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

her, trying to banish the ghosts banging around my heart, and almost succeeding.

Hannah rents a room in a sober house. It’s a drab, ranch-style place with ugly brown siding, but her room feels like a nest. It’s small, with a queen bed, a zillion throw pillows, lights strewn along the frame. On the giant bookshelf—wood, Ike would be pleased to know—books compete for space with records, CDs, and cassette tapes.

Mind you, I don’t notice any of this until the next morning.

“See?” Hannah teases me when we wake up and I go straight to the bookcase. “Books and music can coexist.”

“I’d say last night showed they can do way more than coexist,” I tease, reaching for her again.

She smacks me with a pillow. “Not now. I have to finish a transcription project before noon,” she says. “But that will only take an hour or two.”

“A what?”

“Transcription. Typing up what people say. That’s my job these days. Until I figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”

“You don’t want to make music?”

“I already do make music,” she says. “But making a living from it . . . I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“What are your plans after the transcription?”

“I just have to pack for Arizona.” She smiles. “But other than that I’m free. What about you? Do you have things you need to do?”

A long list of them. Now that selling to Lou’s boss is out, the store is Penny’s. I’ve got to break the news to Ira. And the Lumberjacks. And Chad. Send the bulk buyers the inventory Chad is working on. Put the records in storage. Figure out where Ira and I are going to live. I’d planned to go somewhere sunny but now I’m not so sure I want to be far from Hannah. Or Chad, for that matter.

Hannah’s hair is down, fanning across her shoulders. Her silk kimono keeps slipping, revealing the star-shaped mole on her clavicle that I can’t stop kissing.

There is nowhere else I’d rather be. No one else I’d rather be with. All my problems will be there tomorrow, but for today, there’s this.

I pull at the belt of her robe, bringing her close, kissing her again. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

I text Ira that I’m going to be away for two days and where he can pick up the car if he needs it, but he tells me not to worry and have fun. And so I turn off my phone and just try to let myself have this.

Because this—Hannah and me cooking omelets side by side in her kitchen—feels like a miracle.

Because this—Hannah and me reading chapters aloud from her old copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—feels like happiness.

Because this—Hannah and me, together—feels like inevitable.

At the end of the second day, Hannah pulls down a suitcase and starts to pack.

“Stay,” I tell her.

“Trust me, I wish I could.”

“Then don’t go. We’ll make Thanksgiving dinner and eat in bed.”

She kisses me, casually, because that’s what Hannah Crew does now. “Tempting,” she says. “But I have to face the music.”

She pads to her shelf and rifles around; the zigzag scar down her hip from the accident that got her addicted to painkillers peeks out of her robe. When I saw it for the first time, and she told me the full story of the accident, I felt such tenderness, and relief. She is not Sandy. Her addiction was not her own choice.

“I have something for you,” she says. “I made it last night when you were sleeping.” She opens a desk drawer and pulls out a tape. “Old school. Seemed more your vibe.”

“What is it?”

She hands me the cassette. AARON’S PERFECT SONGS? is written in block letters across the spine of the case.

“It’s from the playlist I made you, plus a few new additions.” She nibbles on her thumbnail. “I told you I wouldn’t rest until I found you a perfect song.”

There’s a part of me that never wants her to find the perfect song because that way Hannah will have to keep looking. And if she has to keep looking, we won’t end.

But there’s another part of me that needs to tell her—prove to her—how meant to be we are.

“You already found me a perfect song,” I say.

“I did?” She lights up. “Which one?”

“Talking Heads, ‘This Must Be the Place.’”

“Really?” Her eyebrow—the one with the scar on it that I now know she got in an ice-skating accident when she was nine—quirks up. “I almost didn’t put that one on. I’m not sure why I did.”

“I am,” I say, pulling her to me. “I knew it from the moment we met.”

“And what did you know?”

“That you and me, we are inevitable.”

The 2010 Rand McNally Road Atlas

Since I’ve never been drunk, I’ve never been hungover, but Chad has explained how it all works. Not just the headaches, or feeling simultaneously ravenously hungry and needing to puke, but the correlation between pleasure and pain.

According to Chad, there’s a direct link between how much you overindulge and how shitty you feel. “It’s like bricks,” he explained to me. “Drink a brick, get hit with two. Drink a dozen bricks, and it’s like a house fell on you.”

The first brick hits as I drop Hannah off at the airport shuttle bus. I won’t see her for five days. Rationally, I know five days is nothing. We’ve known each other barely a month. Have spent all of five days together in that month. But it’s a brick just the same.

The second brick smashes down when I pass the sign at the edge of our town. In one week, we lose the store. And I haven’t told Ira.

The third brick lands when I realize I’m telling Ira right now. There is no more putting it off.

The fourth brick lands when I pull up to the store and see both Ike’s and Chad’s trucks parked out front. It’s Thanksgiving week.