The Shade of the Moon (33 page)

“He’ll love it here,” Sarah said. “I do. The only thing that was missing was you.”

“I’m here now,” he said, and kissed her to prove it. “Miranda and Alex are all right?”

“They’re fine,” Sarah said. “I’ve been staying with them. Now you will be, too. Oh,
Jon. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy.”

Jon didn’t want their next kiss to end. But as it did, he remembered Opal, standing
outside, guarding the bikes, waiting for him.

“Come with me,” he said to Sarah. “There’s someone I want you to meet.” He held her
hand as they walked out the door.

“Ruby?” Sarah said, breaking away from Jon. “You brought Ruby here?”

“This is Opal,” Jon said. “Ruby’s twin. Opal, I want you to meet Sarah Goldman. Sarah,
this is my friend Opal Grubb. That’s G-R-U-B-B.”

“That your Sarah?” Opal asked. “The one you’re always pining for?”

“The same,” Jon said. “She’s living here now.”

“Well, ain’t that something,” Opal said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you . . . Sarah.
Jon talked my ear off about you from Sexton right here.”

Sarah extended her hand to shake Opal’s. For a moment Opal didn’t know what to do,
but then she reached out and shook Sarah’s hand.

“I want you to know nothing happened between Jon and me,” Opal said. “I told him he’d
better not try anything funny with me, and he was a perfect gentleman.”

“I think he’s perfect, too,” Sarah said. “And I’m glad he has such a good friend.”

“Opal, would you like to freshen up?” Jon asked. “Sarah, does the clinic have a bathroom?”

Sarah smiled. “With running water,” she said. “There’s a small kitchen, too, Opal,
if you’d like to have a drink of water or some food.”

“Wouldn’t mind neither,” Opal said. “And I can see the two of you wouldn’t mind if
I left you alone.”

“We’ll be in in a minute,” Jon said.

“Two minutes,” Sarah said.

“Take your time,” Opal said. “You’ll know where to find me.”

Sarah waited until Opal had closed the clinic door behind her. “What happened?” she
asked. “How did the two of you end up together?”

“She’s my friend,” Jon replied. “Nothing more. I tricked her into coming with me,
and she tricked me into thinking she was Ruby.”

“Trickery and deceit,” Sarah said. “That’s quite a basis for friendship.”

Jon laughed. “I love you,” he said. “And I can’t believe you’re here. Could we put
off fighting until tomorrow?”

Sarah’s kiss was all the answer he needed.

Nothing was going to come easy. Jon knew that. Nothing had for four years.

But the sun was visible behind the ash clouds, and with its light, Jon could see a
future worth fighting for.

We’ll make it work, he told himself. Together, we can make it work.

How would things have been different for Jon if Dad had survived the trip to Sexton?

Would Jon have felt differently about the enclave rules if he hadn’t met Sarah?

In each of the books with Mom featured, she finds a reason to throw a party. Why do
you think socializing was so important to her, even in such dire situations?

Jon and Miranda both carry a great deal of guilt over Julie’s death. Miranda talks
only to Alex about it, while Jon has told no one. How would things have been different
if Jon and Miranda had shared their particular truths immediately following Julie’s
death?

The “clavers,” people who live in the Sexton enclave, feel a strong sense of entitlement
because the work they do is regarded as essential for human survival. On the other
hand, Ruby says she was a “grub,” in effect a manual laborer, long before the cataclysmic
events that led to the enclaves being established. Jon, as a “slip,” falls somewhere
between the two. Do these sorts of class distinctions exist today, in the real world,
in your world? Do you think it’s possible today for grubs to become clavers, or would
they, at best, feel like slips?

Sometimes a writer sees a story as a whole, planning on taking a character from Point
A to Point Z, in one volume, or two, or three or more.

Sometimes things just happen.

All four of my “moon” books just happened. It’s lucky for me that they did, but there’s
no way I can claim I knew from the very first moment just how things would evolve.

That very first moment was a Saturday afternoon when I had nothing better to do than
watch TV. I found an old sci-fi movie called
Meteor,
and I watched it all the way through, even though I’d seen it before and had a reasonably
good idea who would live and who would die by movie’s end.

Eventually the movie did end, and I turned off the TV. That was when I had the idea
that literally changed my life. I said to myself, “What would it be like to be a teenager
living through a worldwide catastrophe?”

My mind began racing. By evening’s end I knew who the teenager was (a girl named Miranda,
living in a small town in Pennsylvania with her mother, her big brother, Matt, and
her little brother, Jonny) and what the catastrophe would be (knocking the moon closer
to earth, thus strengthening its gravitational pull).

