Definitely—whatever you do, kids—do not do drugs. They can lead you to the pinnacle of the world. They can give you everything. But beware, because…because…because…
Yeah, that’s ringing a little hollow, isn’t it?
So let’s stop with the pretense and tell kids the truth.
Hey, kids. Drugs are like every other risk you could take in life. For instance, you could save your money, get a loan that you’ll have to personally guarantee, and start your own business. If you do, chances are—sorry, kids—you’ll fail. Yeah, I started my own business in my parents’ garage at nineteen. But my parents backed me with three hundred grand, and that might have had something to do with my subsequent success.
You? You’d never get out of the garage.
You could go to college. Go ahead, kids. Take on a hundred grand in debt. Graduate. And then ask yourself why the kid in your class whose parents paid for everything has a better job than you, advances faster, goes further. Watch him 20 years later—the year you’re making the final payment on your own education, when your kid is signing up for a million bucks in educational loans (gotta love inflation, kids—it will never be on your side), and his kid is going to school with everything paid for.
Drugs are like everything else in life: they’re a roulette wheel that is slanted precipitously towards those of us who are already predisposed to win. We have golden tickets, and everything we do turns out all right.
So here’s the truth, kids. If you’re not already winning, don’t do drugs. They’ll eat you up and spit you out. You won’t win the Tour de France. You won’t make a hundred and ninety billion dollars. You’ll lose. And when you lose, it won’t be at the petty cost of a few days spent in the hospital. You won’t suffer through an embarrassing interview with one of the most powerful women in the world.
You’ll lose everything and nobody will even notice. Your tickets are aluminum. You weren’t born holding gold, and chances are, you’ll never touch it.
Now, as it turns out, I promised to write a soul-searching opinion piece telling people not to do drugs. But let’s face it. Drugs aren’t—and have never been—the real problem. (Except for heroin. Nobody ever accomplished anything on heroin, not even with a golden ticket, so kids, if you have any sense at all you will leave that crap right where you found it.)
And so I have to question the utility of browbeating small children about using drugs. I think that instead of telling them what they should do, I should let them tell me.
Here I am, holding this ticket made of gold. It bought me the world. If I wanted to, I could keep cashing it in for a higher score. It’s a little tarnished, yes—but gold is gold.
Given everything I’ve just told you, kids, what do you think I should be doing?
Adam Reynolds announced his permanent retirement as CEO of Cyclone Systems early this morning. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.
Hold Me: Excerpt
Liked this excerpt? You can find out more about Hold Me here.
Other Books by Courtney
The Cyclone Series
Trade Me
Hold Me
Find Me
Courtney’s historical romances
The Worth Saga
Once Upon a Marquess
Her Every Wish
After the Wedding
The Devil Comes Courting
The Brothers Sinister Series
The Governess Affair
The Duchess War
A Kiss for Midwinter
The Heiress Effect
The Countess Conspiracy
The Suffragette Scandal
Talk Sweetly to Me
The Turner Series
Unveiled
Unlocked
Unclaimed
Unraveled
Not in any series
A Right Honorable Gentleman
What Happened at Midnight
The Lady Always Wins
The Carhart Series
This Wicked Gift
Proof by Seduction
Trial by Desire
Author’s Note
The ideas that formed the backbone of this book go way, way back with me.
When I first consciously had the idea for this book, I realized that in order to make the premise work, I would need to have a huge company—the kind of company that had a market capitalization of several hundred billion dollars. As you can imagine, companies that meet that criterion are few in number: Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Google… There are more, of course, but it’s just not a very large list, all things considered.
Add in that the plot also required the company to be run by someone (or, rather, someones) who had acquired something of a cult of personality, and the number of similar companies gets even smaller.
And so I want to go on the record as saying that despite the inevitable comparisons that will be drawn, I really, really, did not set out to make Cyclone sound so much like Apple. When I first got the idea for this book, it was sometime in early 2013. Apple had not yet announced a smartwatch, and while there were rumors, they were distant rumors.
I said in the beginning that any similarities are coincidental. A more accurate statement is probably that the similarities that do exist are the result of the dictates of reality. There are only so many believable ways to set up a company that large, and even fewer to have one that is dominated by a particular personality. Adam Reynolds is my own invention. He’s not supposed to be a stand-in for any particular CEO, and to the extent that he has traits that may remind you of someone (dropping out of college, for instance), those are traits that are widely shared (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg) by multiple entrepreneurs.
