“You have to be a match, don’t you? To donate bone marrow? It must be like—a blood type? Not just anybody could donate bone marrow to anybody else. . . .”
“Tink wouldn’t have wanted to ask. She’d have thought it was just too—too much to ask.”
“I’d have done it. She didn’t give me a chance!”
“I’d have done it. . . .”
The girls of Tink, Inc., joined hands to comfort one another.
“I feel so terrible about this! So kind of—lost . . .”
“Look, we can’t be sure. Like it said, the Wikipedia entry is ‘uncorroborated.’”
“I wish we could know. . . .”
“Well—we won’t know.”
“Like about Tink’s father—‘the Amazing Vanishing Man’—whoever he was, we won’t know.”
Overhead the sky was losing its light. The glowering red sun behind the clouds had begun to fade. A faint rustle of leaves across the pavement and then silence, and if Tink had been hovering near, now she had departed.
Except that night a dream came to each of us, swift as a flash of light across a wall.
And there was Tink, peering at us from a short distance, as if across an abyss, an expression of reproach on her face—(her face had a fever-tint, a smoldering glow)—it seemed that she was pissed as hell that we’d been speculating about her health behind her back—(her health was her own bloody business)—but she was forgiving, too.
Not going anywhere.
Not for a long time.
You guys would screw up totally if I did.
Just be cool—okay?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOYCE CAROL OATES has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time. Her first novel for teens, BIG MOUTH & UGLY GIRL, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, followed by the acclaimed novels FREAKY GREEN EYES; SEXY; and AFTER THE WRECK, I PICKED MYSELF UP, SPREAD MY WINGS, AND FLEW AWAY. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, Ms. Oates is also the author of many bestselling novels, including WE WERE THE MULVANEYS; BLONDE, which was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; THE FALLS; and THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. You can visit her online at www.readjoycecaroloates.com.
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CREDITS
Cover photograph © 2012 by Noukka Signe
Cover design by Alison Klapthor
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You
Copyright © 2012 by The Ontario Review, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oates, Joyce Carol.
Two or three things I forgot to tell you / Joyce Carol Oates. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When their best friend, Tink, dies from an apparent suicide, high school seniors Merissa and Nadia are alientated by their secrets, adrift from each other and from themselves.
ISBN 978-0-06-211047-3
Epub Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN: 9780062110497
Version 09062013
[1. Secrets—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Self-esteem—Fiction. 4. Cutting (Self-mutilation)—Fiction. 5. Preparatory schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.O1056Tw 2012
2012009699
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
* * *
Typography by Alison Klapthor
12 13 14 15 16 LP/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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Joyce Carol Oates, Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You
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