Excerpt from The Last Boy and Girl in the World by Siobhan Vivian, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1

Sunday, May 8
Mostly cloudy, with steady afternoon showers, 49°F

I used to love rainy days. The coziness of hiding inside a baggy sweater. Of thick socks and galoshes. Curling up against your best friend to share her too-small umbrella. The drowsy, dreamy way a day can pass when there's not a single ray of sunshine.

That was before Aberdeen had its wettest spring ever recorded. After three weeks straight of precipitation, I was ready to blow off finals and move to the Sahara. The weather hadn't reached biblical levels. We'd had a couple of big storms, not one long and endless monsoon. Some days it just sprinkled, some days it only misted. But the air always felt damp and unseasonably chilly. I was sick of layering. Thermals under jeans, T-shirts under button-ups under hoodies, tights or leggings under dresses under cardigans. All of it thickening me like a full-body callus, while my dresser drawers were full of neatly folded spring clothes that I was dying to wear. In fact, most kids still wore winter coats to school even though it was the beginning of May. In those early days, I remember that, more than anything else, feeling wrong.

So it was really nice to wake up to the sun the morning our high school's Key Club went to help shore up the riverbank with sandbags. Especially since the forecasters were already predicting a band of severe storms later in the week, supposedly the worst to hit us yet.

Actually, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a rainbow. Not a real one, but a rainbow sticker I had put on the underside of Morgan's bedside lampshade a million years ago. Everything in Morgan's room used to be covered in stickers—her walls, her mirror, her closet door. Over time, she'd peeled them away, though their sticky gum outlines were left behind, like permanent shadows. But she never found this one, and I liked that it was still there.

I lifted my head off the pillow. Morgan was already in the shower. I waited until I heard the water shut off before climbing out of her bed. It was too cold and too early to bother changing clothes, so I threaded my bra back through the armholes of the T-shirt I'd slept in and checked to make sure my leggings weren't too baggy in the butt to wear in public. Then I reached across Morgan's side of the bed, picked one of my socks off her radiator, and squeezed it. It still wasn't completely dry, not even after a night spent baking on the coils.

Morgan hurried into her bedroom in her bra and underwear, a towel twisted around her hair. Ever since her parents divorced and her dad moved out, she'd quit wearing her bathrobe. Or maybe it was ever since she'd started hooking up with guys. I wasn't sure.

"I'm borrowing dry socks, okay?" I knelt in front of her laundry basket.

She shivered as she pulled on her jeans. "You want an extra shirt, too?" she asked, pulling a white thermal with a tiny yellow rosebud print out of her dresser and offering it to me.

I shook my head. "I have my hoodie. And once we start working, I bet we get sweaty." I looked forward to that, to being outside and not feeling cold.

Morgan put on the thermal and plopped down at her desk, a place more for makeup and hair stuff than for studying or homework. She unwrapped the towel. Her hair was such a dark shade of brown, it looked black when it was wet, and she barely ran her comb through it before twisting it up in a topknot. It was so thick that she used three hairbands to hold it, and I knew the center of that knot wouldn't ever dry, not even by the next morning. Then Morgan sat back in her chair and stared at her reflection for a few quiet seconds. When she noticed me noticing, she said with a chuckle, "I guess one good thing about having a long-distance ex is that I don't have to worry about randomly running into him in Aberdeen."

Excerpted from The Last Boy and Girl in the World by Siobhan Vivian. Copyright © 2016 by Siobhan Vivian. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.