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

are ringing and it’s loud as shit in here but somehow I hear Chad’s quiet voice cut through it all. I have never heard him sound so angry.

“Don’t you dare,” he says. “Don’t you fucking dare call me a dinosaur.”

I run out of the store without looking back. I jump into the Volvo and take off, tearing past C.J.’s and the hardware store and the used-car lot, blowing through the traffic light, not stopping until I see a blur of blue.

Denim Blue. That was the name of the paint color Mom used on the porch swing. She used to repaint it every few years, so it would stay bright. “You have to take care of the things you love,” she said. Which she did. Until she couldn’t.

There it is, on the side of the road. Bart must have dumped it here. Like I told him to.

I stop. I load the porch swing in the back of the car. And then I keep going.

I have no idea if Daryl Feldman is going to be in his office. It’s Thanksgiving week. People have places to go to. Family to visit. But I’m flying blind here. The assistant is in, surprised to see me. “Did you have an appointment?” I shake my head. And maybe it’s the desperation reeking off me or maybe she knows her boss is an asshole or maybe it’s the Thanksgiving spirit, but she says, “Let me see what I can do.”

Five minutes later, I’m ushered in. Before Daryl speaks, I do. “The records are worth way more than forty-five hundred dollars. I left the index here last time, and if you looked up any of the albums, you’ll see how valuable they are.”

Daryl Feldman stares at me from his modern and uncomfortable-looking and obviously very expensive desk chair.

“There’s a Pink Floyd Piper at the Gates of Dawn in there, first pressing, worth two fifty. A Replacements Stink, first pressing, two hundred. And more like that. Thousands more. They’re worth, ballpark, fifty thousand dollars.”

Daryl swivels back and forth in his chair.

“But I’ll sell them to you here, now, for twenty grand. At twenty grand, you’re still gonna make a shit ton of money.”

Daryl swivels some more. “Eight grand,” he counters.

If Penny were here, she would keep going, recognize this as an opening bid, part of the negotiation dance. But I don’t want to dance. I just want it to be over. And eight grand solves my most immediate math problem. It’ll pay Chad back for most of the deposit he lost because of me. I can take the $1,200 I’ve made off record sales and pay the guys for their work. We still lose the store. But once the asteroid hit, we were always going to lose the store. Like we were always going to lose Sandy. Like we were always going to lose Mom. Some things are inevitable.

“Deal,” I tell Daryl.

“When can I pick them up?”

“Today if you want.” I write down the store’s address and instruct him to make out the check to Chad Santos. Then I pry off the key Sandy gave me after I promised I would not sell his records. I slide it across Daryl’s desk. “Show this to Ira. Tell him you came for the vinyl. He’ll understand.”

Ira still keeps an old Rand McNally Road Atlas in the seat pocket. According to a distance chart in the back, the drive is fifteen hundred miles. I plot my course, running my fingers down and to the right, along the thick blue interstate lines, the way Ira must have done when he traveled from one end of the country to the other, not knowing what he was looking for until he saw her standing on the side of the road.

The Magician’s Nephew

Phoenix is the fourth sunniest place in country, the sun shining eighty-five percent of the time. I know this because I’ve Googled it as I’ve thought about places to live where the sky does not constantly cry. In my fantasy version, these places all have bright blue skies, open vistas, sunlight burnishing a copper Georgia O’Keeffe landscape.

But as I reach the outskirts of the city, the sights are oddly familiar: big-box stores, car dealerships with inflatable tube balloons, gas stations, fast food chains. Instead of damp and cloud-shrouded, it’s sun-bleached and violently bright, but otherwise, it feels the same.

Except for one crucial difference. Hannah is here.

I pull into a Circle K off the highway and use some more of my record-sale stash to gas up again and buy a travel pack of toothpaste, some deodorant, a new pair of boxers. I lock myself in the bathroom and clean off as best I can. When I feel halfway human, I extract my phone from the seat pocket where I’ve buried it and turn it on for the first time since I left home. It whooshes back to life with a cacophony of alerts, missed calls, voicemails, and texts. I ignore them all, and call Hannah.

She picks up right away. “Hey, baby,” she says. “I was just thinking of you.”

She was thinking of me. She called me baby. It’s going to be okay.

“I was thinking of you too,” I rasp.

“Are you sick? Your voice sounds hoarse.”

Somewhere outside Bellevue when the silence was already starting to make me crazy, I remembered the tape Hannah made me and popped it in. I listened to it, on repeat for twenty-nine hours, through Eastern Washington, across Oregon and Idaho, and into Nevada. I sang along, at first making up nonsense words and then, after repeated listenings, the real ones. I sang at the top of my lungs, even to the songs like “Clair de Lune,” which has no words. I sang louder than the wheeze of the Volvo’s beleaguered engine, louder than the voices in my head.

“I’m fine,” I reply. “What are you up to?”

“Making coffee.”

“And after that?”

“I don’t know.