Everything, Everything Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Alloy Entertainment and Nicola Yoon

  Cover design by Good Wives and Warriors

  Interior illustrations by David Yoon

  Childhood diary entry hand-lettered by Mayrav Estrin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Richard Howard. Copyright © 1943 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, English translation copyright © 2000 by Richard Howard. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Picture from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Richard Howard. Copyright © 1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry. English translation copyright © 2000 by Richard Howard. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yoon, Nicola.

  Everything, everything / Nicola Yoon. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “The story of a teenage girl who’s literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she’s ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more”— Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-553-49664-2 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-553-49665-9 (glb) — ISBN 978-0-553-49666-6 (ebook)

  [1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Allergy—Fiction. 4. Racially mixed people—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.Y66Ev 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015002950

  Cover and interior design by Natalie C. Sousa

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  a

  To my husband, David Yoon, who showed me my heart.

  And to my smart, beautiful daughter, Penny, who made it bigger.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The White Room

  SCID Row

  Brthdae Uish

  Stays the Same

  Life is Short™

  Alien Invasion, Part 2

  Madeline’s Diary

  The Welcome Committee

  My White Balloon

  Neighborhood Watch

  I Spy

  Menteuse

  Piéce de Rejection

  Survival

  Life is Short™

  First Contact

  Night Two

  Night Four

  Night Five

  Night Six

  Night Seven

  First Contact, Part Two

  First Contact, Part Three

  Astronaut Ice Cream

  Everything’s a Risk

  Fifteen Minutes Later

  Two Hours Later

  Ten Minutes After That

  Later Still

  To Those Who Wait

  Future Perfect

  Olly

  Diagnosis

  Perspectives

  Wonderland

  Life is Short™

  Makes You Stronger

  No Yes Maybe

  Time

  Mirror, Mirror

  Forecast

  Madeline’s Dictionary

  Secrets

  Thank you for Shopping

  Numerology

  Olly Says

  Chaos Theory

  A Tale of Two Maddys

  Freedom Card

  Upside Down

  Skin

  Friendship

  Research

  Life And Death

  Honestly

  Owtsyd

  The Third Maddy

  Life is a Gift

  Madeline’s Dictionary

  Mirror Image

  Schedule Change

  More Than This

  Nurse Evil

  Neighborhood Watch #2

  Higher Education

  Aloha Means Hello And Good-Bye, Part One

  Later, 9:08 P.M.

  Madam, I’m Adam

  The Glass Wall

  The Hidden World

  Half Life

  Good-Bye

  The Five Senses

  Other Worlds

  Aloha Means Hello And Good-Bye, Part Two

  Happy Already

  Infected

  Ttyl

  First-Time Flyer Faq

  The Carousel

  Madeline’s Dictionary

  Here Now

  Madeline’s Dictionary

  Reward If Found

  Remembrance of Things Present

  The Swimsuit

  Guide To Hawaiian Reef Fish

  Jump

  Cliff Diving: A Guide

  Zach

  The Murphy Bed

  All the Words

  Madeline’s Dictionary

  The Observable World

  This Time

  Spiral

  The End

  Released, Part One

  Resurrected

  Readmitted

  Released, Part Two

  Life is Short™

  Geography

  Map of Despair

  Life is Short™

  Select All, Delete

  Pretending

  Reunion

  Neighborhood Watch #3

  Five Syllables

  His Last Letter is Haiku

  Here And Now

  For My Eyes Only

  Protection

  Madeline’s Dictionary

  Identity

  Proof of Life

  Outside

  Fairy Tales

  The Void

  Beginnings And Ends

  After the Death of

  One Week A.D.

  Two Weeks A.D.

  Three Weeks A.D.

  Four Weeks A.D.

  Five Weeks A.D.

  Six Weeks A.D.

  Madeline’s Mom

  Flowers for Algernon

  The Gift

  The End is the Beginning is the End

  Future Perfect #2

  Takeoff

  Forgiveness

  Life is Short™

  This Life

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Here is my secret. It’s quite simple:

  One sees clearly only with the heart.

  Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

  THE WHITE ROOM

  I’VE READ MANY more books than you. It doesn’t matter how many you’ve read. I’ve read more. Believe me. I’ve had the time.

  In my white room, against my white walls, on my glistening white bookshelves, book spines provide the only color. The books are all brand-new hardcovers—no germy secondhand softcovers for me. They come to me from Outside, decontaminated and vacuum-sealed in plastic wrap. I would like to see the machine that does this. I imagine each book traveling on a
white conveyor belt toward rectangular white stations where robotic white arms dust, scrape, spray, and otherwise sterilize it until it’s finally deemed clean enough to come to me. When a new book arrives, my first task is to remove the wrapping, a process that involves scissors and more than one broken nail. My second task is to write my name on the inside front cover.

