You Are Not Here Read online

  My heart races as I write those eight words.

  I think about ripping up the paper

  and rewriting something less risky,

  but don’t.

  I take a deep breath,

  take his note,

  and he takes mine.

  After hanging out for a little while,

  I head home.

  Partly because I don’t know anyone there

  besides Ethan and Lou.

  But mostly because I’m dying to read the note.

  I can feel it in my back pocket.

  It is an itch on my skin

  that I have to scratch.

  The farther I walk from Ethan’s house,

  the more the itch begins to burn.

  I make it three blocks before I stop

  and take the note out of my pocket.

  As I unfold it, my heart pounds.

  I’m excited to see what it says.

  I hope that it’s about me,

  but I’m scared

  that it will be something dumb, like

  I wish for world peace,

  and I will be humiliated.

  And then the note is open

  and I am reading it

  and it says: To kiss you.

  And before I realize it,

  I am running.

  Running

  the three blocks back to Ethan’s house,

  and then I am through his front door,

  scanning the faces, looking for him.

  And then I am out the back door,

  and on the back deck.

  I see Lou and ask if he’s seen Ethan.

  He says he saw him in the backyard.

  And then I am down the stairs,

  and searching for Ethan’s face again.

  He doesn’t see me coming at first,

  but when he does, he looks confused.

  In one quick motion,

  I put my hand on his chest,

  push him into the shadows under the deck,

  and then I am kissing him.

  And it is amazing.

  Just the right mix

  of hard and soft.

  After a little while,

  I can feel him smiling,

  and I pull back.

  “You cheated,” he says.

  “You didn’t wait until you got home.”

  “You didn’t look?”

  “No. Should I look now?”

  “Yes.”

  He reads the note, smiles,

  then puts one hand on the side of my face,

  the other on my neck,

  and kisses me.

  It is warm

  and it is real.

  The death book wants me

  to write a letter to Brian in heaven.

  Dear Brian,

  The last few months

  have been a roller coaster.

  Meeting you

  and starting to get to know you

  was really exciting.

  But there were limits

  on how close you let me get.

  And I guess I did a bit of the same.

  When we were together,

  I was willing to take whatever you gave.

  And after you died

  I was able to see

  how little that was.

  I deserved

  and still deserve

  more.

  I’m not sorry or regretful

  about us.

  There were good times.

  I learned things about myself.

  And it also made me see that memories—

  real or imagined—

  can’t make me whole.

  I’ll never know

  why you were the way you were.

  I’ll never know if it was because of your dad.

  Or if it was because you didn’t

  like me enough.

  But I’m going to have to learn

  to be okay with not knowing.

  Brian, I want you to be at peace

  and I want that for myself too.

  And I don’t think I’ll get that

  if I keep visiting you like I have been.

  It keeps me from growing.

  So I’m writing to you

  to tell you that I’m not

  going to come around for a while.

  I’ll still think of you.

  You’ll still be the first guy

  I ever really cared about.

  But I’ve got to let you go.

  Now what?

  It’s not like I can look up

  the address for heaven in the White Pages

  and put a stamp on this

  and drop it in the mail.

  I know this letter was for me.

  But I still want to do something with it.

  The death book suggests

  that I fold it into a paper airplane

  or put it in a bottle and send it out to sea.

  But I have another idea.

  It feels a little ridiculous

  to be standing at Brian’s grave

  when I just wrote that I wouldn’t

  be coming here anymore.

  It feels very ridiculous

  to be standing at Brian’s grave

  and holding a soup spoon.

  But leaving the letter here,

  in the ground above Brian,

  seems like the right place.

  The dirt is still a bit uneven,

  but now there are lots of wisps of grass

  sprouting up from it.

  I crouch down and lean forward

  as if I am about to whisper Brian a secret,

  and begin to dig.

  After about ten scoops,

  I roll the letter up

  and drop it into the hole.

  I fill the hole back in,

  stand up, step back,

  and walk away.

  I had to be ready.

  I wasn’t.

  I had to want my life back.

  I didn’t.

  But I do now.

  I can’t flip a switch

  and make things go back to normal.

  But I can try.

  I need to remind myself

  to make phone calls,

  to seek out my friends.

  So after staring at my contacts list,

  I finally hit SEND.

  “Hey, Maris. What’s up?” I ask.

  “Hi! I’m racing to get to yoga.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, we can—”

  “Do you want to come?”

  My instinct is to say no.

  Or to lie and say I have plans

  so I can spend the afternoon in bed.

  But I fight it.

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll go.”

  “Cool. Pick you up in five.”

  It’s been a while since I’ve done yoga.

  At first everything hurts,

  is stiff,

  and all the talk

  about heart centers,

  energy, and breath

  seems so strange—

  not at all where my thoughts have been.

  During tree pose,

  I try to clear my mind

  and balance on one foot,

  but I wobble, I tip.

  The instructor says,

  “Breathe easy. Maintain focus.”

  But I can’t seem to do either—

  especially since Marissa is watching me

  out of the corner of her eye, grinning.

  I don’t know how, but she manages

  to maintain the pose perfectly,

  even while she laughs at me.

  This makes me laugh

  and wobble even more.

  When we go into pigeon pose

  I feel a sharp pain in my thigh.

  So, just like the instructor said,

  I stop and go into child’s pose.

  I fold over, my chest on my thighs,

  my arms at my sides,

&nb
sp; and feel the weight

  of my body

  sinking into the floor.

  And just breathe

  breathe

  breathe.

  Acknowledgments

  I am so grateful to my mother, father, and extended

  family (the Bennetts, Dosiks, and Greenes) for their support

  and encouragement; my editor, David Levithan, and the

  other geniuses at Scholastic for their enthusiasm; my agent,

  the illustrious Barry Goldblatt; Judy Goldschmidt, for

  brainstorming with me; and finally, Dr. Stefania Giobbe

  for her COD expertise.

  Special shout-outs to Jessica Schutz, for being a super sister

  and for helping me work out the kinks; Annica Lydenberg

  for being my first and favorite reader; and Amy Wilson,

  Emily Dauber, Emily Haisley, Emily Klein, Lauren Cecil,

  and Nicole Duncan for their unwavering friendship.

  And finally, to my Penguin posse: I never take for

  granted that I get to spend five days a week with you.

  You are the kindest, funniest, most creative bunch

  of people I have ever met.

  The “death book” is based, in part, on two fantastic books:

  I Will Remember You by Laura Dower and Look at the Sky:

  Death in Cultures Around the World by Shawn Haley.

  About the Author

  SAMANTHA SCHUTZ is the author of the acclaimed memoir I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, which was a New York Public Library Best Book for Teens and a Voices of Youth Advocates Poetry Pick. You Are Not Here is her first novel. Samantha lives and works in New York City as a children’s book editor. For more about her, please visit www.samanthaschutz.net.

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  Edited by David Levithan

  Where We Are, What We See

  Edited by David Levithan

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  This Is PUSH

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  Copyright

  Copyright © 2010 by Samantha Schutz

  Cover photo © Oscar Gutierrez/iStockphoto

  Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi

  All rights reserved. Published by PUSH, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  First edition, October 2010

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 publisher.

  E-ISBN 978-0-545-32881-4