Tell Me Three Things - Julie Buxbaum Page 0,94

I like to watch people. I’ve told some kids stuff in the nicest way possible. I told Ken Abernathy that Gem was cheating off him in calculus. With you, it was different. Ours was a two-month-long conversation.”

“So what you’re saying is you’re kind of like Wood Valley’s Batman.”

He grins. Looks down.

“Not really. This is my brother’s shirt. It’s silly, but whatever.”

“I like being able to ask you questions and you answering them.”

“I like you asking me questions.”

“Tell me three things,” I say, because I love our three things. I don’t want them to stop even though we can now say them out loud.

“One: contrary to popular belief, I do not do drugs. Terrified of them. Won’t even take Tylenol. Two: I memorized the first part of ‘The Waste Land’ just to impress you. Normally, I play Xbox in the middle of the night or read when I can’t sleep, but I thought it would make me seem, I don’t know, cooler or something.”

“It worked. It was totally dreamy.” My voice is smiling. I didn’t even know it could do that.

“Three: my mom’s in rehab as of yesterday. I am not naive enough to be optimistic—we’ve been to this rodeo a few times—but at least it’s something.”

“I—I don’t know what to say. If we were writing, I’d probably emoticon you.” I squeeze his hand, another way to talk. No wonder Ethan can’t sleep; his family life is even more screwed up than mine.

“Your turn. Three things…”

“Okay. One: I was really hoping it was you. I was sure it was, and then I was sure it wasn’t, and for that second, I thought you were Liam and I wanted to cry.”

“Liam’s not so bad. I need to be nicer to him. Especially now. Oh man, he’s going to break my legs.” Ethan smiles. He’s not scared of Liam at all.

“No he won’t. He’ll go back to Gem, and they can be prom king and queen or whatever, assuming you even do that here, and it will be fine. It’s too bad, though, because I so want to set him up with Dri.”

“By the way, how right was I that you and Dri would be friends?”

“You were right. You were right about a lot of things.”

“Two…”

“Two…” I stall. What do I want to say? That for the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel like I’m exactly where I want to be. That I’m happy to sit still. Right here. With him.

“Two, thank you for being my first friend here at a time when I had no one. It really…made a difference.”

Now it’s his turn to squeeze my hand, and it feels so good, I almost close my eyes.

“Three? I don’t have a three. My head is still spinning.”

“I have one.”

“Go for it.”

“Three: I want to kiss you, like, very much, please.”

“You do?” I ask.

“I do,” he says, and so I turn toward him, and he turns toward me, and even though we are in this random IHOP and our table is full of the bizarre array of uneaten foods Ethan has ordered to allow us to keep our table for the past three hours—pancakes, of course, but also pickles and apple pie—everything falls away.

It is just him and me, Ethan is Ethan is Ethan and Jessie is Jessie is Jessie, and his lips touch mine.

But sometimes a kiss is not a kiss is not a kiss. Sometimes it’s poetry.

Dear Reader,

In Tell Me Three Things, Jessie, my main character, keeps constant count of the number of days it has been since her mother died. Like Jessie, I also lost my mother at fourteen, and of course I’m not going to be coy and pretend that’s a coincidence. It’s not. And I used to do that too: the counting. I still do it, in fact, but now I count in years instead of days. I’m at twenty-four. Twenty-four?!? How is that even possible? With Tell Me Three Things, I was finally brave enough to take a look at a period in my life that I long ago boxed up, put away, and marked with a big red label that read “Too Painful.” I wasn’t interested in exploring my specifics, necessarily, but I very much wanted to delve into those feelings of first loss and their immediate aftermath. To look back at what it was like to be teenager and to have the worst thing you can imagine happening actually happen.

But at the same time, I very much did not want to write a dead mom book. Instead, I decided to combine the loneliness of first loss with something much more magical and universal: the beauty of first love. Jessie is not me—she’s so much cooler and more together than I ever was at sixteen, or even am now, for that matter. But she’s a version of me, an alterna-me, in the way that all of the characters I create somehow are. Tell Me Three Things was an opportunity to gift that me-but-not-me, to gift Jessie, with the one thing I most wanted at sixteen: To feel truly seen. To feel known. Enter Somebody Nobody.

One of the most amazing things about young adulthood is that it’s a time that’s chock-full of firsts. Some wonderful and some…not so wonderful. At one point, Jessie says of her mother, “She will never see who I grow up to be—that great mystery of who I am and who I am meant to be—finally asked and answered.” Now, twenty-four whole years after my mother’s death, a lot of my own questions have been asked and answered, even if my mom wasn’t here to see it all unfold. Writing Tell Me Three Things reminded me of what it felt like when my world was forever widening.

I can’t thank you enough for reading. Though this may look just like an ordinary book to you, for me it’s one more magical first: my very first novel for young adults. Only took twenty-four years to get the courage.

Julie Buxbaum

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is with a heart full of gratitude, as embarrassingly earnest as that sounds, that I thank the following people, without whom this book would just be a big tangle of words on an antiquated hard drive: Jenn Joel, for being a brilliant and kick-ass agent and champion. Beverly Horowitz, for her sharp insights and for pushing me to make Tell Me Three Things better with each and every iteration. The wonderful and incomparable Elaine Koster, who is terribly missed. Susan Kamil, who rocks like no other. The Fiction Writers Co-op, for the support and laughs and for making the writing life a whole lot less solitary. John Foley, for naming Book Out Below! Karen Zubieta, for helping me to keep all the balls in the air. The Flore clan, for letting me into your club and allowing me to share your name. Mammaji, who has given up so much so that I get to do what I love; I am eternally grateful. Josh, who keeps me honest and laughing; I won the big brother lottery. My dad because he’s awesome. My mom, Elizabeth, who is loved and remembered every day, but whose name doesn’t get said out loud enough. And, of course, my husband, Indy, and our two little snugglebugs, Elili and Luca—“love” is too small a word. I am so honored that I get to call you guys mine.