We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman (read aloud txt) 📕

ALSO BY GAYLE FORMAN

I Have Lost My Way

Leave Me

I Was Here

Just One Night

Just One Year

Just One Day

Where She Went

If I Stay

Sisters in Sanity

VIKING

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

First published in the United States of America by Viking,

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Gayle Forman

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.

Ebook ISBN 9780425290828

Design by Rebecca Aidlin

Illustrations by Anna Rupprecht

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For the Heathers, the Kathleens, the Mitchells, the Beckys, and all the booksellers, who give us a great good place.

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Gayle Forman

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Too Loud a Solitude

Sometimes a Great Notion

The Rules

The Giving Tree

Peanuts

Gone Girl

A Wrinkle in Time

Just Kids

When You Reach Me

The Scent of Desire

Fight Club

The Little Book of Hygge

The Art of the Deal

Goldmine Record Album Price Guide

Beethoven’s Anvil

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting and Running a Coffee Bar

Tuesdays with Morrie

Moby-Dick

Moneyball

The Big Book

The 2010 Rand McNally Road Atlas

The Magician’s Nephew

A Grief Observed

My Brother

The Great Good Place

Stone Soup

Bibliography

Addiction Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.

—Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction.

—Pablo Picasso

Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.

—Talking Heads, “This Must Be the Place”

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

They say it took the dinosaurs thirty-three thousand years to die. Thirty-three millennia from the moment the asteroid slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula to the day that the last dinosaur keeled over, starving, freezing, poisoned by toxic gases.

Now, from a universal perspective, thirty-three thousand years is not much. Barely a blink of an eye. But it’s still thirty-three thousand years. Almost two million Mondays. It’s not nothing.

The thing I keep coming back to is: Did they know? Did some poor T-rex feel the impact of the asteroid shake the earth, look up, and go, Oh, shit, that’s curtains for me? Did the camarasaurus living thousands of miles from the impact zone notice the sun darkening from all that ash and understand its days were numbered? Did the triceratops wonder why the air suddenly smelled so different without knowing it was the poison gases released by a blast that was equivalent to ten billion atomic bombs (not that atomic bombs had been invented yet)? How far into that thirty-three-thousand-year stretch did they go before they understood that their extinction was not looming—it had already happened?

The book I’m reading, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte, which I discovered mis-shelved with atlases a few months back, has a lot to say on what life was like for dinosaurs. But it doesn’t really delve into what they were thinking toward the end. There’s only so much, I guess, you can conjecture about creatures that lived sixty million years ago. Their thoughts on their own extinction, like so many other mysteries, they took with them.

Fact: Dinosaurs still exist. Here’s what they look like. A father and son in a failing used bookstore, spending long, aimless days consuming words no one around here buys anymore. The father, Ira, sits reading in his usual spot, a ripped upholstered chair, dented from years of use, in the maps section, next to the picture window that’s not so picturesque anymore with its Harry Potter lightning-bolt crack running down the side of it. The son—that’s me, Aaron—slumps on a stool by the starving cash register, obsessively reading about dinosaurs. The shelves in the store, once so tidy and neat, spill over, the books like soldiers in a long-lost war. We have more volumes now than we did when we were a functioning bookstore because whenever Ira sees a book in the garbage or recycling bin, or on the side of the road, he rescues it and brings it home. We are a store full of left-behinds.

The morning this tale begins, Ira and I are sitting in our usual spots, reading our usual books, when an ungodly moan shudders through the store. It sounds like a foghorn except we are in the Cascade mountains of Washington State, a hundred miles from the ocean or ships or foghorns.

Ira jumps up from his seat, eyes wide and panicky. “What was that?”

“I don’t—” I’m drowned out by an ice-sharp crack, followed by the pitiful sounds of books avalanching onto the floor. One of our largest shelves has split down the middle, like the chestnut tree in Jane Eyre. And anyone who’s read Jane Eyre knows what that portends.

Ira races over, kneeling down, despondent as he hovers over the fallen soldiers, as if he’s the general who led them to their deaths. He’s not. This is not his fault. None of it.

“I got this,” I tell him in the whispery voice I’ve learned to use when he gets agitated. I lead him back to