The Rules of Us - Softcover

Nissley, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593484924 ISBN 13: 9780593484920

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Come out. Break up. Stay friends? In this heartwarming queer love story about love of all kinds, exes navigate new crushes, new feelings, and a newly uncertain future after unexpectedly coming out to each other on prom night turns their lives—and their friendship—upside down. Can they figure out how to move on without losing each other?

Jillian and Henry are the kind of couple who do everything together. They take the same classes, have the same hobbies, and applied for the same super-competitive scholarship so they can go to the same dream college. They even come out as gay to each other on the same night, after junior prom, prompting a sudden breakup that threatens their intertwined identities and carefully designed future. Jillian knows the only way to keep everything on track is to approach their breakup with the same precision and planning as their scholarship application. They will still be “Jillian and Henry”—even if they’re broken up. 

Except they hadn’t planned on Henry meeting the boy of his dreams or Jillian obsessing over a cool girl at school. Jillian is desperate to hold on to her best friend when so much else is changing. But as she and Henry explore what—and who—they really want, it becomes harder to hold on to the careful definitions she has always lived her life by. Stuck somewhere between who she was with Henry and who she might be on her own, Jillian has to face what she can’t control and let go of the rules holding her back.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jennifer Nissley (she/her/hers) is also the author of The Mythic Koda Rose. Although her first love is writing, she is powerfully attracted to video games, horses, and pretty much any piece of clothing or interior design with an animal on it.

She received an MFA in fiction from Stony Brook Southampton and lives in Queens with her spouse and doggo, but sadly no horses.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.


I know Carla getting up to dance with Bea Nabarro has nothing to do with us.

Nothing.

But.

There they are. Carla Kaminski. Beatriz Nabarro. A flailing approximation of some dance everybody’s been copying off social. Which, by the way, is all prom is. Approximations. Flailing. My dress tighter and pinker, the back dizzyingly lower, than anything I’ve ever worn. And the DJ’s pumping his fist and the music hurts my teeth and carrying these cups across the gym without getting splattered has sweat pooling under my pits, but somehow every song that’s played since we arrived has been okay--verging on tolerable. And I actually kind of love sweating. I love this dress.

Funny how high triumph can fling you.

Back at our table, I flop sideways into Henry’s lap, sloshing punch all over us.

“Jillian!” Henry squawks. Light strobing off the dance floor catches the edge of his enormous tortoiseshell glasses. His dad’s. That’s why they don’t fit. “I’m on the hook for excessive damage.” He smooths his vest, one of several components that apparently make up a tux, our decision to attend prom so last-minute that we got stuck with whatever the mildewy shop on Booker had left over. Ergo, his bow tie isn’t quite the same pink as my dress. More bronchial. And off by just the teeniest bit of a centimeter? I plunk our cups down to adjust it for him, and he smiles. The first Henry smile I’ve seen all night. “Thanks. How red does this stuff taste?”

“Hmm . . .” I tip a drop over the soggy paper rim and smack my lips. “Gory.” Henry laughs.

Scooting lower, I rest my head on his and survey the prom committee’s efforts. Unlike the seniors, who get everything--prom at a fancy hotel in Albany with glittery fish tanks, a lobby practically shrink-wrapped in gold leaf--juniors have festivities confined to the gym. Our school’s cathedral to forced teamwork has been transformed with sloughs of blue streamers and lights so billowy that you almost can’t see the hairs shellacked into the floor. Could be worse. This is Elmerville, after all. Upstate New York. If not for prom, we’d be celebrating at Applebee’s.

I nudge him. He’s blinking into his punch.

“To our emergence from the flames of essay hell,” I say. Henry toasts like he kisses. Fly-by gentleness that makes every part of me blush.

No need for Carla whatsoever.

Henry sets his cup on the table, which isn’t ours, just abandoned enough to feel like it, strewn with plasticky aquamarine plates and anonymous tux jackets, the tablecloth splotched with grease from the buffet we missed because Henry wasn’t ready when he said he’d be. Nested on a nearby chair are a minimum of five pastel purses, each large enough to conceal a single tampon or vape pen. Henry sinks against me. I rest my chin in his dark hair.

