These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Love, Delivered” copyright © 2020 by Erin A. Craig
“The Socially Distant Dog-Walking Brigade” copyright © 2020 by Bill Konigsberg
“One Day” copyright © 2020 by Sajni Patel
“The Rules of Comedy” copyright © 2020 by Auriane Desombre
“The New Boy Next Door” copyright © 2020 by Natasha Preston
“Love with a Side of Fortune” copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Yen
“The Green Thumb War” copyright © 2020 by Brittney Morris
“Stuck with Her” copyright © 2020 by Rachael Lippincott
“Masked” copyright © 2020 by Erin Hahn
Cover art copyright © 2020 by Liza Rusalskaya
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780593375297 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9780593375303
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Love, Delivered
The Socially Distant Dog-Walking Brigade
One Day
The Rules of Comedy
The New Boy Next Door
Love with a Side of Fortune
The Green Thumb War
Stuck with Her
Masked
About the Authors
“This is it!” Mom said brightly, opening the door to my new room with a grand, ceremonial swing.
I stepped over the threshold, eyes wide as I took in the high arched ceiling, the oak window seat, and my lamp—a bust of Edgar Allan Poe I’d made in ceramics class, already assembled and looking hopelessly out of place against the stark white walls.
You and me both, buddy.
“What do you think?” Dad asked, coming up behind us. “Just a second,” he called down to one of the guys from the moving company.
“This is it,” I echoed, trying to muster enough cheer to appease them.
“Do you like it?” Mom asked, pushing back one of the curtains the previous owners had left behind. It was some sort of floral chintz and would be coming down the second I was alone. “We were going to wait and let you pick for yourself, but then on the tour—this just screamed Millie.”
It was a cool room, I couldn’t deny that.
It just wasn’t my room.
But it was now, I supposed, no matter how I felt.
Mom and Dad were both scientists. Researchers who specialized in viral pathology. Mom had gotten a pretty sweet job offer at the University of Michigan, working in the hospital labs during the summers and spending the rest of the year as a professor. Dad was going to stay at home while he worked on writing his first book. Some dry textbook he swore would be in freshman biology classes all over the country.
Not a fun book, like the thrillers and mysteries I read.
I’d never seen them so excited before.
We were supposed to leave Memphis in May, allowing me to get through school and still spend part of the summer with my friends, getting to do all our favorite things together one last time. I’d have June, July, and August to settle in and hopefully meet some new friends, just before senior year would start.
But then COVID-19 broke out and literally everything fell apart.
I didn’t finish the school year. I didn’t get one last concert or film festival, no last Grizz game or barbecue nachos, no cupcakes from Muddy’s bakery.
I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Our house—our old house—already had an offer on it, with most of our stuff packed away into boxes and bins when the governor closed the schools, then the stores, then the state.
“Stay at home?” I remembered shouting at my parents with an anger completely uncharacteristic of me. “How do you stay at home when we have no home?” I’d burst into tears and run up to my room before they could answer.
Mom and Dad had talked late into the night, their furtive whispers filling the house. I could hear them wondering what to do, wondering if they were making the right decision, wondering how we’d get through any of this.
Less than twenty-four hours later, everything was decided for us. The hospital in Michigan wanted both Mom and Dad working there. Pronto.
In the blink of an eye we were supplied letters certifying that my parents were essential, pledging that our movers were essential, swearing up and down that the new house was essential.
Everything was essential but my misery.
“The light is different here,” I said, feeling both sets of their eyes on me now, their concern as heavy as the semi truck parked along our drive.
Our lane, as my father insisted calling it.
Back in Memphis we hadn’t had a driveway. Now we had a lane. Of our own.
A lane and a garden and a little old supply shed, painted barn red and outfitted with scalloped white trim.
There was no way to deny it. We were country now.
“Different?” Mom repeated, glancing about the room as if she could find the source of my discontent and eradicate it as she would a virus.
“It’s softer,” I said, joining her at the window and looking out at the open fields. “Greener.”
“All those trees, Millie,” Dad said, patting at my back. “Look at all those pines.”
“They’re pretty,” I admitted.
And they were. But they didn’t hold a candle to the magnolias currently bursting into bloom across my backyard right now.
My old backyard, I reminded myself.
“Coming, coming!”
