Nick and June Were Here Read online

  ALSO BY SHALANDA STANLEY

  Drowning Is Inevitable

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products 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 © 2019 by Shalanda Stanley

  Cover photographs copyright © 2019 by Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stanley, Shalanda, author.

  Title: Nick and June were here / Shalanda Stanley.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | Summary: Told in two voices, Nick, a sometimes artist who steals cars to support his aunt, and June, who has been hiding her symptoms of schizophrenia, run away together.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018026942 (print) | LCCN 2018034010 (ebook) | ebook ISBN 9780399556609 | ISBN 9780399556586 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399556593 (glb)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Runaways—Fiction. | Schizophrenia—Fiction. | Mental illness—Fiction. | Automobile theft—Fiction. | Artists—Fiction. | Love—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S735 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.S735 Nic 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Shalanda Stanley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my mother, who read to me since birth

  and always changed the endings

  when she knew I needed her to

  It was midnight and we lay on our backs in the bed of Bethany’s truck. We were in the middle of a cornfield and it was after harvesttime, so it was just the three of us and the leftover broken stalks. There was supposed to be a meteor shower that night. We’d been watching them together since we were in elementary school, back when we’d watch from my trampoline with my parents sitting on the swing on the porch, back when we thought the meteors were shooting stars and we’d make wishes.

  Nick checked the time on his phone. “It should start any minute now,” he said.

  That was his job, to check the time. Nick made sure things happened when they were supposed to.

  The night was clear and the sky was so huge it felt infinite, so big that I felt the weight of it.

  The world feels too big. Sometimes the world feels so big you can’t breathe.

  My breath hitched and my fingers jerked, reaching for the edge of my notebook that lay next to me. I never let it get too far away. I’d gotten better at not reacting when it happened, but I had to write it down before I forgot the words. I sat up.

  The world feels too big. Sometimes the world feels so big you can’t breathe, I wrote.

  “Hey, lay back down,” Nick said.

  Not yet. “What time is it?” I asked him.

  “12:03,” he said.

  12:03, I wrote.

  Nick and Bethany didn’t ask what I was writing. They were used to my documenting. They were used to everything about me. Bethany and I had been together since birth, born only a day apart. She came first. Nick had been in my class every year since kindergarten, but we didn’t start spending time with each other until the fifth grade, when we were assigned to work as partners on a social studies project. Our project was called “Cotton: Then and Now.” It was a long and arduous task. Secrets were spilled. Bonds were forged.

  Bethany nudged me. “Is it happening again?” she asked.

  I nodded. It happened more and more.

  She pulled me down to them. “Keep your eyes on the stars,” she said. “They are so beautiful.”

  They are so beautiful.

  She felt me flinch and turned to me. “It’s okay,” she said.

  They are so beautiful they are SO beautiful.

  “I’m with you,” she told me. Her breath on my cheek was warm and smelled like coconut. Bethany always smelled like sunscreen and reminded me of summer.

  And she was right. The stars were beautiful. I imagined what Earth would look like if I was on a star and looking down at it.

  The world feels too big.

  I imagined sitting on the star and looking down at Earth. I’d hold up my thumb and close one eye so the whole world disappeared behind it.

  I squeezed the notebook to my chest. Sometimes I could just hold it and feel better. Nick scooted closer to me so that his leg touched mine. He knew when I needed him to touch me.

  A year ago, things had changed between us. One day, every time I looked up, he was looking back at me, and then I caught him drawing my face in the margins of his history notebook. He drew all the time, but he’d never drawn me before. When I asked him about it, he said, “I just feel better when I’m looking at you.”

  His dad had gone to prison two years earlier and Nick had been sad ever since, so I was glad something was making him feel better. We started spending more and more time together, just the two of us. He’d come over and we’d sit on my porch swing. My parents didn’t know what to think of it, so I’d bring a textbook outside with me. We could all pretend it was just homework. Nick would even ask me a question or two. At first we sat on opposite ends of the swing, but every day he’d sit a little closer, until we sat so close that our legs touched. Once he pulled a sucker from his pocket. It was root-beer-flavored, our favorite, but there was only one. We shared it, back and forth from his mouth to mine. That was how things changed between us. It was a few gained inches on a front-porch swing and that sucker. He told me things he’d never told anyone, the kinds of things you’d confess only in the dark. It was a powerful feeling, and I was addicted.

  He noticed things about me that others didn’t. Some were big and some were small. He noticed that the time we almost had a wreck, I covered my ears instead of closing my eyes. It was the same way with scary movies, in the everybody-is-about-to-die parts. I’d much rather see it than hear it. He knew I didn’t read books with animals in them, just in case they didn’t survive the story, and I didn’t eat yellow food, not because I thought it was gross but because yellow was my favorite color and I thought the world needed more of it, not less. After our first fight, he snuck into my house while my parents and I were out
for dinner and painted one of my bedroom walls sunlight yellow. My parents didn’t appreciate his apology like I did.

  He was the first person to realize something was wrong. He knew before I did.

  I noticed things about him, too. His pinkie finger on his right hand was crooked for reasons he couldn’t remember and he prayed before he ate, but only a soft mumble so nobody would notice. It was the same thing when he did something nice for someone. It was small gestures, so if you weren’t watching closely, you’d miss it. That was Nick. He never wanted to reveal his true self. When his mom left town with her boyfriend and he had to go live with his aunt Linda, he started saying, “I’m okay,” before anyone had a chance to ask him how he was doing.

  The first night we kissed, we were on my back porch. He reached out to touch my hand, and even though he’d touched my hand more than one million times before, this touch felt new. Everything about that night felt new—new porch, new sky—and when his eyes met mine, a brand-new Nick and June. Our lips touched and I swear to God there was an electric shock, a tiny blue light that jumped from his body to mine. He’d felt it, too, because he stumbled back. It was like the universe was sending us a message, a zap blessing. Bethany said it probably wasn’t anything so dramatic, just static electricity built up between our bodies.

  “Do you want one?” he asked me now, holding out a red Sour Patch Kid. He always saved the red ones for me.

  There was a whole section in my notebook titled “How Do You Know When Someone Loves You?” I wrote it because I was pretty sure he loved me, and not in the I’ve-known-you-all-my-life-of-course-I-love-you way but in the you-make-it-easier-to-breathe-when-you’re-around-me way. He’d showed me with his actions in a thousand different ways and I’d written down all of them. It was my proof that love was a verb.

  We worried Bethany would be weirded out by our relationship or feel left out, but she wasn’t. “I’ve seen this coming,” she said. It wasn’t unusual for her to see things before we did.

  It did change things, though. Now it was usually me and Bethany, or me and Nick. Tonight was special, to have both of them in the same place at the same time. That happened less and less, and not just because Nick and I were boyfriend and girlfriend but because Nick spent a lot of time doing other things. He’d made choices neither Bethany or I agreed with. He was following in his dad’s footsteps, like maybe if he did bad things he’d understand his dad better, or maybe if he did bad things but was still mostly good, then his dad was still mostly good, too.

  I was pretty sure his choices were leading him down a dangerous path, and I didn’t know what that meant for the three of us.

  “Pass the blanket,” Bethany said.

  It was chilly. Nick pulled a blanket across us and we waited for the show to start.

  “Would you rather eat only cold foods or hot ones?” Bethany asked.

  She didn’t like it when it was quiet for too long.

  “Cold,” Nick and I said at the same time.

  “Would you rather have the one thing you’ve always wanted and die tomorrow, or never get it and live forever?” she asked.

  “Do I know I’m never going to get it?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “If I don’t know, then I’d rather live forever, trying to get it. If I know, that changes things.”

  “I see your point,” she said.

  “Would you rather go to school naked or get a bad grade?” Nick asked.

  That one was for Bethany. She’d made all A’s our whole lives.

  “It would suck to go to school naked, but I’d totally do it.”

  “Would you rather be able to see into your own future or somebody else’s?” I asked.

  “Mine,” Bethany said.

  “I don’t want to know what’s coming for anybody,” Nick said.

  “Really?” I asked. “Not even a ten-minute glimpse, like a little heads-up?”

  “Remember that time the two of you came to a middle school dance dressed like flapper girls, because Misty Wright convinced y’all that when the invitation said ‘Dress Up,’ it meant costumes, not nice clothes?”

  Whenever would-you-rather conversations took a turn Nick didn’t like, he deflected with embarrassing memories of our childhood.

  Bethany leaned up so she could see him. “And you wore a dress because you couldn’t resist taking the invitation literally.”

  We laughed and it was the only sound for a mile.

  Nick and Bethany helped me keep the secret. They were as scared as I was, so they helped me hide it, covering for me, making excuses. “She’s just tired,” they’d say. “She’s fine,” they’d promise. We knew that once everyone knew something was wrong, it would change everything. We knew that they wouldn’t let us keep things the way they’d always been.

  You could never stop this. You’re only going to get worse, worse, worse.

  I sat up.

  You could never stop this. You’re only going to get worse, I wrote.

  “What time is it?” I asked Nick.

  “12:07,” he said.

  12:07, I wrote.

  I wrote down what happened most every time it happened, at least the times when I was sure it was happening. Sometimes it was hard to tell. I kept everything in my notebook. I’d always been a record keeper, so I was creating a timeline of the details, hoping I could make sense of what was happening.

  Nick sat up. “It’s okay,” he said.

  This was their favorite thing to tell me.

  “It’s not okay,” I said. “You don’t know what this is like.”

  “Umm, I can imagine.”

  But he said it like a question, and umm was what he said right before he lied.

  He rubbed my arm up and down, whispering close to my ear, “You don’t have to be afraid if I’m with you.” This wasn’t a question or a lie. He didn’t understand how I could be scared of anything if I was with him. He looked at me like he could see all the way inside. “It’s us against them, remember?”

  I studied his face, the tiny scar that ran through his right eyebrow. Sometimes when he said just the right thing, I focused on his flaws so I wouldn’t get tricked into thinking he was perfect.

  “There,” Bethany said, pointing.

  We turned our heads and saw the first meteor streak across the sky and then another one and another one. The sky put on a show of light and flame, and I heard the music.

  “You’re missing it,” Nick said. “Stop writing and watch.”

  The corners of his mouth turned down, but I pretended not to notice. I pretended I couldn’t hear the worry in his voice, because I had to write the song down, the one they couldn’t hear. This was the part I liked.

  There was a wistful quality to it, like the song was telling me to remember this moment. A part of me thought that this was just my imagination, that there was no music. The other part knew the truth. It was my own private orchestra, chords playing in time with the light show and building to a climax. I knew the peak was coming even though it was a song I’d never heard before. I felt the crescendo building from inside me.

  Don’t forget what tonight feels like.

  The music crashed to a stop and my heart crashed with it. The good parts never lasted long.

  Don’t forget what tonight feels like, I wrote.

  Nick scooted closer. He put his hand on top of mine so I had to stop writing. “Look,” he said.

  A meteor flew across the sky like someone had shot it out of a cannon, the tail of it sparking.

  “Make a wish,” Bethany said.

  Star light, star bright, the first star I see tonight.

  I pulled my hand out from under Nick’s and turned away from him.

  Star light, star bright, the first star I see tonight, I wrote.

/>   “What time is it?” I asked him.

  “12:13,” he said, his voice quieter.

  12:13, I wrote.

  I wish I may, I wish I might.

  I closed my eyes and wished for quiet, clamping my hands over my ears even though I knew it wouldn’t help. The sound was coming from inside me.

  Have this wish I wish tonight.

  “You’re shaking,” Bethany said. She put her arms around me like she could keep me still.

  I couldn’t stop this anymore, never could.

  This has been coming for a long time.

  The voices weren’t my first symptom.

  * * *

  Creed, Arkansas, had 5,570 people in it and forty-five churches. For a town that small, that was a lot of Jesus. There were five churches on the walk between my house and school, one with a sign that said SPIRIT-FILLED, making me wonder what was inside the other ones.

  School wasn’t a straight shot from my house. There were two lefts and two rights. A left on Raymond Street, a right on Powell, left on Walton, right on Green. Left, right, left, right, like an army march. I’d walked this path most every day, every school year since first grade. It’d been a couple of weeks now since I’d done it, though. Nick and Bethany had asked me not to walk to school anymore, not after what had happened when I’d ended up at Becky Wilkes’s house. Nothing good had ever happened at Becky’s house. I’d promised them that I’d ride with one of them, but Bethany was late and Nick wasn’t answering his phone. I didn’t drive. Three thousand two hundred eighty-seven people die in car crashes every day. There were too many variables to consider when driving and I didn’t trust myself to handle them.

  The sidewalk was busted up with too many cracks to count. I passed houses with cars on cinder blocks in the front yards and dilapidated signs advertising things I couldn’t make out, the letters rusted. Once, my cousin Tanya came to visit from Atlanta and pointed out all the wrecked parts of Creed, like I couldn’t see them. I didn’t tell her that it was a cover, that we kept the good stuff hidden so outsiders would keep driving by. If you came to Creed, we wouldn’t tell you about the color of the winter wheat fields when they were at full height, or what it felt like to stand on Purple Rock in July and turn your face to the sun. You would never know about the abandoned barn hidden in the woods where anything could happen. We kept those things secret, because Creed had a finite number of resources, and the people born here got first dibs.