All That Was: A Novel - Hardcover

Rivers, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374302464 ISBN 13: 9780374302467

Verlag: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Piper and Sloane were best friends. They grew up together, from childhood to first love, and in spite of how different they were, their friendship was supposed to last forever. That is, until Piper caught Sloane kissing her boyfriend - and just days later, Piper was found dead, washed ashore on a beach. Sloane was torn with grief and guilt. How do you make amends for hurting someone you love if that person is no longer around? And how can you ever move on and love again? Told from alternating perspectives, this is a story about the complexity of friendships, forgiveness, and growing up.

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Karen Rivers is the author of many books for children and teens, including Before We Go Extinct and The Girl in the Well Is Me. She lives in Victoria, BC, with her children. Visit her online at karenrivers.com.

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All That Was

A Novel

By Karen Rivers

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2017 Karen Rivers
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-374-30246-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Prologue, 
Part One, 
Now, 
Before, 
Now, 
Before, 
Now, 
Before, 
Before, 
Now, 
Before, 
Now, 
Before, 
Part Two, 
Soup, 
Sloane, 
Soup, 
Sloane, 
Soup, 
Sloane, 
Soup, 
Sloane, 
Soup, 
Sloane, 
Soup, 
Sloane, 
Part Three, 
Before, 
Now, 
Epilogue, 
Also by Karen Rivers, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

PART ONE

NOW

When my phone rings for the first time since I last saw Piper, I ignore it.

The ice in my glass melts into my Diet Coke, turning it watery and thin. I take a gulp that hurts the whole way down, a stone that I've swallowed whole. I hold my breath. It stops hurting all at once, like a light going out.

Piper's mad and I'm not ready to talk to her. I don't know what I'll say.

"You're her spirit animal," Piper's mom once told me. I wanted to tell her that "spirit animal" is actually offensive the way she's using it. I also wanted to say that Piper's inner animal isn't a person, anyway. It's something furious and powerful, already extinct, so rare it couldn't even exist anymore — a clouded leopard or a Caspian tiger — beautiful and strange and pretty much impossible to understand.

I'm none of those things.

There are thousands of girls like me. Millions. I'm as common as a house cat.

The only thing that makes me different from every other girl is that Piper chose me. We've been friends for so long that we've started to look the same. We sound the same. We definitely, on purpose, dress the same. It messes with people, to see us together. I don't really know why, but it makes us powerful — twice as pretty, twice as special. But there's no guidebook for what to do when suddenly, you don't feel like being two.

You want to be one.

I want to be one.

Me. Without Piper.

Me, with Soup.

We said a boy would never come between us, but we were so wrong.

I kissed Soup.

Soup kissed me.

But what if it was a mistake? Maybe Soup just got us mixed up. He was pretty drunk and the lighting was bad and I was drunk, too, and no one said no. So it was my fault. He has an excuse, but I sure don't.

Me, alone, is terrifying, and Soup is Piper's boyfriend.

I take another sip of my watery drink and the blue sky sinks down around me and the sun burns my eyes and my head aches from a hangover I totally deserve and I stare at my phone and my skin beads with sweat and the day gets hotter and longer and worse.

Last night feels more real now that it isn't happening than it felt when it was happening. At the time, it felt like a dream. The house was tilting around me, all corridors and half-built rooms and echoing sounds of emptiness, and I was dizzy, spinning. Then the music that felt like it was inside me. Drinking and more drinking, the cough- syrup sweetness of the mix. Then there we were, me and Soup, dancing, slower than the beat, but also just right. The filth on the unfinished floor rose up around us, stomped into clouds, both of us shiny with sweat and grayed from the dust. And then there was his face and my face and I can't explain it, I definitely can't explain why I did it. I couldn't help it. It just ... happened.

That's never happened to me before. I've kissed boys, but it's never felt like that kiss, like a force bigger than me, pulling my lips to his lips and taking over every part of me. I couldn't have stopped it if I'd tried.

But I didn't try.

I have to talk to Piper, but I can't because it's impossible to tell her the truth and I haven't thought of the lie yet. I can't be in love with Soup. And I won't be. Love is a decision, that's what Piper always said, before she changed her idea about that. But maybe she was right all along. If so, I'm deciding now. Love is chemicals: dopamine and serotonin, flooding your brain, making you more or less yourself. You should be able to take a pill to stop it, to lock into your neurotransmitters, blunt the signal.

There should be a cure.

But anyway, it's over, whatever "it" was.

The thing with Soup and me.

I shiver hard, but I'm not cold. Not even a little. If anything, it feels like I'm cooking. The backs of my legs stick to the paint on the sun- hot wooden Adirondack chair. I can feel my skin everywhere tightening from the heat, like a sweater shrinking in the dryer, the sun robbing it of everything.

"I'm sorry," I practice. "Please, Piper. Pipes, come on. I was drunk, so it didn't count. Maybe the alcohol and my meds ... maybe that was ... I mean ..."

I lick my lips. They taste like a lie I'm telling myself, salty and wrong.

I don't always like Piper but I need Piper. Piper is part of me. Not being friends with Piper isn't an option.

I'd die.

But kissing Soup wasn't like kissing anyone else. It was something different. It was everything different.

It was everything I wanted all along.

* * *

I should go inside the house, where there is air-conditioning and Netflix, fresh ice and Diet Coke, but I can't seem to do anything but sit here and try not to think about Soup. I have a plan for my life and there's no room in it for a boyfriend right now.

I'm going to travel after senior year.

I'm going to go to film school in New York the year after that.

I'm going to be important. I'm going to really change things with my films. I know it.

I'll look back on this and I'll realize it didn't matter. I'll know that we made a big deal over nothing. Over a boy. We agreed a long time ago, boys don't matter.

There is so much stuff that matters. Real things.

Things like how flocks of birds are mysteriously falling dead from the sky, raining down on towns and farms in feathery hailstorms.

Things like how herds of antelope are lying down all at once, dead, on the grassy plains of Africa.

Things like how thousands and thousands of fish died at the same time in one lake in China.

Things like how polar bears are drowning because the ice is melting out from underneath them, leaving them wobbling on shrinking islands, and then swimming for their lives.

Everything is dying.

I hope you die, for real, Piper said. Monster. I could feel her spit hitting my cheek; I knew how much she meant it. Piper has hated plenty of people, but it's never been me. Not before last night. I didn't know how to answer. She was close enough to kiss and then she wasn't. Her eyes were tiny, angry slits when she spun away and vanished into the wall of music.

I don't know how she could see where she was going.

I hope she didn't fall.

I hate myself, but it wasn't all my fault. Soup should have let go first.

But even while Piper was yelling, we were swaying without meaning to, without wanting to; our bodies were touching in a way that felt like we weren't in control of them, our hands entangled, reaching for each other, her face collapsing.

Why does it matter so much?

It was only a kiss.

Whales are washing up dead on beaches everywhere, their corpses rotten and bloated. Sometimes they explode. It still doesn't seem like anyone cares.

If the elephants start dropping dead, maybe then the world will notice. Everyone...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374302464
• ISBN 13: 9780374302467
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar