How shocked I was when I received a response just days later, informing me that the show was to go on. Our community needs this, she told me.
Joplin is not a long drive from my town of Liberty—only 165 miles or so. As I drove the two and a half hours, I couldn’t help thinking what a very short distance those 165 miles would be for a tornado. Had things shifted only slightly, had the tornado raged north for another couple of hours, it could have been my town that was destroyed. I could have been one of the people who lost everything.
A study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration discovered that many Joplin residents failed to heed the tornado warnings that day, because they’d become desensitized to the sound of tornado warning sirens. I get it. I’ve lived my whole life in the Midwest. Tornado watches and warnings are a way of life. I don’t want to say we don’t take them seriously, but when you get so many of them, you can become complacent, and complacency can be deadly.
Just like Jersey, who didn’t want her cooking to be interrupted, you sometimes get skeptical or lazy or just too darn busy to be inconvenienced by what you imagine will be yet another false alarm. Sometimes you just assume disaster is never going to happen to you. How could the people of Joplin have foreseen what was going to happen to them on May 22?
After my library visit in Joplin, I took a tour of the devastated area. Even after weeks of cleanup, the destruction was knee-buckling. Whole houses, gone. Street signs and other landmarks, gone. Trees, gone. Everything, just… gone. I was speechless, and my heart ached for the people who had lost so much.
But even more shocking than what I saw in the tornado’s path outside was what I saw inside the library that day. It was busy, bustling, and a full crowd turned out for my event. I couldn’t believe that in the midst of tragedy, people were still dedicated to living their previously scheduled lives. The librarian was right: The community did need the show to go on, not necessarily to hear me speak, but to do something normal. To do something planned. To be with one another, to laugh and smile, to show that they may have been down but they were definitely not out. Far from it.
After what I saw in Joplin, I began to think about what it means to “lose everything.” Everyone has his or her own version of a tornado—fire, earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, war, illness, terror attack. An unexpected disaster rages; someone loses everything.
But is it really possible to lose absolutely “everything”? Can we lose our spirit? Can we lose our drive? Can we lose whatever it is that makes us continue in the face of overwhelming adversity? Can we really lose that uniquely human ability to hope?
Or is it possible to step up to the enormous task of redefining “everything”?
These were the questions I wanted to put to Jersey Cameron. I wanted to strip her of absolutely everything and see what she did with the bare bones that were left. I had a feeling she could answer the call to adversity with strength and integrity. And in the end, I think she did. Her path wasn’t easy or straightforward, and she wasn’t without her hiccups and undignified moments. But the point was that she kept going, she kept fighting, she kept trying to remember what and where her “everything” was.
Every so often, I think about those people in Joplin who came to hear me speak. I can still picture some of their faces. They were grim but open. They were tired but interested. If ever there was a visible spark of hope, it was in that room. I imagine Jersey sitting among the crowd, her own face grim and weary, her own spark of hope glimmering behind her eyes, her own redefinition of “everything” writing itself on her heart.
This book is for all of those in Joplin who showed me firsthand what survivor spirit looks like, and for the countless others out there who have suffered devastation and tragedy and have managed to build on. It’s for all of you who unexpectedly have found yourselves forced to redefine what “everything” means to you. To those of you called to rebuild a life you didn’t plan on living. And did it anyway.
Thank you for reading Jersey’s story.
Jennifer
ALSO BY JENNIFER BROWN
Hate List
Bitter End
Perfect Escape
Thousand Words
Say Something: A Hate List Novella
Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ALSO BY JENNIFER BROWN
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Brown
Cover art © Shutterstock, Aleshyn_Andrei
Cover design by Erin McMahon
Cover © 2014 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: May 2014
ISBN 978-0-316-24551-7
E3