Table Of ContentAND THEN THINGS FALL APART
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or
real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents
are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events
or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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First Simon Pulse paperback edition July 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Arlaina Tibensky
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Designed by Karina Granda
The text of this book was set in Caslon.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Control Number 2010044631
ISBN 978-1-4424-1323-8
ISBN 978-1-44241324-5 (eBook)
For my parents
Contents
Chapter 1: Date: July 12 Mood: Fractured Body Temp: 103.5
Chapter 2: Date: July 13 Mood: Dickensian Body Temp: 101.6
Chapter 3: Date: July 14 Mood: Hallucinatory Body Temp: 102.5
Chapter 4: Date: July 15 Mood: All by Myself I Am a Huge Camellia Body
Temp: 103.5
Chapter 5: Date: July 16 Mood: Limp As a Wet Leaf Body Temp: 103.5
Chapter 6: Date: July 17 Mood: The Opposite of Hopeful Body Temp: 101
Chapter 7: Date: July 18 Mood: Incarcerated Rock Star Body Temp: 101
Chapter 8: Date: July 19 Mood: Dorian Grayian Body Temp: 102
Chapter 9: Date: July 20 Mood: Twice Shy Body Temp: 101
Chapter 10: Date: July 21 Mood: Off-Kilter Body Temp: 101
Chapter 11: Date: July 22 Mood: Red as Sylvia’s Bedside Tulips Body Temp:
101.5
Chapter 12: Date: July 23 Mood: Retrospective Body Temp: 101.5
Chapter 13: Date: July 24 Mood: Appalachian Body Temp: 101.5
Chapter 14: Date: July 25 Mood: Totally Betrayed. Yet Again. Body Temp: 101
Chapter 15: Date: July 26 Mood: Dismayed Body Temp: 100
Chapter 16: Date: July 27 Mood: Dressed, At Least Body Temp: 101
Chapter 17: Date: July 28 Mood: Condemned to Misery Body Temp: 101
Chapter 18: Date: July 29 Mood: Indebted Body Temp: 101
Chapter 19: Date: July 30 Mood: Epicurious Body Temp: 100
Chapter 20: Date: July 31 Mood: Ravenous Body Temp: 101.1 (which is also a
great radio station!)
Chapter 21: Date: August 1 Mood: Truth? You Can’t Handle the Truth! Body
Temp: 101
Chapter 22: Date: August 2 Mood: Esther Greenwoodian Body Temp: 100
Chapter 23: Date: August 3 Mood: Low Priority Body Temp: 99
Chapter 24: Date: August 4 Mood: A Gaper’s Delay on My Mom’s Trajectory
Body Temp: 99
Chapter 25: Date: August 5 Mood: Shocked Body Temp: 99
Chapter 26: Date: August 6 Mood: Weary and Lava-boned Body Temp: 98.6
stadium cheering
Chapter 27: Date: August 7 Mood: There Are No Words
Chapter 28: Date: August 8 Mood: As Nude as a Chicken Neck
Chapter 29: Date: August 9 Mood: Infinite as Space and Wise Beyond My
Freaking Years
Chapter 30: Date: August 10 Mood: Juvenile Delinquent
Chapter 31: Date: August 12 Mood: Sunkissed and Glowy
Chapter 32: Date: August 13 Mood: There’s No Place Like Om
Chapter 33: Date: September 22 Mood: Centered
Acknowledgments
About the Author
DATE: July 12
MOOD: Fractured
BODY TEMP: 103.5
I once watched a collector kill a monarch butterfly on a nature show by putting
it under a glass dome with a piece of cotton soaked in gasoline. The insect’s
wings flapped less and less until they were perfectly still.
Suffocation is a cruel way to go.
I can’t breathe under my bell jar either.
I’m hot.
I have the chills.
I’m drenched with sweat, smothered beneath a hundred-pound coverlet.
My head hurts. My eyes hurt. My tongue feels heavy so it’s hard to talk. If I
stop typing, a vein in my forehead twitches with my pulse.
I close my eyes, leaning my head back on my pillow to rest. For a second it’s
as dark as a midnight sky. Then I imagine the shattered pieces of my heart
sparkling like mirror shards.
But when I open my eyes, I am still here: in the spare bedroom in my
grandma’s house with her ancient green bottle of Muguet des Bois from her own
high school years on the dresser. My deceitful and depraved father is still staying
in the basement. My mother is still in California visiting her sister’s premature
newborn, and my boyfriend, Matt, is still avoiding me.
The best years of my life.
And then the itching resumes with renewed fury.
Because I have the chicken pox. It’s a virus that, contrary to popular belief,
you can still catch well into your teens.
I think I am losing my mind a tiny bit at a time. When the chatter in my
head gets too loud, I start to type. The noise from the typewriter keys drowns
out the noise in my head. Getting what I’m thinking onto paper in smudgy black
letters feels good, like stretching or punching a wall. Or crying. Which I’m not
doing much of anymore because it doesn’t seem to help.
I’m not the first person to ever be sick, enraged, depressed, delirious,
betrayed, and confused all at the same time, or to use a typewriter to examine life
in all of its jagged-edge glory. Sylvia Plath did it too, and she is the most
