Sarah Dessen

North Carolina · connectedBorn 1970

American writer

Studied at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Studied at Chapel Hill High School
Studied at Greensboro College

writer, novelist, children's writer, young adult author

In the libraries

Open Library Just Listen · 2006 View library record ↗ Open Library Keeping the moon · 1999 View library record ↗ Open Library Lock and Key · 2008 View library record ↗ Open Library Someone Like You · 1998 View library record ↗ Open Library That Summer · 1996 View library record ↗ Open Library This Lullaby · 2002 View library record ↗

Read Sarah Dessen

That Summer 1996 Find a copy Just Listen 2006 Find a copy This Lullaby 2002 Find a copy Someone Like You 1998 Find a copy Lock and Key 2008 Find a copy Keeping the moon 1999 Find a copy

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

Maybe not, she said as we came to the car. But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works.

It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.

It was just perfect, just right all at once.

My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest. page 40000

At every wedding someone stays home.

Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend.

There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.

You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place.

You can't just turn your heart off like a faucet; you have to go to the source and dry it out, drop by drop.

I watched my mother do what she did best, and realized there would never be a way to cut myself from her entirely. No matter how strong or weak I was, she was a part of me, as crucial as my own heart. I would never be strong enough, in all my life, to do without her.

I've given lots of people chances, she said suddenly, as if Marion was still in the room to hear us. But there's only so much faith you can have in people.

And so we stood there in the kitchen, my mother and I, facing off over everything that had built up since June, when I was willing to hand myself over free and clear. Now I needed her to return it all to me, with the faith that I could make my own way.

When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. but the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, Halley, weren't yet in place. Scarlett's vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting.

I knew I had to keep him to myself, as I'd slowly begun to keep everything. We had secrets now, truths and half-truths, that kept her always at arm's length, behind a closed door, miles away.

I wondered again why the right thing always seemed to be met with so much resistance, when you'd think it would be the easier path. You had to fight to be virtuous...

There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right were you stand.

Are you ever going to show me the painting?"

Man," he said. "You are, like, so impatient."

I am not," I said. "I've been waiting forever."

Okay, okay." He stood up and went over to the corner, picking up the painting and bringing it over to rest against the bright pink belly of one of the mannequins. Then, he handed me a bandana. "Tie that on.”

Why?" I said, but I did it anyway. "Norman, you are way too into ceremony."

It's important." I could hear him moving around, adjusting things, before he came to sit beside me. "Okay," he said. "Take a look."

I was worn out, broken: He had taken almost everything. But he'd been all I'd had, all this time. And when the police led him away, I pulled out of the hands of all these loved one, sobbing, screaming, everything hurting, to try and make him stay.

I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.

Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away.

After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.

I'd heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. We can't heal you at Evergreen, the very somber voiceover said. But we can help you to heal yourself. It had become our own running joke, applicable to almost anything.

Hey Cass, I'd say, hand me that toothpaste.

Caitlin, she'd say, her voice dark and serious. I can't hand you the toothpaste. But I CAN help you hand the toothpaste to yourself.

And she was good to me: strong, fun, and fiercely loyal. And if I didn't have many other friends because of her-most girls were intimidated by her looks, or thought she was too pushy, or just flat-out feared for their boyfriends-it never bothered me. I never missed having a wide, thick circle of girlfriends: Rina was more than enough. We were comfortable with each other's flaws and weaknesses, so we stuck together and kept to ourselves.

It's so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.

I had this wild thought that he was the only one in all this chaos who was just like me, and that was comforting and profound all at once.

Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids. I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again, pulling me upward into light,to drown.

What was the name of Pygmalion's sister?

She blinked, twice, obviously surprised. Ummm, she said, keeping her eyes on me. I don't know.

I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself for the next hit, and feel something. Something grainy and small, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park.

And that was as far as he got before i heard it. The thumping of footsteps, running up the lawn toward me: It seemed like I could hear it through the grass, like leaning your ear to a railroad track and feeling the train coming, miles away. As the noise got closer I could hear ragged breaths, and then a voice.

It was my mother.

I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.

Can she be divorced? I asked. And famous for her commercials and ideas?

She can be anything, Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. And so can you.

Well, it's New Year's now but I don't feel that way anymore. I wonder if you do either. Something's happening to me. It's like I'm shrinking smaller and smaller and I can't stop it. There's just so much wrong that I can't imagine the shame in admitting even the tiniest part of it. When you left it was like there was this huge gap to fill, but instead of spreading wide enough to do it I just fell right in, and I'm still falling. Like I'm half-asleep, and I can't wake up, can't wake up....

There were moments - when Jeopardy came on, in the car during radio trivia challenges, or for practically any question I couldn't answer in any subject - that Rogerson simply amazed me. I started to seek out facts, just to stump him, but it never worked. He was that sharp.

In physics, I sprung on him as we sat in the Taco Bell drive-through, what does the capital letter W stand for?

Energy, he said, handing me my burrito.

Sitting in front of my parents' house as he kissed me goodnight: Which two planets are almost identical in size?

Duh, he said, smoothing my hair back, Venus and Earth.

Rogerson, I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, where would I find the pelagic zone?

In the open sea, he said. Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.

It's funny how someone's perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.

See you in dreamland.

If there's one thing I've learned in the last few months, it's that sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.

During this time we've been apart, it's you I've thought of when I'm at my weakest, and you who have pulled me through.

She was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive.

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell anyone. As long as I didn't say it aloud, it wasn't real.

We laughed ourselves silly, taking back our shared past, gently, piece by piece.

I was running from one problem or place to another, with no time left to study, or sleep, or just breathe. I felt pulled in all directions, fighting to keep all these obligations circling in the air above me. It was only a matter of time before something fell.

I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.

For two hours I'd felt myself stretching tighter and tighter, like a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping. And now, I could feel the smaller, weaker part of myself beginning to fray, tiny bits giving way before the big break.

Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.

I was drowning in broad daylight and no one could tell.

I mean, it's not surprising, really. Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It's, like, part of you for good.

Two a.m.' He swallowed, then said, "You know. The person you can call at two a.m. and, no matter what, you can count on them. Even if they're asleep or it's cold or you need to be bailed out of jail...they'll come for you. It's like, the highest level of friendship.”

Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.”

When you can't save yourself or your heart, it helps to be able to save face.”

I felt tears prick my eyes as I looked down at the model again, looking at that girl and boy on the curb. Forever in that place, together.

Despite my dad's assurances I was strangely nervous my stomach tight ever since we'd hung up. Maybe Deb had picked up on this and it was why she'd pretty much talked nonstop since I'd approached her and asked for a ride. I'd barely had time to explain the situation before she had launched into a dozen stories to illustrate the point that Things Happened But People Were Okay in the End.

Like a blinking cursor on an empty page, it was just the first thing. The beginning of the beginning. But at least it was done.

It was kind of soothing, these sounds of lives being lived all around me, for better or for worse. And there I was, in the middle of them all, newly reborn and still waiting for mine to begin.

I dialed the number slowly, wanting to get it right. Two rings, and he picked up.

Yes, I said after his hello.

Mclean? he asked. "Is that you?

Yeah, I said, swallowing and looking out my open door, at the ocean. The answer's yes.

The answer . . . he said slowly.

You asked me to go out with you. I know you probably changed your mind. But you should know, the answer was yes. It's always been yes when it comes to you."

He was very quiet for a moment. Where are you?

I started crying again, my voice ragged. He told me to calm down. He told me it was going to be all right. And then, he told he'd be there soon.”