If I Stay by Gayle Forman (free children's online books txt) 📖

as a kind of control group.”

They tried for four years. Mom got pregnant twice and had two miscarriages. They were sad about it, but they didn’t have the money to do all the fertility stuff that people do. By the time I was nine, they’d decided that maybe it was for the best. I was becoming independent. They stopped trying.

As if to convince themselves how great it was not to be tied down by a baby, Mom and Dad bought us tickets to go visit New York for a week. It was supposed to be a musical pilgrimage. We would go to CBGB’s and Carnegie Hall. But when to her surprise, Mom discovered she was pregnant, and then to her greater surprise, stayed pregnant past the first trimester, we had to cancel the trip. She was tired and sick to her stomach and so grumpy Dad joked that she’d probably scare the New Yorkers. Besides, babies were expensive and we needed to save.

I didn’t mind. I was excited about a baby. And I knew that Carnegie Hall wasn’t going anywhere. I’d get there someday.

Chapter 7

 

5:40 P.M.

I am a little freaked out right now. Gran and Gramps left a while ago, but I stayed behind here in the ICU. I am sitting in one the chairs, going over their conversation, which was very nice and normal and nondisturbing. Until they left. As Gran and Gramps walked out of the ICU, with me following, Gramps turned to Gran and asked: “Do you think she decides?”

“Decides what?”

Gramps looked uncomfortable. He shuffled his feet. “You know? Decides,” he whispered.

“What are you talking about?” Gran sounded exasperated and tender at the same time.

“I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re the one who believes in all the angels.”

“What does that have to do with Mia?” Gran asked.

“If they’re gone now, but still here, like you believe, what if they want her to join them? What if she wants to join them?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Gran snapped.

“Oh,” was all Gramps said. The inquiry was over.

After they left, I was thinking that one day maybe I’ll tell Gran that I never much bought into her theory that birdsand such could be people’s guardian angels. And now I’m more sure than ever that there’s no such thing.

My parents aren’t here. They are not holding my hand, or cheering me on. I know them well enough to know that if they could, they would. Maybe not both of them. Maybe Mom would stay with Teddy while Dad watched over me. But neither of them is here.

And it’s while contemplating this that I think about what the nurse said. She’s running the show. And suddenly I understand what Gramps was really asking Gran. He had listened to that nurse, too. He got it before I did.

If I stay. If I live. It’s up to me.

All this business about medically induced comas is just doctor talk. It’s not up to the doctors. It’s not up to the absentee angels. It’s not even up to God who, if He exists, is nowhere around right now. It’s up to me.

How am I supposed to decide this? How can I possibly stay without Mom and Dad? How can I leave without Teddy? Or Adam? This is too much. I don’t even understand how it all works, why I’m here in the state that I’m in or how to get out of it if I wanted to. If I were to say, I want to wake up, would I wake up right now? I already tried snapping my heels to find Teddy and trying to beam myself to Hawaii, and that didn’t work. This seems a whole lot more complicated.

But in spite of that, I believe it’s true. I hear the nurse’s words again. I am running the show. Everyone is waiting on me.

I decide. I know this now.

And this terrifies me more than anything else that has happened today.

Where the hell is Adam?

A week before Halloween of my junior year, Adam showed up at my door triumphant. He was holding a dressbag and wearing a shit-eating grin.

“Prepare to writhe in jealousy. I just got the best costume,” he said. He unzipped the bag. Inside was a frilly white shirt, a pair of breeches, and a long wool coat with epaulets.

“You’re going to be Seinfeld with the puffy shirt?” I asked.

“Pff. Seinfeld. And you call yourself a classical musician. I’m going to be Mozart. Wait, you haven’t seen the shoes.” He reached into the bag and pulled out clunky black leather numbers with metal bars across the tops.

“Nice,” I said. “I think my mom has a pair like them.”

“You’re just jealous because you don’t have such a rockin’ costume. And I’ll be wearing tights, too. I’m just that secure in my manhood. Also, I have a wig.”

“Where’d you get all this?” I asked, fingering the wig. It felt like it was made of burlap.

“Online. Only a hundred bucks.”

“You spent a hundred dollars on a Halloween costume?”

At the mention of the world Halloween, Teddy zoomed down the stairs, ignoring me and yanking on Adam’s wallet chain. “Wait here!” he demanded, and then ran back upstairs and returned a few seconds later holding a bag. “Is this a good costume? Or will it make me look babyish?” Teddy asked, pulling out a pitchfork, a set of devil ears, a red tail, and a pair of red feetie pajamas.

“Ohh.” Adam stepped backward, his eyes wide. “That outfit scares the hell out of me and you aren’t even wearing it.”