I invented the fundamental traits of Fernanda/the Cyclone Vortex before Apple announced their own smartwatch. I, personally, would rather own a Vortex (sorry, Apple!) but then, I have the benefit of being able to make things up without having to solve any engineering difficulties.
I made up the details of Fernanda on my own. But as completely awesome as Blake’s car may sound, I did not make up anything about it. It’s all true. The car is quiet. The handles extend out toward you. It turns on automatically when you sit in it. I could add several hundred other details. I test-drove a Tesla to get a feel for it, and this was a dangerous thing to do. I had to actively restrain myself from turning this book into a Tesla love-fest. A friend of mine told me I should ask Elon Musk to sponsor the book, and I considered pitching the idea for about two seconds, which is two seconds longer than I have ever considered any potential sponsorship idea before. (This book is not sponsored by Tesla Motors.) (I have no desire to ever have my books sponsored by any corporations, whether real or imaginary.)
If I had 1.4 billion dollars, I would absolutely buy a Tesla. (You don’t need 1.4 billion dollars.)
I say I got the idea for this book in 2013, but there are aspects of it that have been around for longer.
I don’t discuss the precise contours of Blake’s eating disorder in the book, mainly because this is not a book about eating disorders; it’s a book where a character happens to have one. But for those who are wondering, Blake is not anorexic: He’s not obsessed with either his weight or his figure. And his particular eating disorder has a different presentation than anorexia normally would.
I got the idea for an athletic protagonist with an eating disorder in late 2012, when I was reading Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race. The book talks a great deal about the Tour de France and the many ways that athletes attempted to win. Obviously, much of it is given over to a discussion of Lance Armstrong. But he also talks about weight. At one point in the book, he states, quite plainly, that he thought all the cyclists around had eating disorders. This stuck in my head, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since.
Eating disorders in male athletes are not well understood. For female athletes, there has been a lot of research on what is called the Female Athlete Triad, an eating disorder that arises when an a
thlete (typically an endurance athlete) does not take in enough food to cover her training. This often results in a loss of bone mass, a reduction or even a cessation in menstrual periods, and other energy deficiencies. Overtraining in this way does not always result in significant weight loss—that’s why it’s a little harder to detect.
Female Athlete Triad is obviously something that people initially assumed only applied to women. In recent years, however, there’s been a growing discussion of whether there’s a similar presentation for men (many think there is) and how to discover it (it’s harder, because men don’t have periods, and so they’re lacking that particular canary in the coal mine). In Blake’s case, his symptoms include the stress fracture he suffers at the race he runs in Spain, among other things. It’s complex, with multiple psychological factors that need to be addressed. Luckily, he’s going to be seeing a great therapist.
Another piece of this book—Tina’s background—came from a time much earlier than Tyler Hamilton’s book. Anyone who has ever had to read any number of immigration cases has probably run into a case involving someone who practiced Falun Gong. Falun Gong is a series of exercises, coupled with some teachings, that was popular in China in the 1990s. It was, in fact, potentially too popular, and the Communist government banned it.
Protests followed; one of those protests involved ten thousand practitioners showing up, unannounced and unexpected, in Beijing. Needless to say, this freaked out the central government, and they quashed the practice with greater vigor.
The torture that Tina’s father suffered is actually mild compared to what has been reported. The US State Department issued a report describing some of the practices; you can read it here. If anything, I’ve understated what could potentially happen to practitioners of Falun Gong in China. Some of the worst reports suggest that those who refuse to recant are not only executed arbitrarily, but their organs are harvested for medical purposes.
The immigration problem with Falun Gong, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. Anyone who has studied immigration law knows that it is a harsh business. Potential asylum seekers are expected to corroborate their stories—but it’s hard to get evidence that the government has put you in a secret camp. (I’ve seen it go down both ways—person A gets deported because there’s no evidence that he was tortured in a secret Communist reeducation camp; person B presents evidence that states that he was held in a reeducation camp, and then the immigration judge decides the evidence is fraudulent, because why would the government admit that it held someone in a secret camp?)
(I also want to point out that this cuts both ways: the fact that there is rarely evidence of horrible government shenanigans means that unscrupulous people seeking asylum may choose to claim that they’re practitioners of Falun Gong simply because their stories cannot be easily disproven.) The end result is that a lot of people who have claimed to practice Falun Gong have been deported.
I first heard about Falun Gong when I was working on the Ninth Circuit, where a substantial portion of the docket is composed of immigration cases, and for some reason, that inherent dilemma—damned if you don’t have evidence, damned if you do—has stuck with me.
There’s another piece of Tina that goes even farther back.
I have a lot of memories of Berkeley. One of my strongest ones, though, is this. My fellow physical chemistry GSIs in the chemistry department all taught Chem 1A in our first year as graduate students.
Teaching Chem 1A, at least the year I did so, was an exercise in helplessness. Our sections were scripted; the class skipped some very basic concepts in chemistry—things like balancing equations and dimensional analysis—that are foundational, on the theory that anyone going to Cal would already know.
Well, they didn’t all know. The students of mine who didn’t know those things were—inevitably—the ones who did not come from rich areas. They had science teachers in high school who taught gym class (nothing wrong with that—except if the gym teacher doesn’t know science). Our sections were scripted; instead of covering those basics as instructors, we had to do terrible things like show our students pictures of random things and have them talk about what they meant.
(To this day, these pictures still make me want to beat someone over the head. Y’all, any one-state system has the same entropy as any other one-state system. Stop teaching our kids lies in lieu of balancing equations! Obviously, I still feel a fiery rage when I let myself think about this.)
All the GSIs talked about it: The students who were at the greatest risk in our classes weren’t the ones who worked the least, or even the ones who most lacked aptitude. They were the ones who didn’t come from school districts that had money. They were poor and more likely to be immigrants or people of color.
Perhaps the greatest stretch of my imagination in this whole book is the one that nobody but me will notice. To this day, my deepest regrets are for those students who were set up to struggle from before the day they enrolled. The playing field was never equal. I wanted to write someone who succeeded despite the fact that everything in the system was set up against her.
I wish I’d been able to do more.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to everyone who listened when I told them about my idea for this book, and told me it was not a horrible idea to write it: Ann Aguirre, Tessa Dare, Sherry Thomas, Brenna Aubrey, Rawles Lumumba, Carey Baldwin, Leigh LaValle… I’m sure there are others on this list. Writing in a new subgenre is a scary thing, and this book terrified me on many, many levels.
I’m grateful to the many people who helped me get this book together on a tight turnaround: Robin Harders and Briana Lambert for editing, Martha Trachtenberg for copy editing, Julie Naughton, Rawles Lumumba, and Rebecca Hill for last minute proofing. Thanks also to Professor Robert van Houweling, who sent me his syllabus for PS 1, and the City of Berkeley, for not giving me a ticket when my meter had totally expired when I went to do my campus walk around.
I pulled on years of listening to people in my family talk about living in China to write this book. Tami, TJ, Mom, and Dad were all ridiculously helpful. And Tami answered last-minute questions about Mandarin at…um…the last minute.
Mr. Milan was very excited to finally know something about legitimate medical procedures that would actually be used in the book, and to be able to have actual input other than suggesting that everyone get chlamydia or syphilis. He thinks the cath lab (where they stick a catheter in your femoral artery and pump you full of dye so they can observe what’s going on in your heart) is awesome and you cannot imagine how excited he was that someone actually got cathed in the book. He answered lots and lots of questions. Like: how long does it take to cath someone? How can you tell if someone’s having a heart attack? At what point would you suspect and/or not suspect cocaine usage? What signs do you have that someone is using cocaine? I did not ask him all of these questions, but he answered them all anyway. Seriously, you have no idea how much he likes the cath lab. He is reading this over my shoulder as I write, and he wants me to drop a link to this YouTube video about cathing people. He thinks it’s hilarious. I, as a normal citizen, find it frightening.
Usually I thank people and say that any mistakes are my own, but I’m married to Mr. Milan and told him all these details three times, so if he missed something and it ended up wrong, it’s because he wasn’t paying attention. Feel free to blame him if something is off. (I’m kidding.) (I’m not kidding.)
Sean B. at the Denver Tesla not only let me test drive the car even though I told him that I was never going to buy one, he answered innumerable weird questions that nobody else had ever asked. Questions like, “What happens if I’m driving down the road and I throw my electronic key fob out the window?”
And as for my AK co-clerks…you know that I can never thank you guys enough. This book is dedicated to you for a reason.
Finally, if you’ve gotten this far—thank you for taking a chance on a new book in a new subgenre for me. I hope you enjoyed the
ride.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
An op-ed by Adam Reynolds
Excerpt from Hold Me
Other Books by Courtney Milan
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or companies or products, is purely coincidental.
Trade Me: © 2015 by Courtney Milan.
Cover design © Courtney Milan.