Hope Nation Read online

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  New York, NY 10014

  Collection copyright © 2018 by Rose Brock.

  “Don’t Listen to the A**holes” copyright © 2018 by Atia Abawi. “Chah-Muh” copyright © 2018 by Renée Ahdieh. “Before and After” copyright © 2018 by Libba Bray. “The Dreadful Summer of 1991” copyright © 2018 by Howard Bryant. “The Two Types of Secrets” copyright © 2018 by Ally Carter. “Rundown” copyright © 2018 by Ally Condie. “Four-Letter Words” copyright © 2018 by James Dashner. “Baseball Pasta” copyright © 2018 by Christina Diaz Gonzalez. “Shot of Hope” copyright © 2018 by Gayle Forman. “Born in Argentina, Made in America: The Immigrant Identity” copyright © 2018 by Romina Garber. “Caution: This Hope Is NSFW (but it shouldn’t be)” copyright © 2018 by I. W. Gregorio. “Wings and Teeth” copyright © 2018 by Kate Hart. “We” copyright © 2018 by David Levithan. “Different Dances” copyright © 2018 by Alex London. “Surviving” copyright © 2018 by Marie Lu. “Hoping for Home” copyright © 2018 by Julie Murphy. “The Kids Who Stick” copyright © 2018 by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. “The Only One I Can Apologize For” copyright © 2018 by Aisha Saeed. “Always” copyright © 2018 by Nic Stone. “Now More Than Ever” copyright © 2018 by Angie Thomas. “In the Past” copyright © 2018 by Jenny Torres Sanchez. “Love” copyright © 2018 by Nicola Yoon. “Nobody Remembers the Names of People Who Build Walls” copyright © 2018 by Jeff Zentner.

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  Ebook ISBN 9781524741846

  Version_1

  For Madeleine, Olivia, Michael, and Mom, who inspire me to start and end each day with hope.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  “WE” BY DAVID LEVITHAN

  “BEFORE AND AFTER” BY LIBBA BRAY

  “NOW MORE THAN EVER” BY ANGIE THOMAS

  “RUNDOWN” BY ALLY CONDIE

  “SURVIVING” BY MARIE LU

  “NOBODY REMEMBERS THE NAMES OF PEOPLE WHO BUILD WALLS” BY JEFF ZENTNER

  “LOVE” BY NICOLA YOON

  “WINGS AND TEETH” BY KATE HART

  “SHOT OF HOPE” BY GAYLE FORMAN

  “BASEBALL PASTA” BY CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ

  “DON’T LISTEN TO THE A**HOLES” BY ATIA ABAWI

  “DIFFERENT DANCES” BY ALEX LONDON

  “THE DREADFUL SUMMER OF 1991” BY HOWARD BRYANT

  “THE TWO TYPES OF SECRETS” BY ALLY CARTER

  “BORN IN ARGENTINA, MADE IN AMERICA: THE IMMIGRANT IDENTITY” BY ROMINA GARBER

  “CHAH-MUH” BY RENÉE AHDIEH

  “THE ONLY ONE I CAN APOLOGIZE FOR” BY AISHA SAEED

  “IN THE PAST” BY JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ

  “ALWAYS” BY NIC STONE

  “HOPING FOR HOME” BY JULIE MURPHY

  “CAUTION: THIS HOPE IS NSFW (BUT IT SHOULDN’T BE)” BY I. W. GREGORIO

  “FOUR-LETTER WORDS” BY JAMES DASHNER

  “THE KIDS WHO STICK” BY JASON REYNOLDS & BRENDAN KIELY

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  ROSE BROCK

  Introduction

  Dear Reader,

  Like some of you, I’m a reader. Like others, I wasn’t always. My family came from Germany to the United States when I was in elementary school, and for all kinds of reasons, I struggled. Coming from somewhere different was hard. Learning English—learning in English—was hard. That slowly changed, thanks mostly to books. Books became my escape, my window to this new American world. I still remember my first book friendships; before I had real friends at my new school, I basked in the company of fictional friends. Since that point, reading books has been one of the things I cherish most.

  Here’s another thing you should know about me. Until she passed away, I was fed a steady diet of hopeful anecdotes by my immigrant mother. Hers were often focused on her childhood during World War II in Germany. After losing all their possessions in an Allied bombing, my grandmother and her five children fled their city to Bavaria to start over again while they waited for my grandfather to be released from a camp for prisoners of war. Although my family was on the wrong side of history, it seemed that the lessons served to my mom were ones that resonated, and for that reason, in my childhood home, finding hope was a directive. It was expected that the world’s lemons would be made into fresh lemonade. Perhaps that is the reason I’m an optimist. A dreamer. A hoper. And whether it’s in my genetic makeup to see the glass as half full or it’s a product of conditioning, I love stories of resilience and tenacity, and I look for hopeful stories everywhere—in books, in movies, and most importantly, in real life. The older I get, the more I understand that finding and holding on to hope can be hard. At times it can feel impossible.

