“Thirty minutes of our own,” he says. “What should we fill them with?”
I grab his hand and pull him back into the crowd.
“Where are we going?” he asks, but I don’t answer him until we’re at the entrance of Happy Happy and he laughs and says, “Perfect,” and I say, “I thought so, too.”
A minute later we’re carrying gin and tonics to the table where I sat when this all started. The bar itself is almost quiet. The true party is out on the street; most of the bars won’t fill until later. There’s too much to see, and there’s the need to be seen. But for now all I want are a few minutes with my friend. I’ve already heard about his day with Taylor and Ryan. He already knows how excited I am about seeing Violet.
Mark lifts his glass.
“We need to toast,” he says.
“Yes.”
“What a week,” he says.
“Somehow we survived it.”
“We more than survived it. We kicked this week’s ass.”
“We tongue kissed it.”
“We fucking married it,” Mark says. “This week will be with us forever.”
We clink glasses, take sips, and it’s the weakest gin and tonic I’ve ever had, but I don’t mind.
“I think he knows we’re underage,” Mark whispers.
We grin at each other, and I will be happy if all we do is sit and sip our tonic waters in the presence of each other for the rest of our minutes alone, but then the door opens and fills the bar with the roar of the street. We turn to look and our mouths drop in synchronized disbelief.
Here’s another teenager, younger than us. He squints and then sees us. He freezes and steps back toward the door. I gesture him over.
“Should I try to get a drink?” he says once he’s reached us. And then, whispering, “I don’t have a fake ID.”
Even as he’s saying it, he’s looking through his wallet as though an ID may magically appear.
“Not worth it,” I say. “This is a monumental waste of ten dollars.”
He puts his wallet in his pocket, but then he has nothing to do with his hands, and I see that they’re shaking.
“What are you doing here?” Mark asks him.
“Oh, uh,” the boy stammers. “I, um … I was just…”
If Garrison Kline were here, he’d take a look at this boy and know exactly the right thing to say. He wouldn’t look into the boy’s soul, but he’d make him look into it himself, until what he saw didn’t scare him so much anymore.
But Garrison Kline has disappeared from our lives in a puff of fairy godfather smoke. Somehow, I can feel that with certainty. All we have, at least for now, are ourselves and each other.
We introduce ourselves, and the kid says his name is Wyatt and that he read about the bar on the Internet and that it seemed like kind of a cool place to just, you know, check out sometime, and he has no idea why he’s even here, he just felt like getting out of the house, and I can’t listen to him talk like this anymore.
On his shirt is a tiny rainbow pin. I touch it.
“This is beautiful,” I say, even though it’s only flimsy metal and cheap paint. “Did you get it for today?”
He stops his rambling. He nods.
“Someone handed it to me when I got off BART.”
“And how does it feel to wear it?”
He breathes in and exhales. Smiles at the table and wipes his forehead with his arm.
He gathers the courage and looks at me.
“Feels good,” he says.
“Happy first Pride, Wyatt,” I say solemnly.
“Thanks,” he says.
Hiding and denying and being afraid is no way to treat love. Love demands bravery. No matter the occasion, love expects us to rise, and with that in mind I check my phone.
“Boys,” I say. “We have a party to attend.”
* * *
The party has spilled from Shelbie’s house to the street, where some neighbors are blasting music from a huge speaker in their garage. Lehna and Candace are sitting with their arms around each other on Shelbie’s stoop. Lehna smiles when she sees me. June and Uma are dancing along with so many others. I don’t know if the people around them are Shelbie’s friends, but I do know that on a day like today there is no such thing as a stranger.
“Let’s dance,” I say to the boys.
“I’ve never danced with a girl in a leotard and wings before,” Wyatt says.
“I bet you’ve never danced with a guy before, either,” Mark says, and Wyatt blushes, and Mark grabs his hand.
The warm sun. The people filling the streets. The bass so powerful it thrums through me. The people hawking Jell-O shots and bottles of water. The drag queens and drag kings. The trans men and trans women. The straight couples cheering us on. The topless girls, waving from apartments above us. The gay boys on fire escapes, shaking their asses. The bears, holding hands in matching wedding rings. The lesbian moms with toddlers on their shoulders. And those not as easily identified or defined. The bi, the genderqueer, the questioning. All of us with love in our hearts.