“You like this song, don’t you?” I bellow over the relentlessly pulsing dubstep. He grunts. My eyes skip over the dance floor behind him.

Carla is tall. Not extremely so, but storky enough that I could pick her out if I had to. Then there’s her hair. When she and Bea reeled past me at the punch bowl, I noticed she’d changed it again. Buzzed part of one side so her curls zigged spectacularly, her own personal fireworks show as she danced.

Henry would deem it all pretty ridiculous.

He’d say, And you care about them because . . . ?

But I don’t care.

Not about Carla’s new hair or Bea’s hand enfolding hers. The way Carla’s dress has wrinkled in the back, like lines on a pillowcase.

“What time is it?” Henry shouts.

“Um”--I check my phone--“just after nine.” Prom ends at eleven. My dad said to call if we wanted out earlier, but . . . “Why? Do you want to go already?”

He shakes his head, like I don’t know what he’s thinking. Of course we don’t need prom.

It doesn’t need us.

But our junior year also wasn’t like everybody else’s. A barrage of mentor check-ins and short essays and deadlines so torturous they surpassed even our academic pain thresholds. That’s what it takes, Henry kept saying. Every time I sobbed over my laptop, ground my nails into my sides, and howled, his reminder echoed through me. What it takes, what it takes . . . Because, let’s be real, the Lucille M. Purdy Memorial Scholarship isn’t just the most prestigious and coveted scholarship in New York State. This scholarship awards ten students of exceptional merit up to $85,000 for tuition and school-related expenses. More money than my parents make in one year, combined. So much money that when I think about it, light pulses behind my eyes.

Because $85,000 means more than tuition. For Henry and me, $85,000 buys our only opportunity to attend the same school: Oneida Polytechnic Institute, the top in-state university for video game design. We’ve been gnawing our way toward this moment, haunting the Purdy Scholar subreddit for application strategies, since we were thirteen. Practically infants. Since submitting our applications last night, I haven’t stopped grinning. So, contrary to every other social instinct in our possession, prom isn’t pointless. Just this once. It’s not pointless, after the year we’ve had, to want to dance with my boyfriend, my face in his neck for the slow songs. They’ve played two already.

My chin’s planted in Henry’s hair. It takes a second to realize he’s on his phone.

“Hey.” I grind my butt bones into him. “You okay?” South Korea is a million hours ahead of New York. Texts from his dad come at inconvenient times.

“It’s not . . . shit.” The tux jacket Henry slung across the back of his chair starts to slide, and as he lunges after it, I decide the pink on his bow tie is so jarringly not like mine that we maybe should’ve gone with the second option the shop owner showed us. “Not my dad,” Henry goes on. He glances toward the DJ booth, likely calculating whether the number of writhing bodies violates the gym’s 310-person occupancy limit. “It’s Yuna.”

“Yuna?” Henry’s achingly cool older half sister, who lives with their dad in Daegu. Or, as Henry refers to her, Preferred Spawn. “You never talk to-- Wait. Is that why you’re in such a shitty mood?” His eyes widen, like the perfectly obvious also pains him. I slap his phone onto the tablecloth. “Okay, no, not tonight. We agreed. No bullshit, no drama. We’re celebrating. And”--I dip my head toward the dance floor--“if talking about Purdy’s too risky, can you at least rejoice in the fact that we’re not Carla and Bea right now?”

Henry’s brow scrunches, his dress shirt damp where I’m gripping his shoulder. “What do you mean?”

I’m dripping with sweat myself, thanks to my punch bowl expedition. Shrugging, I splay my fingers through the sopping ends of my curls.

So much for not mentioning her.

“Just that they’re back together.” I try to swallow. It never helps. “Or seem like they are. I give them, mmm . . . forty-eight hours before they’re fighting publicly.” I expect a smirk, one of Henry’s seismic eye rolls, but the crease in his forehead only deepens. “Henry.” I sandwich his face between my hands. A must for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593484924
• ISBN 13: 9780593484920
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar