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113 pages

English

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Laila Piedra doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and definitely doesn't sneak into the 21-and-over clubs on the Lower East Side. The only sort of risk Laila enjoys is the peril she writes for the characters in her stories: epic sci-fi worlds full of quests, forbidden love, and robots. Her creative writing teacher has always told her she has a special talent. But three months before graduation, Laila's number one fan is replaced by Nadiya Nazarenko, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who sees nothing at all special about Laila's writing. A growing obsession with gaining Nazarenko's approval-and fixing her first-ever failing grade-leads to a series of unexpected adventures. Soon Laila is discovering the psychedelic highs and perilous lows of nightlife, and the beauty of temporary flings and ambiguity. But with her sanity and happiness on the line, Laila must figure out if enduring the unendurable really is the only way to greatness.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	12 juin 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683352631
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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PUBLISHER S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-2872-3 eISBN 978-1-68335-263-1
Text copyright 2018 Riley Redgate Jacket illustrations copyright 2018 Nathan Burton Jacket and book design by Alyssa Nassner Cover copyright 2018 Amulet Books
Published in 2018 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
Amulet Books is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
For my kind, brilliant father. Here s another book that, regrettably, does not include steam locomotives, linguistics, wine, Irish clocks, or bird-watching.
Sorry.
1
Every day after school, she left earth for another galaxy. The launch apparatus was a pine desk in her bedroom that had been loved into ugliness, ringed with water stains and stippled by ballpoint pens. She opened her laptop there, and under the light of the screen, the desk faded, and the apartment, and the corner of Brooklyn through the window. She wrote herself away, into a city of glass tubes that crisscrossed a toxic planet, into the perforations of gently tumbling asteroids, into sunships that breached the surfaces of red giants and emerged crackling with plasma. She watched hordes of aliens catapult through wormholes toward a blue-green paradise braced for war, and she could have sworn she heard the hum of their engines.
Out there, danger wasn t something that erupted purposelessly in parking lots or at traffic intersections; it was peril , pure and moral and invigorating. Unifying. Out there, love bridged the space between planets, and betrayal risked the destruction of universes. Life was lived along a spectrum so vibrant it felt ultraviolet. How could the world outside the window seem anything but gray in comparison?
2
A hindwind caught Eden s tail. There was a shudder from her ship s flankwake to its nose. In the rearview monitor, three silver ships burst out of the white horizon behind her, heralds for ten thousand more. The entire Ta adran horde. The admiral s line had broken, and now the world was in her hands.
Eden yanked the accelerator. Her ship could still reach the enemy station, which rose like a mountain from the ice forests. Hideous prongs at its crown were accumulating a gray glow of power. A ghostly beam focused toward their sun: the Ta adran Stardrainer, poised to harvest every scrap of solar energy.
There was no time for the original plan. She could never break into the Stardrainer and unhook its wiring before it fired. But she had one final weapon: her ship, a fuel cell cutting the air at Mach 4.
Eden slammed an elbow into the rocket prop, and her ship began to scream in overload. The sun would rise tomorrow, and the day after. She realized she d known for months that she would die defending it.
Mr. Madison set down the pages. This is my favorite thing you ve written, he said.
Really? Laila asked.
Really, he said through a mouthful of soup. Speaking through soup was harder, logistically, than speaking through other foods, so this resulted in a messy splattering situation that Laila pretended not to see, because somebody had to be gentle with him. Mr. Madison was incurably self-conscious and-Laila loved him, so she was allowed to say it-an absolute pushover. To worsen things, he was small and pale and looked about thirteen years old, the human equivalent of a weed that had spent most of its life beneath a boulder. All in all, the type of teacher that kids bullied not because they wanted to do him any particular emotional harm, but because Jesus, it was right there .
Here, said Mr. Madison, with one of those stutter-y, beckoning motions that somehow looked apologetic. He leaned over his desk to return Laila s story. He d circled so many passages in blue that each paragraph looked like a map of elliptical orbits. Mr. Madison was the type of deeply involved reader who couldn t touch anything without leaving evidence. Laila always emailed him her stories, and he always handed back a copy she could hold. They d kept this ritual for almost four years.
Thanks, Laila said, but as she paged through, familiar doubts nudged her. It wasn t that she didn t trust his opinion. When it came to science fiction, Mr. Madison was even more obsessed than she was. They shared a favorite series, Moondowners , an epic space opera whose final book was set to release this fall after a five-year wait. He could out-quote her, something hardly anybody could do, even in the Moondowners forums. Not that any of this made his opinion more valid, but if she shared taste with somebody, she would ve liked to think they had high standards, and if Mr. Madison had high standards, he couldn t consist entirely of checkmarks and exclamation points.
You re not just saying that, right? she asked.
He stopped eating, his eyelids aflutter over his watery eyes. The panicked blink.
Laila hurried to diminish the blow. It s just, every story can t be your favorite, right?
Oh, he said, mollified. Hmm. I guess I- Mr. Madison chuckled. He had a nasal little laugh that obviously embarrassed him. He never laughed during class, just smiled widely and let his narrow shoulders tremble in silence. If you walked down the hall, you could see a half dozen kids mimicking this at any given time.
I m not embellishing, he said. I promise. Have you considered that maybe you re just getting better with every piece? Mr. Madison had a habit of phrasing even his firmest opinions as questions. Laila could never decide whether this was a pedagogical strategy for engaging students or a depressing inability to show any confidence whatsoever.
Suddenly she felt guilty for second-guessing him. Mr. Madison had read every word she d written since freshman year, had spent so many thankless lunch periods discussing her stories. Having someone who took her writing so seriously made the whole exercise real in a way that it had never been when she was little, scrawling loopy cursive into the notebook she d clutched under the gummy light on her bedside table, ten years old and terrified to show her parents even a glimpse.
I m curious, Laila, he said, plucking his round glasses from his nose. He wiped them with a microfiber cloth he always kept neatly folded beside his stapler. Are you proud of this story?
When she realized she couldn t say yes, she nearly cringed. What did it say if she d worked for more than a month to write a single twelve-page draft, and she wasn t even proud of it?
Outside, four floors below, car horns blared dissonant chords. Laila glanced through the windows. Thick clouds had trapped the March sun and flattened Manhattan into a lithograph. She caught herself picking at the tips of her black hair-subdividing the broom of split ends-and sat hard on her hands.
I don t know about proud, she told him. I mean, it s a first draft. I m fine with where it is. I can lock myself in this weekend and fix the whole admiral section.
Mr. Madison was usually too nervous about miscommunication to rely on sarcasm, but he surprised her with a wry note: And are you planning to come up for air at all?
Laila leaned back in her chair and smiled. These were the moments when she felt like Mr. Madison understood her better than any of her friends did, or even her family. Whenever the world didn t directly demand her attention-between classes, between sentences, on the train-her imagination took over, as reflexive as breath. Laila spent every day yanked taut between this world and another, and he was the only one who knew, because he d listened patiently to her wandering through brainstorm after bizarre brainstorm; he d seen her first drafts, fifth drafts, tenth drafts, all ripped down to the phrase and reassembled.
Actually, she said, I do have plans. The new season of The Rest is dropping tomorrow, so me and Hannah and the guys are going to meet up. Watch a few episodes.
That sounds like fun. Anything nonfictional planned?
Nah, she said. She never planned nonfictional things. At most, she let Hannah and Felix and Leo drag her to dinner every once in a while.
Mr. Madison s nervous chuckle pushed through his nose again. Laila, you know I d never criticize your work ethic, but have you ever considered that getting some distance from a piece could be valuable?
She had to resist a grimace. Yeah, I see people saying that online. Take a break. She shook her head. Maybe distance works for them, but whenever I go a day without working on this stuff, I feel . . . not even lazy, more like . . .
She took a long moment to arrange her thoughts, knowing he wouldn t push her. Mr. Madison had a type of quiet, reassuring patience that nobody else in this school seemed to understand. In group projects or casual snippets of conversation, other kids always cut her off halfway through a sentence, and the interruption flustered her-and once she d lost momentum, she could never get her social interaction gears restarted. That left most of the school-Hannah, Leo, and Felix excepted-with the totally misguided idea that quiet was her only personality trait.
I guess I ve got this image, she said, th