“Really? You don’t think the pajamas make it look dumb. I don’t want anyone to laugh at me,” Teddy declared, his eyebrows furrowed in seriousness.

I grinned at Adam, who was trying to swallow his own smile. “Red pajamas plus pitchfork plus devil ears and pointy tail is so fully satanic no one would dare challenge you, lest they risk eternal damnation,” Adam assured him.

Teddy’s face broke into a wide grin, showing off the gap of his missing front tooth. “That’s kind of what Mom said, but I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t just telling me that so I wouldn’t bug her about the costume. You’re taking me trick-or-treating, right?” He looked at me now.

“Just like every year,” I answered. “How else am I gonna get candy?”

“You’re coming, too?” he asked Adam.

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

Teddy turned on his heel and whizzed back up the stairs. Adam turned to me. “That’s Teddy settled. What are you wearing?”

“Ahh, I’m not much of a costume girl.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Well, become one. It’s Halloween, our first one together. Shooting Star has a big show that night. It’s a costume concert, and you promised to go.”

Inwardly, I groaned. After six months with Adam, I had just gotten used to us being the odd couple at school—people called us Groovy and the Geek. And I was starting to become more comfortable with Adam’s bandmates, and had even learned a few words of rock talk. I could hold my own now when Adam took me to the House of Rock, the rambling house near the college where the rest of the band all lived. I could even participate in the band’s punk-rock pot-luck parties when everyone invited had to bring something from their fridge that was on the verge of spoiling. We took all the ingredients and made something out of it. I was actually pretty good at finding ways to turn the vegetarian ground beef, beets, feta cheese, and apricots into something edible.

 

awkwardnight and feeling shittier about it with each playback.

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna back out,” Adam said, looking equal parts hurt and irritated.

“What about Teddy? We promised we’d take him trick-or-treating—”

“Yeah, at five o’clock. We don’t have to be at the show until ten. I doubt even Master Ted could trick-or-treat for five solid hours. So you have no excuse. And you’d better get a good outfit together because I’m going to look hot, in an eighteenth-century kind of way.”

After Adam left to go to work delivering pizzas, I had a pit in my stomach. I went upstairs to practice the Dvo?ák piece Professor Christie had assigned me, and to work out what was bothering me. Why didn’t I like his shows? Was it because Shooting Star was getting popular and I was jealous? Did the ever-growing masses of girl groupies put me off? This seemed like a logical enough explanation, but it wasn’t it.

After I’d played for about ten minutes, it came to me: My aversion to Adam’s shows had nothing to do with music or groupies or envy. It had to with the doubts. The same niggling doubts I always had about not belonging. I didn’t feel like I belonged with my family, and now I didn’t feel like I belonged with Adam, except unlike my family, who was stuck with me, Adam had chosen me, and this I didn’t understand. Why had he fallen for me? It didn’t make sense. I knew it was music that brought us together in the first place, put us in the same space so we could even get to know each other. And I knew that Adam liked how into music I was. And that he dug my sense of humor, “so dark you almost miss it,” he said. And, speaking of dark, I knew he had a thing for dark-haired girls because all of his girlfriends had been brunettes. And I knew that when it was the two of us alone together, we could talk for hours, or sit reading side by side for hours, each one plugged into our own iPod, and still feelcompletely together. I understood all that in my head, but I still didn’t believe it in my heart. When I was with Adam, I felt picked, chosen, special, and that just made me wonder why me? even more.

And maybe this was why even though Adam willingly submitted to Schubert symphonies and attended any recital I gave, bringing me stargazer lilies, my favorite flower, I’d still rather have gone to the dentist than to one of his shows. Which was so churlish of me. I thought of what Mom sometimes said to me when I was feeling insecure: “Fake it till you make it.” By the time I finished playing the piece three times over, I decided that not only would I go to his show, but for once I’d make as much of an effort to understand his world as he did mine.

“I need your help,” I told Mom that night after dinner as we stood side by side doing dishes.

“I think we’ve established that I’m not very good at trigonometry. Maybe you can try the online-tutor thing,” Mom said.

“Not math help. Something else.”

“I’ll do my best. What do you need?’

“Advice. Who’s the coolest, toughest, hottest rocker girl you can think of?”

“Debbie Harry,” Mom said.

“Tha—”

“Not finished,” Mom interrupted. “You can’t ask me to pick only one. That’s so Sophie’s Choice. Kathleen Hannah. Patti Smith. Joan Jett. Courtney Love, in her demented destructionist way. Lucinda Williams, even though she’s country she’s tough as nails. Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, pushing fifty and still at it. That Cat Power woman. Joan Armatrading. Why, is this some kind of social-studies project?”

“Kind of,” I answered, toweling