Don't Fail Me Now

Praise for
Like No Other
, by Una LaMarche

“One of the most poignant and star-crossed love stories since
The Fault in Our Stars
.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Electrifying . . . surprisingly seductive. LaMarche expertly conjures up what high-stakes infatuation feels like.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Refreshing tale of forbidden love.”

—People

“LaMarche tells a truly complex urban story worth telling.”

—Vogue

“[T]he dire consequences that threaten this clandestine romance make the novel read like a thriller. . . . Readers will fall for these two love-struck teenagers as easily as they fall for each other.”

—Publishers Weekly,
starred review

“Romantic and wonderful and heartbreaking.”

—Slate.com

“You root for Devorah and Jaxon because you remember you were once like them. From our first love or our first rebellion, they are a way for us to relive those strange and exciting days.”

—Boston Herald

“
Like No Other
is a moving coming-of-age story that will have even adults remembering the burning intensity and insecurities of their first love.”

—VOYA

“LaMarche alternates between the two perspectives, prefacing each chapter with a date and time stamp, underlining how time expands and contracts in odd ways when one is in love. [Devorah and Jaxon's] time together is forbidden and precious, making each moment simultaneously infinite and too short. Fans of Rainbow Rowell's
Eleanor & Park
 . . . will enjoy this story of surprising love.”

—School Library Journal

“[R]eaders will be fascinated by this peek into a different world, empathetic with the couple's feelings and buoyed by the hopeful ending.”

—
Booklist

“[Devorah's] struggle between tradition and modernity, filial duty and personal fulfillment, is complicated and realistic. . . . This leads to a conclusion that, while bittersweet, is still hopeful.”

—The
Horn
Book

Penguin.com

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Copyright © 2015 Penguin Random House

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN: 978-0-698-18219-6

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

To my parents, Ellen and Gara, who have never failed me . . . and who, therefore, did not inspire this novel in any way. Sorry, guys. I love
you.

Sunday Night/Monday Morning

Baltimore, MD

“Michelle? I'm scared.”

Denny's voice cuts through the static that's been building in my brain, a surround-sound symphony of panic made even worse by the digital hiss and spit of the police intercom. My little brother nestles his face into my side, and I lift my half-asleep hand to rest on the soft, tight curls at the nape of his neck.

“It's okay,” I say, squeezing him three times in quick succession, which is our family code for
it's going to be okay.
The simple act still soothes me, even though now that I'm grown I can see the irony: A family that needs that kind of a code is not now, and has probably never been, okay. I bend down to kiss the top of his head. “Can you go back to sleep?”

Denny shrugs, burrowing deeper into my T-shirt. “Ina wanu gotslepgin,” he mumbles into my armpit.

“Huh?”

He looks up at me with big, watery eyes. “I don't want
you
to go to sleep again,” he says.

“Oh, I wasn't sleeping, only . . .” Only paralyzed with anxiety. Not exactly a bedtime story fit for a first grader. “I was just zoning out.”

“I want you to stay with me,” he whimpers.

They'll try to split you up!
I get a flash of my mom, wild-eyed with terror.

“I will, meatball, I promise.” I use our family's pet name for him—Denny was the roundest, brownest baby you ever saw—in a cheap attempt to make him feel safe and am rewarded instantly with a teary, hesitant smile that turns into a yawn halfway through, revealing a missing front tooth that—surprise, surprise—the “Tooth Fairy” still owes him for. She tends to save her quarters for other things. I feel another twinge of dread.

Don't let them split you up!

“Hey, do you have any homework we could finish?” I ask, trying to sound like this is a normal, fun activity that siblings often do together when they find themselves stuck in a police precinct at one
A.M.
on a school night.

Denny nods and leans down, sending the cavernous neck of his men's-size Goodwill T-shirt sliding up over the back of his big mug-handle ears, and pulls his backpack out from under Cass's feet, which causes my sleeping sister to thrash dramatically before burying her face back into her hoodie. The officer at the front desk, a hard-looking Latina with her hair pulled
back so tight it gives her cartoon-villain eyebrows, glances up at the commotion and glares at us, and my jaw tenses.

We don't want to be here either.

Fresh shame floods my cheeks as I think back to all of the hushed whispers and pitying glances that greeted us when we got brought in four hours ago, and also to the tall, pasty cop who poked his head out of a door down the hall and made a joke about “crack babies” to whoever was inside.

“Here,” Denny says, holding a sheet of paper up in front of me, interrupting my revenge fantasy about punching that ignorant douche right in the center of his big pie-dough face. It's a photocopy of a drawing of a wide, squat tree with two big branches that curl out from the center, making a heart in the middle. Inside the big, fluffy outline of leaves there are four rows of blank boxes. At the top, in a thick, curly font, it says
my family
. “I'm s'posed to fill it in, but I forget how,” he says, rubbing his eyes.

