I Fell in Love with Hope: A Novel - Softcover

Lancali

 
9781668034538: I Fell in Love with Hope: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668034530 ISBN 13: 9781668034538
Verlag: Emily Bestler Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The heart-wrenching TikTok sensation about a group of terminally ill patients who vow to live the rest of their lives to the fullest and find a love that transforms and transcends.

Against the unforgiving landscape of a hospital, a group of terminally ill patients embraces the joys within their reach: friendship, freedom, rebellion. Each in their own way is broken; each in their own way is stronger for it.

In the midst of pain and loss, they find community, even miracles, and together they are determined to reclaim from life what illness has taken from them. But a singular heartbreak has led one to swear off love forever. The risk of experiencing another tragedy feels too great. Yet, in this desolate place where it seems impossible for love to make an appearance, a door opens—and so do hearts.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lancali is the pen name for Lou-Andrea Callewaert. Born in France, where her imagination was so all-consuming her parents teased that she lived on the moon, she moved to the US when she was ten and soon started filling empty boxes with stories she’d write. Lou is now twenty-one, still a moon treader, her imagination more sculpted and developed, and she attends the University of Florida where she studies literature and classics. I Fell in Love with Hope is her first novel and she is currently completing her second.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Yellow-Flared Eyes
1 yellow-flared eyes

years later…

WHEN HE DIED, I became someone else.

I used to dream of us, thinking that within his yellow-flared eyes there was a future I could count on. Futures are never certain. Nothing will teach you that better than watching someone you love walk away.

Nothing will teach you that better than growing up in a hospital.

The steady white noise keeps you sane. Stretchers pass and staff walk in their assigned lanes like they’re on some kind of medical highway. Apart from that, there is bland, tasteless food and bland, tasteless decor to accompany your sentence. That’s all a hospital is, really. Not a place to get better or a place to be treated, but a place to wait.

Imagine a bomb chained to your wrist. It makes sounds. Like a heart monitor. Day and night. A countdown. A countdown, by the way, that you can’t see. Look at your bomb, hold it up like a watch. All that’ll stare back at you is a blinking red light with that barking beep. Reminders that this bomb will go off. You just don’t know when.

That’s what waiting to die is like.

A bomb drifts through your veins by the name of illness.

You cannot defuse it. You cannot destroy it. You cannot run from it.

Time, disease, and death are rueful mechanics that way. They enjoy crafting nooses out of fear, and they love playing games. Shadows are their tools, curving over your shoulders with eerie fingers, coaxing you into the dark, taking your body, your mind, and anything they please with it.

Time, disease, and death are the greatest thieves in the world.

Or they were.

Until we came along. Four friends who do not believe in bombs.

Sony barged into my life not lying on a hospital bed but kicking a vending machine that had robbed her of her chocolate. The second she saw me her frustration melted away, and we shared crappy chocolate and spoke of far-fetched dreams sitting on a cold hallway floor. Though I didn’t know it at the time, she had survived a loss far greater than one of her lungs. With hair the color of fire and an air of freedom, she is a gladiator, the bravest thief I know.

Coeur is a much calmer being. He’s our muscle, our ever-guilty muscle. His mother is French, his father Haitian, both pretentious namers. Coeur means heart, though the heart in C’s body is broken. Literally. But the heart in his soul is the biggest among us. He is the lover in the bunch and the worst thief among us.

Neo is a writer, a bitter poet. Unlike Sony, he is silent, and unlike C, he is remorseless. His spine is fragile, but his words make up for it. He’s bony and short, so small we call him Baby, although, for a baby, he sure has a temper. I’m fairly certain he’s never worn a smile in his life. I’ve known him the longest, and though he’s scowly and mean, it’s all a mask, his protection. He’s also the smartest person I know—observant, creative, resilient—the one who plans and records our great feats of thievery. He claims that Sony and I are extroverts who’ve kidnapped him and coerced him into being our friend, but I know he secretly enjoys the company. Hospitals are lonely until you find your people.

It’s been years since Neo, Sony, and C have been in and out of the hospital.

Now, when they go home, they don’t go home for long. Disease is greedy. It takes pieces of you until you no longer recognize yourself, and Neo, C, and Sony don’t recognize themselves outside this place anymore.

Whether you’re sick or not, the night creates mirrors out of windows. In the past, it showed my friends images of corpses in the glass: skeletons with bones unwrapped by flesh, organs falling through the rib cage, blood seeping from the mouth. They trembled at the foretelling, their fingertips grazing the surface that entranced them. Diagnoses, pills, needles, and so many new mirrors they never meant to find encroached on their lives. Their reflections became their realities.

So rather than meet the new versions of themselves made vulnerable by the beds they slept in and the gowns they wore, my friends turned off the lights. They climbed a staircase and met on a rooftop. They let their fingertips graze the sky with no barrier to stop them from touching the stars.

Defiant.

We should just steal everything, Sony said. Even with a low-burning flame, she was brave. Let’s steal everything we can before we go.

Everything? C asked.

Everything.

Everything’s a long list, Neo said.

Your lives were stolen, I said. Why don’t you steal some of it back?

That was the day our hit list was born. But so far, everything isn’t ours yet.

Stealing is an art form, and we’ve yet to become artists. But it doesn’t stop us from trying.

On a cloudless afternoon we slip out of the hospital. Sony leads the charge, C pushing Neo in a wheelchair across the boulevard. We make our way down the sidewalk and inside a mini-mart. Sony sidles up to a kiosk filled with sunglasses and dons a pair of aviators, scopes out the place, and nods her head.

“Now,” she says, the price tag dangling from her temple.

C makes his way toward the refrigerated section.

“Now?” Neo looks up, caressing the book that never leaves his side. His copy of Great Expectations. It’s a constant, like a beauty mark or the shape of his nose. And it’s bent at the spine, just like him.

“Now,” Sony commands, chest high.

“Won’t we get caught?” I whisper, looking around the gas station mart. Three people roam the aisles; the cashier flips through a magazine.

“We’re definitely getting caught,” Neo says.

Sony smirks down at him through the periphery of her soon-to-be-stolen sunglasses.

“Why would we get caught?” she teases.

Neo snorts. “We always get caught.”

“Today is different. Today is on our side,” Sony proclaims, taking a breath, deep and dramatic. “Can’t you taste it, Neo? How sweet the air is?”

“We’re in a candy aisle, you idiot!” Neo’s wheelchair creaks when he throws his head back to look at me. “Sam. Tell her she’s an idiot.”

I would, but I value my life.

“Sony, you’re an idiot,” Neo says, grabbing a pen and notebook wedged in his chair and slamming the book open, and scribbles, 4:05 p.m.: Sony is an idiot.

Neo is our scribe—the one who records our great deeds. Granted, he didn’t exactly agree to the job. He didn’t even agree to come along on this mission. But when your spine is hook-shaped, you can’t escape the shackles of friendship. The wheelchair groans as I pull it just out of Sony’s reach.

“It’s a wonder you need back surgery at all, Baby.” Sony doesn’t have a job per se. She’s the giver of jobs, doubling as the devil on my shoulder with toothy, shameless grins. “That stick up your ass could surely serve as a spine, no?”

“You talk a lot of shit for someone who can’t go up a flight of stairs,” Neo growls. I pull his wheelchair a little farther back.

“It’s a gift.” Sony sighs, her one lung filled with ambition....

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Verlag
Emily Bestler Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668034530
ISBN 13 
9781668034538
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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Softcover