The Big Crunch (25 page)

“You mean in a week or two,” Wes said.

“And a month, and two months. The in-between future. Where we’ll be. What we’ll be doing. I go back to Omaha. You meet a girl —”

“I don’t
want
to meet a girl!”

“But maybe you do meet somebody. You can’t know for sure. You met me.” She squeezed his hand hard. “You didn’t plan it — neither of us did — it just happened. It could happen again. You meet a girl and I — I don’t know — my dad moves us to Tierra del Fuego or someplace, and I stow away on a cargo ship and come back and you’re married with two kids….”

“I don’t
want
two kids. I want
you.”

“In the close future, yeah. But the in-between future, you don’t know. Neither of us does.”

She could hear Wes breathing. Their clasped hands were slippery with perspiration, but her lips were dry. She moistened them with her tongue and said, “I’m just saying that things will change, and it’s hard. Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Wes’s voice was a croak.

“You will always be the first boy I ever loved. And I will love you forever, even if we are living on opposite sides of the world. Even if someday we hate each other, I will always love you.”

“Me too,” Wes said, his voice so thick she could hardly understand him. “I love you too.”

June sensed something from the corner of her eye. She turned her head just in time to see a bright slash near the horizon. “I saw one!”

“Where?”

“It’s gone.”

“Did you make a wish?”

“It was too fast.”

The meteor shower began slowly. Every minute or so the bright streaks would come and go, leaving blue afterimages in Wes’s eyes. As time passed, as the universe expanded, the flashes came more frequently, occasionally several at once, and he gave himself up to the spectacle, anchored only by June’s hand, knowing that even if he were to fly from the face of the earth, she would be there, always, until the end of time.

My original draft of
The Big Crunch
ended on Valentine’s Day, when Wes answers the phone and finds June at the other end. I thought the book was perfect and complete, so I sent the manuscript off to my editor, David Levithan, who responded with an email saying, “I love the book, but the story isn’t over yet. I want more. Like, a hundred pages more.”

That is most definitely
not
what a writer who thinks he has just finished a novel wants to hear. David can be incredibly aggravating … especially when he is right. And he
was
right — Wes and June still had a long journey ahead of them, and so did I. Thank you, David.

My thanks also to the usual suspects — Mary, Kathy, Deborah, and Pat, and to my dental hygienist and plot consultant Lindsey Erickson, and to Kati Oakes, who gently and astutely critiqued an early draft of the manuscript.

Copyright © 2011 by Pete Hautman

Cover art © by Frank Stockton

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-0-545-24075-8

First edition, January 2011

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E-ISBN 978-0-545-33258-3