even though I know the answer. “As in, one hundred percent not living?”