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Excerpt
The Memory Book
If you're reading this, you're probably wondering who you are. I'll
give you three clues.
Clue 1: You just stayed up all night to finish an AP Lit paper on
The Poisonwood Bible. You fell asleep briefly while you were writing
and dreamed you were making out with James Monroe, the fifth
president and arbiter of the Monroe Doctrine.
Clue 2: I am writing this to you from the attic at the little circular
window, you know the one, at the east end of the house, where
the ceiling almost meets the floor. The Green Mountains have just
recently turned green again after a freakish late-spring dump of wet,
sloppy snow, and you can just barely see Puppy in the early dark,
doing his morning laps up and down the side of our slope in his
pointless, happy Puppy way. Sounds like the chickens need to be fed.
I guess I should do that. Stupid chickens.
Clue 3: You are still alive.
Do you know who you are yet?
You are me, Samantha Agatha McCoy, in the not-so-distant future. I'm writing this for you. They say my memory will never be
the same, that I'll start forgetting things. At first just a little, and then
a lot. So I'm writing to remember.
This won't be a journal, or a diary, or anything like that. First of
all, it's a .doc file on the tiny little laptop I carry with me everywhere,
so let's not get too romantic about this. Second, I predict that by the
time I'm done with it (perhaps never) it will exceed the length and
breadth of your typical journal. It's a book. I have a natural ability to
overwrite. For one, the paper on The Poisonwood Bible was supposed
to be five pages and turned out to be ten. For another, I answered
every possible essay question on NYU's application so the admissions
committee could have options. (It worked—I'm in.) For another, I
wrote and continually edit Hanover High's Wikipedia page, probably
the longest and most comprehensive high school Wikipedia page in
the country, which is funny because technically I'm not even supposed
to go to Hanover High because as you know (I hope), I don't live in
New Hampshire, I live in Vermont, but as you also know (I hope),
South Strafford is a town of five hundred and I can't go to the freaking
general store for high school. So I bought Dad's old pickup on an
installment plan and found some loopholes in the district policy.
I'm writing this book for you. How can you forget a thing with
this handy document for reference? Consider this your encyclopedia
entry. No, consider this your dictionary.
Samantha (proper noun, name): The name Samantha is an American
name, and a Hebrew name. In English, the meaning of the name is
"listener." In Hebrew, the meaning of the name is "Listen, name of God."
Listen, name of God, this isn't supposed to be a feelingsy thing, but it might have to be. We tried emotions in middle school and
we didn't care for them, but they have snuck back into our life.
The feelings came back yesterday in Mrs. Townsend's office.
Mrs. Townsend (proper noun, person): A guidance counselor who
has allowed you to test into all of the advanced classes you wanted to
take even if they didn't fit your schedule, and has made you aware of
every scholarship known to woman so that you don't have to bankrupt
your parents. She looks like a more tired version of Oprah, and with the
exception of Senator Elizabeth Warren, she is your hero.
Anyway, I was sitting in Mrs. Townsend's office, making sure that
I hadn't missed any deadlines because Mom and I had to go to the
geneticist in Minnesota two times in the past month. I didn't even
get a real spring break. (I type that as if I've ever had a spring break,
but I was hoping to get some major prep in with Maddie, Debate
Nationals being just a month away.)
Excerpted from The Memory Book by Lara Avery. Copyright © 2016 by Lara Avery. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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