We join yet another street dance party. We are swept into a stranger’s living room to judge a round of drunken karaoke. We stand in line at Bi-Rite for ice cream and end up back at the park with sticky hands, trying to predict who we’ll all be in five years.
Shelbie says we can stay over at her place tonight, be among the first to show up for the parade tomorrow. Everyone texts their parents—except Greer, who calls the shelter—and all the parents and Greer’s guardian say yes. Tomorrow we will line up along Market Street, shoulder to shoulder. The Dykes on Bikes will be back to kick everything off, and the mayor will be there, and all of the gay cops and firefighters. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will be in full drag, lip-synching to some Katy Perry song. There will be floats and classic cars, and chants and songs and tears. There will be old people who fought hard for what we all have now. There will be babies who will only know a country where everyone can marry. There will be signs reminding us of how far we still have to go. We’ll watch everyone go by, and our hearts will swell with the sight of it.
But not yet.
It’s late now, and we’re all walking to Walgreens for toothbrushes and a couple extra pillows. It’s late, but we’re still wide awake, and each time Violet touches me I’m filled with wonder, because soon we’ll be finding a quiet patch of floor in Shelbie’s living room to share all night.
“Okay, three more,” she says. “We could go to the Grand Canyon. We could teach ourselves to cook. We could learn a dying language and keep it alive.”
“How will we choose?”
“We’ll just pick something,” she says. “It doesn’t even matter what.”
We’ve gotten a few steps ahead of the group. I slow down, turn to see them. We’re on our own now, on an empty street, but the sounds of celebration echo through the night. And here we are. Lehna and Candace and Shelbie, June and Uma, Mark and Quinn and Wyatt and Sky and Greer, and Violet, and me. I don’t know if we’ll all ever be together like this again. I don’t know if Sky and Wyatt and Greer will become my friends for life or only for these two short days. I don’t know if Lehna and I will end up sitting on a porch together, bickering in our old age, or if this week will have been the beginning of a slow fade from each other’s lives. I don’t know if Violet and I will make it … but I hope so, I hope so. They’ve all caught up now, at the corner of this street, with the glow of the drugstore only a block in the distance. And we step off the curb, all of us together, as if to say, Here we come—through hard days and good ones, through despair and through exhilaration, in love and out of love, for just now or for forever. Here we come. It’s our parade.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book first started during a conversation on October 11, 2012, and the first chapter of it was sent on January 20, 2013, starting a back-and-forth pattern that would finish on June 28, 2015. It is safe to say that neither of us in October 2012 imagined that the hypothetical book we were talking about would be completed the weekend of (a) Pride Week when we were both (b) in San Francisco right after (c) the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage rights for people like us. We liked to imagine Katie and Mark celebrating along with us in the streets.
There are many people we have to thank for the book you have in your hands. Together, we would like to thank the extraordinary Sara Goodman, whose infectious excitement and thoughtful words have always been deeply appreciated. We’d also like to thank everyone else at St. Martin’s, and at all of our foreign publishers, for believing in this book. Our agents, Sara Crowe and Bill Clegg, and the many people who support them, are also the beneficiaries of our profound gratitude.
Nina would like to thank the teenagers she’s known, whether in life or by way of a laptop screen, who have been unafraid to voice their uncertainty. You’ve reminded her that it can be a gift to not have it all figured out. She’d also like to thank a certain blond girl who, in 2010 English Comp, said she was afraid she would stop dancing when she grew up and forget that it had once been everything to her. Finally, many thanks to her writing group for their moral and artistic support and her friends and family for making her world a beautiful place, especially Amanda, for giving her time to write so many of these chapters, and Kristyn and Juliet, for innumerable daily wonders.
David would like to thank his family and friends (as always), with special shout-outs to Stephanie Perkins, Rainbow Rowell, and all of the Openly YA authors he’s toured with over the past few years, including (but not at all limited to) Bill Konigsberg, Sandy London, Aaron Hartzler, Sara Farizan, Will Walton, Adam Silvera, and Juno Dawson. He’d also like to thank Nancy Garden, for leading the way for all the rest of us, and Jen Corn, Sarah (Roo) Cline, their kids Maizie and Amon, Jane Mason, Sarah Hines Stephens, and everyone at Books Inc., because I couldn’t imagine writing a San Francisco book without tipping my hat to you.
And from both of us—thank you to the readers who keep us going, time and time again.