  PROPERTY OF: Madeline Whittier

  I don’t know why I do this. There’s no one else here except my mother, who never reads, and my nurse, Carla, who has no time to read because she spends all her time watching me breathe. I rarely have visitors, and so there’s no one to lend my books to. There’s no one who needs reminding that the forgotten book on his or her shelf belongs to me.

  REWARD IF FOUND (Check all that apply):

  This is the section that takes me the longest time, and I vary it with each book. Sometimes the rewards are fanciful:

  • Picnic with me (Madeline) in a pollen-filled field of poppies, lilies, and endless man-in-the-moon marigolds under a clear blue summer sky.

  • Drink tea with me (Madeline) in a lighthouse in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a hurricane.

  • Snorkel with me (Madeline) off Molokini to spot the Hawaiian state fish—the humuhumunukunukuapuaa.

  Sometimes the rewards are not so fanciful:

  • A visit with me (Madeline) to a used bookstore.

  • A walk outside with me (Madeline), just down the block and back.

  • A short conversation with me (Madeline), discussing anything you want, on my white couch, in my white bedroom.

  Sometimes the reward is just:

  • Me (Madeline).

  SCID ROW

  MY DISEASE IS as rare as it is famous. It’s a form of Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, but you know it as “bubble baby disease.”

  Basically, I’m allergic to the world. Anything can trigger a bout of sickness. It could be the chemicals in the cleaner used to wipe the table that I just touched. It could be someone’s perfume. It could be the exotic spice in the food I just ate. It could be one, or all, or none of these things, or something else entirely. No one knows the triggers, but everyone knows the consequences. According to my mom I almost died as an infant. And so I stay on SCID row. I don’t leave my house, have not left my house in seventeen years.

  BRTHDAE UISH

  “MOVIE NIGHT OR Honor Pictionary or Book Club?” my mom asks while inflating a blood pressure cuff around my arm. She doesn’t mention her favorite of all our post-dinner activities—Phonetic Scrabble. I look up to see that her eyes are already laughing at me.

  “Phonetic,” I say.

  She stops inflating the cuff. Ordinarily Carla, my full-time nurse, would be taking my blood pressure and filling out my daily health log, but my mom’s given her the day off. It’s my birthday and we always spend the day together, just the two of us.

  She puts on her stethoscope so that she can listen to my heartbeat. Her smile fades and is replaced by her more serious doctor’s face. This is the face her patients most often see—slightly distant, professional, and concerned. I wonder if they find it comforting.

  Impulsively I give her a quick kiss on the forehead to remind her that it’s just me, her favorite patient, her daughter.

  She opens her eyes, smiles, and caresses my cheek. I guess if you’re going to be born with an illness that requires constant care, then it’s good to have your mom as your doctor.

  A few seconds later she gives me her best I’m-the-doctor-and-I’m-afraid-I-have-some-bad-news-for-you face. “It’s your big day. Why don’t we play something you have an actual chance of winning? Honor Pictionary?”

  Since regular Pictionary can’t really be played with two people, we invented Honor Pictionary. One person draws and the other person is on her honor to make her best guess. If you guess correctly, the other person scores.

  I narrow my eyes at her. “We’re playing Phonetic, and I’m winning this time,” I say confidently, though I have no chance of winning. In all our years of playing Phonetic Scrabble, or Fonetik Skrabbl, I’ve never beaten her at it. The last time we played I came close. But then she devastated me on the final word, playing JEENZ on a triple word score.

  “OK.” She shakes her head with mock pity. “Anything you want.” She closes her laughing eyes to listen to the stethoscope.

  We spend the rest of the morning baking my traditional birthday cake of vanilla sponge with vanilla cream frosting. After it’s cooled, I apply an unreasonably thin layer of frosting, just enough to cover the cake. We are, both of us, cake people, not frosting people. For decoration, I draw eighteen frosted daisies with white petals and a white center across the top. On the sides I fashion draped white curtains.

  “Perfect.” My mom peers over my shoulders as I finish up. “Just like you.”

  I turn to face her. She’s smiling a wide, proud smile at me, but her eyes are bright with tears.

  “You. Are. Tragic,” I say, and squirt a dollop of frosting on her nose, which only makes her laugh and cry some more. Really, she’s not usually this emotional, but something about my birthday always makes her both weepy and joyful at the same time. And if she’s weepy and joyful, then I’m weepy and joyful, too.