  So what is Hope Nation? Simply, it’s a collection of unique and personal experiences shared by some of my favorite writers for teens. Stories of resilience, resistance, hardship, loss, love, tenacity, and acceptance—stories that prove that sometimes, hope can be found only on the other side of adversity. I’m so grateful to each of these talented writers for sharing their own paths to hope.

  Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood once said that during a crisis, it’s vital to look for the helpers. The authors featured in Hope Nation are our helpers; the gift of their stories is the reason I am able to share this book with you. The making of it is a hopeful endeavor in every way—in lieu of being paid to share their stories, my amazing team of contributors have donated 100 percent of their fees to charities that give meaning to them, organizations and charities working to make our world a better place for you and me. And my publisher is matching each donation.

  To me, Hope Nation is the gift I want to give back to all the young people in my life, especially my daughters, Madeleine and Olivia. It’s for the teens closest to me who have been left feeling disempowered and hopeless. We see you. It’s for all of you that we say, “Hope is a decision.” I hope it’s a choice you make for yourself.

  Dr. Rose Brock

  Grapevine, Texas

  2018

  DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY

  DAVID LEVITHAN

  We

  THIS IS WHAT I BELIEVE:

  Despair comes from the things that are bigger than us.

  Hope comes from the things that are our size.

  This is where I’m coming from:

  I don’t know many truly bad people. In fact, when I try to think of a truly bad person in my life, I come up with a handful of selfish ones, a secondhand knowledge of a number of ignorant and/or misguided ones, and a painful dose of ones who hold opinions with which I passionately disagree. But the ones who would kick me when I was down? They are vastly outnumbered by the ones who would help m
e out.

  I know I am lucky in this respect.

  When I’m dealing with other people, especially strangers (and especially especially strangers who are walking slowly on the sidewalk or cutting me off with their cars), I often experience a profound annoyance, peppered with an occasional flash of genuine anger. But what’s interesting to me is that underneath it all is an equally profound love. I operate under the assumption that any given person, if I got to know them, would be completely worthy of love and consideration and kindness. To know a person’s story is inevitably to understand their humanity and feel a loving kinship with them, no matter how different the two of you may seem at first.

  This love, this understanding of humanity, is what gives me hope.

  You see:

  When push comes to shove, most people will help.

  When push comes to shove, most people will aspire to decency.

  When push comes to shove, most people want the center to hold.

  I genuinely believe this.

  So.

  The despair comes when individuals unite into power structures that distance them from this humanity. In the blindness of the mob, or the government, or the corporation, or the armed forces, there can be a strange and dangerous impulse to cut moral corners. Any situation that allows us to dehumanize others is asking for trouble. It plays to the worst in us.

  I hate this. I hate that the value of a human life can ever be seen as anything other than absolute and equal.

  But look. Change happens when people stop looking at the bigger scale and start seeing things on the human scale. Or let’s not just call it change—let’s call it progress. I’m a gay Jew living in America at the start of the twenty-first century, which is inarguably the best time for a gay Jew to be living. Set anywhere else in history, I would be much more afraid of the grave, and much more certain to stay in the shadows. Not because people hated me, but because people hated my category. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t haters out there now. Oh, there are. But there are fewer of them. And there are fewer of them because people started seeing the category on the human scale . . . and realized that the people within it are just as human as they are. That’s how progress works. And the fact that it does work (often at agonizingly slow speed) is what gives me hope.

  In my life so far, I’ve come to count on the fact that whenever the forces of despair push at us, there is always counterbalance that comes from the forces of hope. I have seen it on a micro level—the way when a book is challenged, it will always be defended, most often on very human terms, for very human reasons. And I have seen it on a macro level—when a handful of terrorists caused such devastation in New York City on 9/11, there was an outpouring of millions upon millions of people who responded with care and love and kindness. Most recently, after the election of 2016 and the inauguration of Donald Trump, we saw the remarkable way people came together to protest—and we’ve since seen that protest sustained. The things his government is doing make me despair. The reaction to it makes me hope.

  Which leads me to this story.

  It’s fiction, but it’s not really fiction. On Inauguration Day in 2017, I was attending the American Library Association convention in Atlanta, Georgia, and marched with two librarian friends in a bigger group of librarians, teachers, authors, and publishers in a much bigger group of protesters in the streets of Atlanta. Every year I write a story for my friends for Valentine’s Day, and in 2017 the protest was still very much on my mind when I sat down to write the story. So I made some characters do what I did and see what I saw. Which is why I feel comfortable sharing it in a collection of essays—sometimes we fiction writers need to make up a story to tell a truth of the moment. And this certainly holds the truth, to me, of that day. And that truth still translates for me, months later, into hope.

  • • •

  WE

  (the Valentine’s Day story, 2017)

  “I BET THIS WOULD BE a great place to pick up girls,” Courtney says to me, her eyes scanning the hundreds of pussy hats pouring by Coca-Cola World on the way to the march.

  “If you say so,” I tell her. The only girls I ever pick up are friends like Courtney, who can bring a lesbian reality check to my flightier gay-boy fancies.

