ALSO BY SUSIN NIELSEN
The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen
Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom
Word Nerd
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Susin Nielsen
Cover art copyright © 2014 by Minna So
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nielsen-Fernlund, Susin.
We are all made of molecules / Susin Nielsen. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Thirteen-year-old brilliant but socially-challenged Stewart and mean-girl Ashley must find common ground when, two years after Stewart’s mother died, his father moves in with his new girlfriend—Ashley’s mother, whose gay ex-husband lives in their guest house.
ISBN 978-0-553-49686-4 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-553-49687-1 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-553-49688-8 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-553-49689-5 (pbk.)
[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Bullies—Fiction. 6. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 7. Gay fathers—Fiction. 8. Moving, Household—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N565We 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014017652
eBook ISBN 9780553496888
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Heather Kelly
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v4.1
a
Contents
Cover
Also by Susin Nielsen
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One: Stewart
Chapter Two: Ashley
Chapter Three: Stewart
Chapter Four: Ashley
Chapter Five: Stewart
Chapter Six: Ashley
Chapter Seven: Stewart
Chapter Eight: Ashley
Chapter Nine: Stewart
Chapter Ten: Ashley
Chapter Eleven: Stewart
Chapter Twelve: Ashley
Chapter Thirteen: Stewart
Chapter Fourteen: Ashley
Chapter Fifteen: Stewart
Chapter Sixteen: Ashley
Chapter Seventeen: Stewart
Chapter Eighteen: Ashley
Chapter Nineteen: Stewart
Chapter Twenty: Ashley
Chapter Twenty-One: Stewart
Chapter Twenty-Two: Ashley
Chapter Twenty-Three: Stewart
Chapter Twenty-Four: Ashley
Chapter Twenty-Five: Stewart
Chapter Twenty-Six: Ashley
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Stewart
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Ashley
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Stewart
Chapter Thirty: Ashley
Chapter Thirty-One: Stewart
Chapter Thirty-Two: Ashley
Chapter Thirty-Three: Stewart
Chapter Thirty-Four: Ashley
Chapter Thirty-Five: Stewart
Chapter Thirty-Six: Ashley
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Stewart
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Ashley
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Stewart
Chapter Forty: Ashley
Chapter Forty-One: Stewart
Chapter Forty-Two: Ashley
Chapter Forty-Three: Stewart
Chapter Forty-Four: Ashley
Chapter Forty-Five: Stewart
Chapter Forty-Six: Ashley
Chapter Forty-Seven: Stewart
Chapter Forty-Eight: Ashley
Chapter Forty-Nine: Stewart
Acknowledgments
About the Author
TO OSKAR—BOY, DID DAD AND I HIT THE JACKPOT.
I HAVE ALWAYS wanted a sister.
A brother, not so much. I like symmetry, and I always felt that a sister would create the perfect quadrangle or “family square,” with the X chromosomes forming two sides and the Ys forming the rest.
When I bugged my parents, they would say, “Stewart, we already have the perfect child! How could we do any better than you?” It was hard to argue with their logic.
Then one day, when I had just turned ten, I overheard a private conversation between them. I was in my room building my birthday present, an enormous Lego spaceship, without using instructions, because I have very good spatial abilities. My mom and dad were downstairs, but I could hear their voices clearly through the heating vent.
“Leonard,” I heard my mom say, “Stewart might finally get his wish.” I put down my Lego pieces and moved closer to the vent. “I haven’t had my period in two months. I’m chubbing up around the middle. I’m tired all the time….”
“You think you’re pregnant?” I heard my dad say.
“I do.”
I couldn’t help myself. “FINALLY!” I yelled through the vent. “BEST BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER!”
The next day, Mom made an appointment with her doctor.
But it wasn’t a baby growing inside her. It was cancer. It had started in her ovaries, and by the time they caught it, it had spread.
She died a year and three months later.
Now I’m thirteen, and I still miss her like crazy, because she was a quality human being. When I was seven, my dad and I bought her a mug for her birthday that read WORLD’S BEST MOM, and I actually believed there was only one mug like it on the planet, and that it had been made just for her.
I don’t like to talk a lot about the year she was sick. Or the year after she died. My dad is also quality and he did his best, and I like to think that I am quality and so I did my best, too. But it was really hard because we were missing one-third of our family.
We had been like an equilateral triangle.
Mom was the base that held up the whole structure. When we lost her, the other two sides just collapsed in on each other.
We were very, very sad. My therapist, Dr. Elizabeth Moscovich, told me early on in our sessions that a part of us will always be sad, and that we will have to learn to live with it. At first I thought she wasn’t a very good therapist, because if she was good she should be able to cure me. But after a while I realized that the opposite was true: she’s an excellent therapist, because she tells it like it is.