I remember this assignment. Denny's in first grade now and has the same teacher I had when I went to his school eleven years ago, Mrs. Mastino. I remember filling out my family tree and having my mother proudly stick it to the fridge with three letter magnets:
M
,
H
, and
D
for my initials. I remember how it stayed up there for two years before she finally ripped it up and threw it away along with all of the other memories of him.

I take the paper from Denny and point to the bottom row of boxes. “You fill it in starting backward,” I explain, furrowing my brow, wishing I had a coffee or a soda to aid me in my fake enthusiasm. “This here is us: you, me, and Cass.” I point to the next row up. “That's mom and Buck, then above them is—”

“You mean Dad,” Denny says, and I trap the tip of my tongue between my teeth, biting down until it goes numb, a coping trick I picked up a long time ago and the reason why I still can't taste some things until they reach the back of my throat.

“Right,” I repeat slowly.
“Dad.”

I don't remember when I started calling my father Buck, but it's the only way I can stomach referring to him now. It just makes it easier. “Buck” sounds like a mangy dog or a farm animal too lazy or stupid to find his way home, not like a grown man who walked out on his twenty-two-year-old wife and two kids and never looked back.

Denny, who came later, isn't Buck's son, but for the sake of simplicity we all just pretend he is. I mean, we don't
lie
to Denny—he knows his absent father was different from ours—but it's just easier for everyone to sort of merge them into one deadbeat-dad amalgam. No one except my mom knows who Denny's biological father is, and I would bet money that even she's not 100 percent sure. She was hanging out with a couple of guys around that time, bleary-eyed dudes reeking of skunky cologne she would introduce as “Uncle Trey,” or “Cousin Freddy,” even though we were old enough by then to know they weren't relatives. I went out of my way not to see them. At the sound of her key in the door, I would drag Cass up the tacky carpeted steps to our room, and we'd play Barbies or Legos and I'd turn on the radio to drown out the voices and clinking bottles downstairs.

But there's no box for “possible fathers” on Denny's worksheet, and our family history is too R-rated to fully explain to a six-year-old.

“You know, maybe we should do something else,” I say, but
Denny's already hard at work, a pencil clutched in his little fist, moving slowly across the already-crinkled page on his lap. He proudly holds up the tree, on which he's written
mom
,
dad
,
michel
[sic],
cass
,
max
, and
denny
(with one backward
N
) in crooked capitals. (Max does not exist. Max is Denny's imaginary friend. He surfaced about seven months ago, when mom lost her latest job, showing up sporadically when Denny gets scared, and we can't seem to make him leave, no matter how hard we try. Max is—there's no nice way to put this—kind of a dick.)

“Nice work,” I say. “I think your teacher wants full names, though. Here, how 'bout I write them down and you can copy them in.”

Denny yawns and passes the paper back to me, letting his head drop against my chest. I glance up at the wall clock and catch Officer Tight Hair giving me a look again. Does she think Denny is my son, that I am some kind of preteen mom, too young and sad to even get my own show on MTV? I guess I can't blame her; it feels like that sometimes. Lately, all the time.

Madison Means Devereaux
, I write on the back of the photocopy, trying to make my loose, loopy handwriting clear enough for Denny to read. My mother, Maddie Means, was neither mad nor mean before Buck Devereaux came along. They met in junior high, when Buck transferred schools after his own dad ran out on him (foreshadowing alert!), leaving his mom high and dry and unable to afford the nice suburban neighborhood she had been accustomed to living in. Mom sang in the choir back then, got straight As, and dreamed of going to Juilliard like Nina Simone. She was a pastor's daughter with a dangerous, dormant rebellious streak just waiting for the right trigger.

Speaking of which:
Allen Buckner Devereaux III
, I write,
wanting to roll my eyes hard at the difference between Buck's aristocratic-sounding name and the man himself, a handsome but aimless dropout grifter who couldn't hold a job or, based on the photos I've seen, keep a shirt on for longer than a church service. Right after he left, during her saddest moments, when she would crawl into my bed and curl around me, her sharp, sweet booze breath hot on my neck, Mom used to say that from the day they met it was true love. “I looked in those clear green eyes and saw my future,” she'd whisper, hoarse from crying. I have those same green eyes. People always comment on them, so striking against my coppery skin. But I look in the mirror every day, and I can't see any future hiding behind my irises. All I can see in my father's eyes is the past.