  “I’ve already given my heart away, like, five times,” Courtney tells me. “They just haven’t noticed yet.”

  “They’re distracted by your sign.”

  “No doubt.”

  There’s pretty strong competition for best sign here. Since we’re in Georgia, there are a lot of creative suggestions for how to put the peach into impeach. (It helps that the president’s skin is the same color as a nectarine’s.) There’s an umbrella with an angry cat face on it that threatens “This Pussy Grabs Back.” Another sign has Keith Haring figures spelling out “Make America Gay Again.”

  Courtney went full-Bechdel with her poster art, cartooning famous queer women in various protest poses. Gertrude and Alice hold hands and stand their ground. Frida wears a shirt that says, “I’m Kahling You Out.” Sweet Ellen pumps a fist and calls out, “Nasty If I Wanna Be!” Audre grins and holds a sign that reads, “The Lorde is on our side, and that is all we need.” Sappho gets a speech bubble and defiantly proclaims, “I will turn your lies into fragments!”

  The problem is, it’s starting to rain, and although other people laminated their signs or covered them with clear tape, Courtney’s is entirely unprotected.

  “Shit,” she says as a few drops start to make Susan Sontag’s hair streak.

  I fumble open my umbrella as the spatter turns into a torrent. It’s not big enough to cover us both. People duck into doorways for cover; we hug the Coca-Cola World entrance, but it gives us only a partial respite.

  People continue to hurry toward the plaza outside the Center for Human and Civil Rights, where the march is set to begin. I worry that if we delay too long, we’ll end up missing the speeches, including John Lewis’s kickoff. He’s the person we all want to see.

  Courtney stares down at her poster. I know she spent a lot of time making it.

  “I guess I’ll keep it under my coat for now,” she says. She’s wearing a pink jacket that will barely cover the poster board.

  “Don’t do that,” a girl next to us says. She looks like she could be Alice Walker’s teenage self, and she’s put down her own tape-covered sign, which reads, “‘We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves’—Audre Lorde.”

  “I like your quote,” Courtney says.

  “Thanks,” the girl responds as she rummages through her bag. “Ah, here.” She plucks out a translucent square. “Take this.”

  Emergency Poncho, the label reads.

  “It’s see-through,” the girl explains. “So people can still see that kick-ass sign.”

  “Don’t you need it?” Courtney asks.

  The girl gestures to her own yellow raincoat. “I’m covered.”

  “But does this really count as an emergency?” I ask. “What if this poncho is meant to save a life?”

  Courtney, whom I’ve known for years, shoots me the look she deploys when something that falls out of my mouth gets relegated to Attempted Quip status without crossing the Effective Quip threshold.

  The amusing part is that the girl I’ve known for only a minute or two shoots me the exact same look. Since both of them are shooting at me, they don’t even notice their identicalism.

  “Thank you,” Courtney says, breaking away from me to look back at the girl. “I’m Courtney. This is Otis.”

  “With an O,” I chime in. (It’s just something I do.)

  “I’m CK,” the girl offers.

  “Well, thank you, CK,” Courtney says with some enjoyment.

  “Hey! Courtney’s initials are CK!” I realize aloud. “Your name doesn’t happen to be Courtney Khan, does it?”

  I see something shimme
r across CK’s face, but she quickly shakes her head. “Nope. CK stands in for my first and middle names—don’t ask, ’cause I’m not going to tell. My last name is Hamilton.”

  As soon as she says this, three people behind her start squeeing and saying how much they LOVE Hamilton. “I’m not throwing away my shot!” they sing. Others join in.

  “You must get that a lot,” I say to CK.

  “You have no idea,” she replies.

  “Well, boys named Evan Hansen must have it worse,” I point out. “They must wake up and curse Ben Platt on a daily basis.”

  Instead of getting a big laugh, this observation is greeted with a sheet of water that comes crashing to the ground.

  “Well, that’s not good,” Courtney says. She unfolds the emergency poncho and attempts to put it on. The head hole is not immediately discernible from the armholes. CK hands her protest sign over for me to hold, then helps Courtney straighten the poncho out.

  “You’re an EPT, aren’t you?” I ask.

  Both Courtney and CK stare at me.

  “What?” I say. “An EPT—get it? Emergency poncho technician?”

  They start laughing. But it’s not at my joke. I can tell.

  CK looks at Courtney. “He doesn’t have a clue, does he?”

  Courtney looks at me like I’m a pug. “Nope.”

  But . . . okay. Now they’re next to each other. Getting along. So at least I’ve done something right.

  “Are you here with a group?” I ask.

  “I am,” CK says. “But we seem to have scattered. I was going to try to find them.”

  There’s a beat. I wait for Courtney to say it, since it would be better for Courtney to say it. But I also know that crushes tend to tie Courtney’s tongue, so I step into the pause.

  “Want to march with us for now? It would be great to have an EPT on hand. Just in case something malfunctions.”

  “Otis! Stop!” Courtney says. Then quickly she turns to CK and adds, “I mean, with the acronym. Not with the invitation. You should totally march with us.”