  “I know,” she says, throwing her hands helplessly up in the air. “I’m totally pathetic.” She pulls me into a hug and squeezes. Frosting gets into my hair.

  My birthday is the one day of the year that we’re both most acutely aware of my illness. It’s the acknowledging of the passage of time that does it. Another whole year of being sick, no hope for a cure on the horizon. Another year of missing all the normal teenagery things—learner’s permit, first kiss, prom, first heartbreak, first fender bender. Another year of my mom doing nothing but working and taking care of me. Every other day these omissions are easy—easier, at least—to ignore.

  This year is a little harder than the previous. Maybe it’s because I’m eighteen now. Technically, I’m an adult. I should be leaving home, going off to college. My mom should be dreading empty-nest syndrome. But because of SCID, I’m not going anywhere.

  Later, after dinner, she gives me a beautiful set of watercolor pencils that had been on my wish list for months. We go into the living room and sit cross-legged in front of the coffee table. This is also part of our birthday ritual: She lights a single candle in the center of the cake. I close my eyes and make a wish. I blow the candle out.

  “What did you wish for?” she asks as soon as I open my eyes.

  Really there’s only one thing to wish for—a magical cure that will allow me to run free outside like a wild animal. But I never make that wish because it’s impossible. It’s like wishing that mermaids and dragons and unicorns were real. Instead I wish for something more likely than a cure. Something less likely to make us both sad.

  “World peace,” I say.

  Three slices of cake later, we begin a game of Fonetik. I do not win. I don’t even come close.

  She uses all seven letters and puts down POKALIP next to an S. POKALIPS.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Apocalypse,” she says, eyes dancing.

  “No, Mom. No way. I can’t give that to you.”

  “Yes,” is all she says.

  “Mom, you need an extra A. No way.”

  “Pokalips,” she says for effect, gesturing at the letters. “It totally works.”

  I shake my head.

  “P O K A L I P S,” she insists, slowly dragging out the word.

  “Oh my God, you’re relentless,” I say, throwing my hands up. “OK, OK, I’ll allow it.”

  “Yesssss.” She pumps her fist and laughs at me and marks down her now-insurmountable score. “You’ve never really understood this game,” she says. “It’s a game of persuasion.”

  I slice myself another piece of cake. “That was not persuasion,” I say. “That was cheating.”

  “Same same,” she says, and we both laugh.

  “You can beat me at Honor Pictionary to
morrow,” she says.

  After I lose, we go to the couch and watch our favorite movie, Young Frankenstein. Watching it is also part of our birthday ritual. I put my head in her lap, and she strokes my hair, and we laugh at the same jokes in the same way that we’ve been laughing at them for years. All in all, not a bad way to spend your eighteenth birthday.

  STAYS THE SAME

  I’M READING ON my white couch when Carla comes in the next morning.

  “Feliz cumpleaños,” she sings out.

  I lower my book. “Gracias.”

  “How was the birthday?” She begins unpacking her medical bag.

  “We had fun.”

  “Vanilla cake and vanilla frosting?” she asks.

  “Of course.”

  “Young Frankenstein?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you lost at that game?” she asks.

  “We’re pretty predictable, huh?”

  “Don’t mind me,” she says, laughing. “I’m just jealous of how sweet you and your mama are.”

  She picks up my health log from yesterday, quickly reviews my mom’s measurements and adds a new sheet to the clipboard. “These days Rosa can’t even be bothered to give me the time of day.”

  Rosa is Carla’s seventeen-year-old daughter. According to Carla they were really close until hormones and boys took over. I can’t imagine that happening to my mom and me.

  Carla sits next to me on the couch, and I hold out my hand for the blood pressure cuff. Her eyes drop to my book.

  “Flowers for Algernon again?” she asks. “Doesn’t that book always make you cry?”

  “One day it won’t,” I say. “I want to be sure to be reading it on that day.”

  She rolls her eyes at me and takes my hand.

  It is kind of a flip answer, but then I wonder if it’s true.

  Maybe I’m holding out hope that one day, someday, things will change.

  LIFE IS SHORT™

  SPOILER REVIEWS BY MADELINE

  FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON BY DANIEL KEYES

  Spoiler alert: Algernon is a mouse. The mouse dies.

  ALIEN INVASION, PART 2

  I’M UP TO the part where Charlie realizes that the mouse’s fate may be his own when I hear a loud rumbling noise outside. Immediately my mind goes to outer space. I picture a giant mother ship hovering in the skies above us.