Michelle Hope Devereux.
I was conceived the same month my mother turned sixteen, which helps to explain why I'm named after Michelle Kwan, who skated her way to Olympic silver that winter while I was doing somersaults under Mom's school uniform. There was a party in the basement of my grandfather's church—Mom has a whole photo album devoted to it—with pink balloons and streamers, lemonade in plastic cups, and a big sheet cake with yellow buttercream frosting and pink letters spelling out
Sweet 16 Maddie Means
. In the pictures, Mom is wearing an orange silk dress with a matching short-sleeved jacket, smiling a coy, closed-lip smile as she poses with her parents and my aunt Sam and an endless parade of friends and relatives who have since cut all ties. Buck and his mother are there, too, loitering awkwardly in the background, beige from head to toe among a sea of black parishioners in their most festive jewel tones. It's the only time I've ever seen a photo of Buck wearing a tie. I wonder if they knew about me yet. I wonder if he was already plotting his escape.

I pause and look down at Denny, whose eyes are fluttering closed against my collarbone, his breath slowing into little waves punctuated by open-mouthed sighs. It's amazing how quickly kids can rebound; he was sobbing all the way to the station, asking me a million times where Mom was and where we were going. I tried to keep calm and reassure him without really answering any of his questions—I'll do anything to protect Denny's innocence, since he's the only one of us who's got any; he doesn't remember the first two times Mom got arrested because he wasn't born yet. Cass and I, on the other hand, we know the drill. We don't cry anymore. We just shut off.

This time, though, I know it's bad. They can't reach Aunt Sam—I've overheard two different officers leave her voicemails—and the next call they make will be to Child Protective Services. That's just what happens when you've got a junkie mother, a deadbeat dad, a missing aunt, and no other known living relatives. I swallow hard and put pencil to paper again, to keep the panic at bay.

Reverend Jeremiah Means
and
Cynthia Smith Means
. After I was born, Grandma and Grandpa let Mom stay in the house to raise me, and they paid for all our food and clothes. But they also made it clear that Buck wasn't welcome in their home unless he came on bended knee with a ring, so depending on whom you ask, he either started taking odd jobs or grifting, going around charming people into giving him goods and services he had no intention of paying for, although Mom swears that didn't start until later, when they got really broke. It took him two years, but by the time Mom turned eighteen, the ring—a square quarter carat set in a thin gold band engraved with the letters
BM
, which is appropriate given how quickly things went
down the toilet—finally showed up. By all accounts my grandparents were horrified that their bluff had been called, but they gave their blessings anyway. Two months after the ceremony, which Grandpa officiated in the sparse backyard under a near-dead crabapple tree, they got on a church bus headed to a conference in Philadelphia. It was barreling down the highway at sixty-five miles an hour when the front tire blew and the driver lost control, flipped over the median, and hit a tractor-trailer. Everyone on board was killed instantly.

Allen Buckner Devereaux Jr.
and
Polly Devereaux.
These two have been AWOL since 1994 and 2000, respectively. They just peaced out. I have no idea if the elder ABD is still alive. Last my mom can recall, Polly moved someplace in the Midwest when Buck decided to go through with the wedding. Apparently she'd been trying to convince Buck to go with her, even saying she'd buy him a new car if he walked away from us, but Buck was young and in love, and besides, he was obsessed with “Goldie,” the rusty, Band Aid–colored 1973 Datsun station wagon he'd inherited from
his
deadbeat dad. Incidentally, Polly never met me, but we still drive Goldie. In fact, she's sitting outside right now in the Baltimore Police Department parking lot after having been routinely searched for narcotics. It's like that “Circle of Life” song from
The Lion King
, only way more depressing.

“Shut
uuuuupppp
,” Cass groans, and for a split second I think I must be so fried that I'm saying all this out loud. But then one arm slips down from her face and dangles over the side of the bench, and I can see she's still out cold. Must be dreaming. Something's been bothering her for weeks, and I don't think it has anything to do with Mom's relapse. But every time I've tried to ask her about it, she shuts down. She
was always a shy kid—neighbors used to joke they couldn't tell what she looked like since she was permanently plastered to the backs of Mom's knees—but now that she's thirteen, her natural quietness has turned into something more troubling. She's grown cold, even to me. Looking at her face these days, which is still the spitting image of Mom's, and cruelly beautiful despite the onset of puberty, is like watching a storm roll in from a distance while the sun still shines on you, wondering what it's like on the other side.

Cassidy Devereaux.
Cass doesn't have a middle name, presumably because all hope had been abandoned by the time she came along when I was four. Mom and Buck were okay for a while, but after Mom's parents died, I think they realized how screwed they were, with a toddler, an old house to maintain, and only one (unreliable) source of income. According to Aunt Sam, that's when the dealing started in earnest. I'm not sure how much I should believe of what she tells me, since she's always resented the fact that Grandma and Grandpa left the house to their younger, helpless, irresponsible child when Sam had been busting her ass to put herself through nursing school
plus
managed to avoid a teen pregnancy. But Mom never had a real job until Buck left, so I have to wonder how they made ends meet for so long. And every time I smell pot in the parking lot at school, or on the late-night customers at the Taco Bell where I work, it's immediately comforting. I guess it must smell like home.