Then I heard the tagline.
“A new life. With Novalert.”
I froze for a minute, as if the TV was speaking to me directly.
I thought about everything that had happened in the last few months, the last few years, and really, the last few days. How much things had changed. How much I’d changed, or at least how much I wanted to.
I didn’t yet know that Ms. Davenport wouldn’t show up for school on Monday, or ever again; that my parents would agree to let me spend a year traveling so I didn’t have to stress out so much about school; that Alex would get into MIT early and Raj would get into Boston University late, and I’d make them promise to show me around when I did finally decide to go out east to college, since I finally had a legitimate reason to be there; that Raj and I would spend the rest of senior year together; that my new group of friends would include the reconciled Alex and Justin but also Becca and Isabel; that we’d spend the rest of our time in high school making up for all the fun I didn’t have before.
I didn’t need to know any of those things to know that, for some reason, the ad was hilarious. I couldn’t help myself—I started laughing. And laughing and laughing and laughing, so hard that when I opened my eyes I could see my parents looking worried. But I couldn’t stop laughing. Because, for me, the tagline had turned out to be true.
Just not the way they meant it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks again to Melissa de la Cruz, Richard Abate, and everyone at Spilled Ink—I couldn’t have done this without you, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to work with all of you.
Thanks to the team at HarperCollins, especially my amazing editor Jocelyn Davies and my publicist Gina Rizzo, who have both been fantastic and exceedingly patient with me.
Extra-special thanks to Katherine Bell, who helped me more with this book than is reasonable for any one person to do, particularly given everything she was going through at the time. She claims the book was a welcome distraction; I choose to believe it because her help was invaluable. Keep sending pics of V, please.
Thanks to all my friends who’ve provided moral support and advice, both online and off: Rebecca Johns Trissler, Brandon Trissler, Nami Mun, Gus Rose, Vu Tran, Elisa Lee, Caroline Sheerin, Mary Campbell, the Fearless Fifteeners, and the Group-That-Must-Not-Be-Named on Facebook.
Thanks to my high school friends, who were so incredibly supportive when my first book came out, after the acknowledgments had already gone to press. Vicky Morville helped me with web design; Nadine Levin created wonderful bookmarks, and Mary-Jo Rolnick, Elisa Goldberg, and Cristina Miedema were the best cheerleaders ever.
Finally, thanks, as always, to my family.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Oliver Klink
MICHELLE FALKOFF is also the author of Playlist for the Dead. Her fiction and reviews have been published in ZYZZYVA, DoubleTake, and the Harvard Review, among other places. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently serves as director of communication and legal reasoning at Northwestern University School of Law. Visit her online at www.michellefalkoff.com.
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BOOKS BY MICHELLE FALKOFF
Playlist for the Dead
Pushing Perfect
CREDITS
Cover art © 2016 by The Heads of State
Cover design by Jenna Stempel
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
PUSHING PERFECT. Copyright © 2016 by Spilled Ink Productions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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 hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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ISBN 978-0-06-231053-8 (trade)
ISBN 978-0-06-249017-9 (int)
EPub Edition © October 2016 ISBN 9780062310552
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FIRST EDITION
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