I spent three weeks doing the prewriting. Then I sat down at the computer and began
what was the happiest writing experience of my life, creating the book that became
Life As We Knew It.

I had decided that first evening that the book would be Miranda’s diary, since I wanted
to get the readers as close to the action as possible. And writing a fictional character’s
diary is a lot of fun. The story just spills out; it’s almost like taking dictation.

I worked all day long, stopping only when I became so tired I knew it would be a mistake
to keep writing. Thanks to the prewriting, I knew where the story was going, but I
hadn’t solved every single problem, so there was enough uncertainty that I could change
things around and surprise myself on occasion.

It was more fun than work should ever be.

It was my job to write the book and my agent’s job to sell it. She found it a wonderful
home with Harcourt (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Kathy Dawson was the first of
two excellent editors I’ve worked with there. She helped me tighten the book, and
guided it through the publication process.

There was only one problem. I wanted to write a sequel. Even while I was writing
Life As We Knew It,
I wanted to know what happened next. But Kathy said Harcourt had no interest in a
sequel.

There are moments in my life when I’m really smart, and this was one of them. Instead
of taking no for an answer, I said, “How about if I write a book about the exact same
situation only with a completely different set of characters?”

“Fine,” Kathy said. “Because that’s not a sequel.”

What I didn’t tell Kathy was my intention to write that second book and then a third
one, where Miranda from
Life As We Knew It
would meet the characters from what became
The Dead & The Gone
. Because I knew someday the people at Harcourt would come to their senses and say,
“Of course we want a sequel, only now we want one for both books.”

The Dead & The Gone
was more challenging to write. Miranda isn’t exactly like me (for one thing she swims,
a skill I’ve never quite developed), but Alex is nothing at all like me. I loved him
and his sisters and his friends, and I loved ending the world all over again, but
it wasn’t the joyous experience
Life As We Knew It
had been. On the other hand, I took more pride in it, because it was that much harder
to write, so it all balanced out.

The Dead & The Gone
was published and I began hectoring Kathy about writing a third book. Mostly she
said no, but sometimes she said maybe. I wrote a third book on my own that had very
little to do with the first two, but I realized before showing it to her that it was
a mistake. So I kept asking and waiting, and eventually Kathy said yes, and we had
a long phone conversation where we decided on a plot that had absolutely nothing to
do with Miranda and Alex.

Only then she called me back and said, “What we really want is a sequel.”

So I finally got to introduce Alex to Miranda. I wrote
This World We Live In,
bringing together the characters from the first two books. It was back to Miranda’s
diary, and I got the answers to some of the questions I’d been asked by readers. And
when Kathy left Harcourt and I began working with Karen Grove, I found my book in
the hands of another excellent editor.

I was a happy writer. I’d written a trilogy, a very high-class thing to do. Life was
good.

But people kept writing to ask me if there was going to be a fourth book. And then
I took my cat in for his annual checkup, and my vet asked if there was going to be
a fourth book.

So I contacted Karen and said, “My vet wants to know if there’s going to be a fourth
book. What should I tell him?”

And Karen said, “Do it.”

So I did. I wrote an entire fourth book and sent it off to Karen. She read it. Everyone
at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt read it. And although they never actually said so, they
hated it.

That should have stopped me. But I loved my characters and I loved the world I’d created
and I wanted to make my vet happy. I tried again, and ended up writing the book you’re
holding in some format or another at this very moment,
The Shade of the Moon.

My vet has since retired, so he probably won’t be asking me if there’s going to be
a fifth book. And since I’m writing this before
The Shade of the Moon
is published, I don’t know if anyone is going to ask me that. Frankly, I don’t even
know what I’d want the answer to be, should I ever be asked.

But I do know that watching an old movie on a Saturday afternoon changed my life in
a thousand different wonderful ways.

Visit
www.hmhbooks.com
to find all of the books in the Life As We Knew It series.

Life as We Knew It

When Miranda first hears the warnings that a meteor is headed on a collision path
with the moon, they just sound like an excuse for extra homework assignments. But
her disbelief turns to fear in a split second as the entire world witnesses a lunar
impact that catastrophically alters the earth’s climate—and results in mass devastation.

Told in Miranda’s diary entries, this is a heart-pounding account of her struggle
to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate
and unfamiliar time.

*“Each page is filled with events both wearying and terrifying and infused with honest
emotions.” —
Booklist,
starred review

Visit
www.hmhbooks.com
or your favorite retailer to purchase the book in its entirety.