Dr. Elizabeth Moscovich also says that just because you feel sad sometimes, it doesn’t mean you can’t also be happy, which at first might sound like a serious contradiction. But it’s true. For instance, I can still be happy when Dad and I see a ball game at Nat Bailey Stadium. I can still be happy when I am kicking my best friend Alistair’s butt at Stratego. And when Dad and I adopted Schrödinger the cat from the SPCA last year, I wasn’t just happy; I was over the moon.
Of course, Schrödinger’s not even close to a replacement for my mom. He can’t have good conversations; he can’t cook my favorite from-scratch chicken fingers; he can’t give me back tickles or kiss my forehead at night. But he needs me, and I need him. He needs me to feed him and cuddle him and scoop his poops. I need him to talk to, even though he never talks back. And I need him to sleep by my head at night, because then I don’t
feel alone.
So when Dad started to date Caroline Anderson a year after Mom died, I mostly understood. Caroline is Dad’s Schrödinger. He needs her and she needs him. It doesn’t mean he isn’t still sad sometimes, because he is. But it means he can put the sad on hold for bigger periods of time, and this is a good thing. For a long time he was Sad Dad twenty-four-seven, and I was Sad Stewart twenty-four-seven, and together we were Sad Squared, and it was just a big black hole of sadness.
Caroline and my dad have worked together in the newsroom for almost ten years. They’d always got along, but it wasn’t until they were both single that they started to notice each other in that way. Caroline’s husband left around the time my mom died. She is a divorcée. I’d met her a few times when Mom was still alive, at Dad’s work parties. And of course I see her on TV all the time. I like her, and she likes me. Even better, she liked my mom, and I know the feeling was mutual.
But most important of all, she loves my dad. I can see it in the way she looks at him all google-eyed, and he looks at her the same way. Sometimes it makes my stomach hurt when I think about my mom, and how, if things had been different, she would be getting Dad’s google-eyes, but as Dr. Elizabeth Moscovich has pointed out, I can’t live in the past. Caroline makes my dad happy, and this is a good thing.
Best of all, she has a daughter. Her name is Ashley, and she is one year older than me. I have only met Ashley a few times. She is very pretty, but I think she is also possibly hard of hearing, because when I try to talk to her, she either walks away or turns up the volume on the TV really loud.
Maybe she’s just shy.
And now we are moving in with them. Dad and Caroline broke the news last month. Dad and I and Schrödinger are leaving our house in North Vancouver and moving into Caroline and Ashley’s house in Vancouver, on Twenty-Second between Cambie and Main. They told Ashley and me separately, so I don’t know her reaction, but I am 89.9 percent happy with the news.
“Eighty-nine point nine?” Dr. Elizabeth Moscovich asked me at our final session last week. “What about the other ten point one percent?”
I confessed to her that that part is made up of less positive emotions. We made a list, and on the list were words like anxiety and guilt. Dr. Elizabeth Moscovich told me this was perfectly normal. After all, we’re leaving the house I spent my entire life in, the one Mom and Dad bought together a year before I was born. Now Dad has sold the house to a young couple with a baby, which means there is no turning back. We’re bringing a lot of stuff with us, but we can’t bring the mosaic stepping-stones my mom made that line the path in the backyard, or the flowers she planted, or her molecules, which I know still float through the air, because why else can I feel her presence all the time? It is what less scientifically minded people would call a “vibe,” and our house, even this long after her death, is still full to bursting with Mom’s vibe.
I worry a little bit about that. Where will her vibe go when we are gone? Will it find its way to our new home, like those animals that walked hundreds of miles to find their owners in The Incredible Journey? Or will it get lost on the way?
And also I am anxious because I don’t know how Ashley feels about this merger of our family and hers. I don’t expect her to be 89.9 percent excited. I just hope she’s at least 65 percent excited. I can work with 65 percent.
This is not how I wanted my wish to come true. This is not how I would have chosen to become a quadrangle. I would far, far rather still be a triangle if it meant that my mom was alive. But since that is a scientific impossibility, I am trying to look on the bright side.
I have always wanted a sister.
And I’m about to get one.
MY FAMILY IS FUBAR.
That’s the word my part-time friend Claudia used to describe her own family at school yesterday. I said I didn’t have a clue what that meant, and she said, “That makes sense, ’cause you’re clueless.” Then she told me it’s a military term. It’s short for “Effed Up Beyond All Recognition,” except in the military, they don’t say “effed.”
See, Claudia has been in a so-called blended family for a few years now. She has a wicked stepfather and two snotty-nosed little half sisters. So she totally gets the insanity that is about to happen to me.
I am only just-turned-fourteen, so Claudia says I have to wait another two years before I can hire a lawyer and get unconstipated. Wait. That’s not right. I keep having to look it up. I mean emancipated. According to Claudia, it means you can divorce your parents and be free of them for good. Claudia wants to divorce her family, too. So even though she’s a little chunky around the middle and doesn’t wash her hair enough and is not even close to my social status, she does kind of get what I’m going through.