We are all a part of this.
My phone vibrates.
Walking through Dolores Park. Found Greer and Quinn! Meet us here?
“Dolores Park?” I call out, and Shelbie runs inside and returns with a picnic blanket. We push through the crowds together.
On Dolores Street, the line of motorcycles and scooters stretches for blocks, topped by women of all ages and colors, wearing spike heels and combat boots, lingerie, and leather, and in one case nothing at all. The sun is warm on my skin and the paint on my arms is still bright. I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror of a car and my cheeks still sparkle gold.
Violet, I think.
Her name isn’t a spell I’m trying to cast or a way to forget anymore. It’s a thrill that courses through me, a current of love, and then there she is, waving.
“You look incredible,” she says, and she touches my cheeks, and she touches my hair, and the neckline of the leotard, and the edges of the wings. She spins me around and then she wraps her arms around my neck and she’s kissing me here, under the hot sun, her mouth warm and soft, and I can’t get enough of her.
We kiss, and kiss, and kiss.
I will never get enough of her.
And when we stop kissing, I say, “I have something to tell you.”
“Tell me.”
“My parents agreed,” I say. “I sent an email to the admissions office. So it’s official: I’m free for another year.”
“Oh, Kate,” she says. “Let’s do something amazing.”
* * *
The motorcycles roar to life. The pigeons take flight. The crowd goes wild.
Quinn’s dressed in a bright pink bunny suit.
“It looks hot in there!” I shout over the revving engines.
“Say that again?” he yells back.
“I said, it looks hot in there!”
“That’s what I thought you said!”
And then, with a flourish, he unzips the suit and steps out of it in only a pink sparkly Speedo.
“Oh, God,” I say. “Have you been waiting all day to do that?”
“Yes,” he says, and starts dancing.
And the sun rises higher in the sky and then begins its descent. We take up three tables in a crowded Mexican restaurant and sit next to someone else every time someone yells, “Switch!” We carry our plates and silverware to new chairs and ignore the annoyance of our frenzied waiters.
I sit next to Violet and hold her hand.
I sit next to Wyatt and dab glitter on his cheekbones.
I sit next to Lehna and make dinner plans for after graduation.
I sit next to Greer and tell them I loved their poem.
I sit next to Mark and say, “Let’s know each other like this for a very long time.”
I sit next to Quinn, who plants a kiss on my mouth for old times’ sake.
I sit next to a kid I don’t know. “What’s yo
ur name?” I ask. “Sky,” she says.
I sit next to Violet again. She says, “We could drive across country. We could volunteer to build houses. We could go live on a farm. I’m still thinking.”
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
NINA LaCOUR is the award-winning author of Hold Still, The Disenchantments, and Everything Leads to You. A former indie bookseller and high school English teacher, she lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her online at ninalacour.com. Or sign up for email updates here.
DAVID LEVITHAN is the New York Times bestselling author of many YA novels, including Another Day, Two Boys Kissing, Every Day, Boy Meets Boy, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (written with Rachel Cohn), and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (written with John Green). By day, he works as an editor. By night, he lives in New Jersey. Vist him online at davidlevithan.com. Or sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
St. Martin’s Press ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on Nina LaCour, click here.
For email updates on David Levithan, click here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Three
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Four
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Five
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Six
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations,
and events portrayed in this novel are either products of
the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
YOU KNOW ME WELL. Copyright © 2016 by Nina LaCour
and David Levithan. All rights reserved. For information,
address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design and illustration by Olga Grlic
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-09864-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-10332-1 (international, sold outside the
U.S., subject to rights availability)
ISBN
978-1-250-09866-5 (e-edition)
e-ISBN 9781250098665
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional,
educational, or business use. Please contact the
Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department
at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at
[email protected] First U.S. Edition: June 2016
First International Edition: June 2016
Nina LaCour, You Know Me Well
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends