Shawn P.O Allen
We couldn’t save him. You still can.Marisol Vega is sixteen and constitutionally incapable of being late. She has gone to Lakewood High for two years, she knows exactly who she is there, and she understands that this is its own kind of trap.On the first day of junior year, she finds a letter in her backpack.It’s from her. Ten years older, writing from the other side of something that hasn’t happened yet.The letter is about a boy she has not met. His name is Cody James Harmon, he moved to Pinellas Park when his parents split, and he is very, very good at seeming fine. The depression is not a mask over some truer person - he genuinely likes people, he is genuinely funny. It’s more like a room in him that he has learned to keep the door closed on, and on the days the door is open, he is very far away even when he’s standing right next to you.The first instruction is one sentence long. Don’t let him walk home alone today.Marisol reads it after the bus has already gone.MORE LETTERS WILL COME. NOT ALL OF IT AT ONCE.The second letter contains a list. Eleven items, September through February, in the too-careful handwriting of someone who composed it many times before committing it to paper. Some are dates. Some are postures - he’ll go quiet in October, don’t panic, but don’t give him space, that’s exactly what he’s expecting. Some are addressed to her so directly they take her breath: when he deflects with a joke, you’ll want to laugh and move on. Don’t. Not every time.Her future self will not tell her everything. The whole picture at once would be more weight than a sixteen-year-old can carry, and would make her useless to him.And there’s a postscript. Tell Javier you know. He got one too.A YEAR OF SHOWING UP BEFORE YOU’RE READYWhat follows is not a rescue. Her older self is explicit about that - the second you become the person saving him, he becomes the person who needs saving, and that is not who he is. Be in his life. Actually in it. Not stage-managing it from the wings.So Marisol does the harder thing. She goes to the Pinellas Park house on an October Friday when nobody in the original timeline did. She says a true thing in a driveway in November that she didn’t prepare, and a week later he calls a therapist on a Tuesday afternoon, quietly, without fanfare. She learns the difference between paying attention and almost paying attention, which turns out to be the entire distance between two versions of a life.She also learns what it costs to hold six months of someone’s future in your hands and not tell him. Because eventually she will have to. And when she does, he will have to decide which parts of the year were real.Around them: Tanya, who has handed Marisol half a granola bar every September for six years. Brandon, whose love language is the logistics of feeding people. Javier, who got his own letter and has been carrying it alone. A grandmother’s cross that still smells faintly of Pond’s cold cream. St. Petersburg in the fall, the Skyway pier at first light, the screened porch and the mockingbird and the sunset going pink over the Kenwood rooftops.Then February. Then the fourteenth.A young adult novel about depression, friendship, and the ordinary courage of noticing - a hopeful coming of age story for readers who want a book about suicide prevention that is finally, insistently, about being alive. A Latina heroine with a voice you’ll hear for a long time after. A found family in Florida. A love letter to everyone who showed up before they were ready, and to everyone who is still deciding whether to.Content note: this novel deals directly with depression and suicidal ideation.