What really bugs me, though, is that my family wasn’t always FUBAR. For twelve and a half years it was perfect. My dad works at an advertising agency, and my mom anchors the local evening news. They are both very good-looking for old people, and I’m not being arrogant but just stating a fact when I say I inherited the best from both of them. We have an almost-new silver Volvo station wagon, and until a year and a half ago we took a trip to Maui every March break. We have a big modern house with another, miniature house in the backyard that’s called a laneway home. Laneway homes are all the rage in Vancouver. They’re built beside the alleys that run behind our houses, where a garage would normally go. We had ours built just before my world came crashing down around my feet. My parents thought that maybe they would rent it out for a few years, then I could live in it if I went to university in Vancouver, even though my ninth-grade counselor says I need to “face the cold, hard truth” because a C average will not get me into university.
Again, I am just stating a fact when I say that my friends were jealous of me and my life. And I couldn’t blame them in the slightest. I would have been jealous of my life, too, if it hadn’t already been mine.
Then, a year and a half ago, my dad sat my mom down and said the two words that tore our family to shreds.
“I’m gay.”
None of my friends know that part. Not even my best friend, Lauren. I just told her my parents split because they were fighting all the time.
’Cause, see, there are Certain People who have this idea that I’m not a nice person. This is totally untrue and false and a lie. But Certain People think I’m a Snot (at least, that’s what some jerk wrote on my locker in eighth grade). Claudia told me Certain People were actually pleased when my parents split up, like I somehow deserved a little pain. I guess it is somewhat partially halfway true that I have made a few comments over the years about other people’s families (like, I might have told Violet Gustafson her mother was a skank before Violet broke my nose, which has fortunately healed so well you can hardly notice), but my comments were misunderstood. When I said that to Violet, I meant it more as an observation than an insult. But Violet and her friend Phoebe didn’t see it that way, so now I call them Violent and Feeble behind their backs, which I personally think is quite clever.
So I didn’t get an ounce of sympathy from anyone when my parents split. In fact, I got a lot of smirks from Certain People when they found out. Even Lauren’s sympathy seemed awfully phony, which I admit really hurt. That’s why there is no way I’m telling anyone the gay part. Not because Certain People are gayists (although I’m sure some of them are), but because they would love the fact that my so-called perfect life was built on one gigantic lie.
I guess, if I’m totally one hundred percent honest, I’m a bit gayist, too. I didn’t think I was. I mean, I love Geoffrey, my mom’s hair-and-makeup guy in the newsroom, and he is gay. And I see gay people on my favorite TV shows, and they seem cheerful and snarky and fun to be around.
But it’s different when your dad suddenly announces he is one. There is nothing cheerful or fun about that. It opens up a lot of questions. Questions that I don’t really want to know the answers to. Questions like: Did you ever really love us? Or was that a lie, too?
?
??
MY DAD TOLD MY mom he was gay on a Tuesday. By Saturday he had moved out.
Not to an apartment downtown. Not to Siberia, as I’d suggested.
Nope. He moved approximately six feet away from us, into our laneway house.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My newly gay dad couldn’t afford to get his own place unless he and Mom sold the house, which they both agreed would be too hard on me. So their genius solution: let him live in our backyard. Like, if I look out our kitchen window, I look into his kitchen window.
At first I figured it was just temporary. I figured Mom and I would bond over our hatred of Dad, and pretty soon our combined anger would force him to move out, and we would never have to see him again.
No such luck. Not only is he still living there, but Mom totally betrayed me. First, she just couldn’t stay mad at Dad. They are actually “working on being friends” now!!!! Second, she started dating her producer, Leonard Inkster, a year ago, which I am pretty sure breaks all kinds of workplace rules. And third—as if tearing out my heart and smashing it to the ground repeatedly wasn’t enough—my mom has asked Leonard to move in with us. And Leonard doesn’t come alone. He comes with his midget-egghead-freakazoid of a son.
Oh my God. Their moving van is pulling up right now.
I hate my mom.
I hate my dad.
I hate Leonard.
I hate his kid.
I hate my life.
Two more years till I can get unconstipated.
MY DAD AND I moved in all our things in just under two hours. We were fast because we’d already put a lot of stuff into a storage locker last week. I wasn’t very happy about this, but Dad reminded me that Caroline already has a house full of furniture, and we can’t have two of everything. This makes a lot of sense on a practical level, and Dad and I are both very practical. But it is an interesting biological conundrum when one organ—in this case, my brain—tells me one thing, and another organ—in this case, my heart—tells me another.
So I cannot tell a lie: it didn’t feel good, filling up that locker with the things that represented our entire life with Mom. Like the Formica kitchen table with gold sparkles where the three of us sat for most of our meals. Or the couch with the red-and-yellow flowers where Mom lay when she had bad days, trying to knit if she had the energy. Or the coffee table with circular stains all over it because Mom didn’t believe in coasters. I got a little choked up when Dad closed the door, even though he promised me we could visit anytime we want.