Right Here, Right Now

by Shannon Dunlap

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

From Indies Introduce Pick author Shannon Dunlap comes a story of love, friendship, and possibility for fans of You’ve Reached Sam.

Worlds turn. Particles spin. Love endures.

 
There are infinite universes in which Elise never dies. Her best friend, Anna, never has to mourn her or choose between the weight of her grief and the weight of her ambition. Her cousin, Liam, never has to lose another loved one or fight to find purpose in a life that already doesn’t feel like his own. 
 
But Liam and Anna do not get to choose the universe in which they live. Across multiple worlds, their paths collide as they wrestle with what it takes to save someone else and how to face love and loss on a quantum scale.
 
This moving, lyrical novel introduces two teens on the cusp of finding out who they are while finding each other again and again.

Release date: April 9, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 288

Sample

AT ONE SINGLE POINT of time and space in a single world, Anna is making herself macaroni and cheese from a box. She is not, however, thinking about the macaroni, which is, at this very moment, cooking to a softness far south of appetizing. She is not even thinking about the topic she told herself she would think about during this short break, which is her solo piece for the audition. If it’s all she thinks about for the few remaining days until the tryout, she still won’t be able to perform it perfectly.

Instead, Anna is thinking about plunging her left hand into the pot of salt water that is boiling rapidly on the stove. She has this variety of thought frequently, though she would never really do it, obviously. It’s sort of like standing near a high ledge and having the inexplicable impulse to jump. She has imagined slamming her wrist in a window, having it bitten completely off by Wendell, the noisy German shepherd next door, kneeling on the concrete of the driveway so that her parents’ car can back its rear tire slowly over her metacarpals. Her hand and wrist throb constantly from so much practice, and she tells herself that these strange visions are simply her way of mentally coping with the pain, of owning it in some small way.

The abrupt ring of the phone echoes in the quiet house. Anna makes no move to answer it. Who calls in the middle of the afternoon, anyway? Only salespeople or some agency doing surveys. Or Elise. God, it’s probably Elise. Anna closes her eyes, waits until it finishes ringing, then waits a few seconds more until it starts ringing again. Definitely Elise.

Elise has been her best friend since they took swimming lessons together when they were five years old. That’s still how she would introduce her to someone—“This is my best friend, Elise”—but over the past few months the title has felt a little worn, like a sweater that’s gotten too tight, and Anna has had a hard time feeling anything but annoyance for Elise. She is too much, too much of everything.

Anna wants only to be something—specifically, one of the greatest violinists the world has ever produced. Once upon a time, her mother had wanted her to follow in her footsteps, though the flaws in this plan became abundantly clear when four-year-old Anna wept through her first three dance recitals. When she picked up the violin in a school music class for the first time, it was like a weight inside her had suddenly become a balloon: Here was the thing that was going to make her special. But lately, Anna doesn’t know how to catch up to that greatness or grasp it with her aching hand.

The sound of the phone dies, and then Anna realizes that she’s forgotten to set the kitchen timer and curses under her breath. It’s past time to drain the pasta, mix in the butter and the milk and the cheese powder and the frozen broccoli, and shovel it in before going back to practicing.

Usually her weird, violent daydreams fade quickly, but today they persist, nipping at the back of her brain the entire time she is standing at the counter and chewing the too-soft pasta and too-crunchy broccoli. Her wrist is a stick of dynamite, ready to blow into a million pieces of shrapnel. She tucks her left hand in her armpit like a broken wing while she eats with her right. What would her life be without it? If she didn’t play the violin, would she even be the same person? She knows: technically, yes. And yet, it’s hard to imagine a world in which she doesn’t have music to anchor her life in place.

“Can we please focus?” Liam says. They’ve been in Gavin’s parents’ garage for almost two hours, and they’ve gotten through the new song a shockingly small number of times. Gavin is trying to hold them all together on drums, but Chris’s guitar solo is so heavy and plodding that it sounds like he’s dragging a dead body around, and Eric’s bass line is halting and unsteady, as if he unwittingly tripped on that same corpse and lost his balance. There’s a headache developing behind Liam’s right eye. He feels in his gut that “Dark Dark Matter” is good or could be, but Chris and Eric cannot bring it to life. No matter how much electrical jolt he pours into the vocals, all he gets back is a flatline.

“The show is in less than two weeks,” he reminds them.

“Is the show in less than two weeks?” Eric asks, mock-innocent. “Really? You haven’t mentioned that eight thousand times.” Desperate for productivity, Liam has made an authoritarian decree, forbidding any kind of smoking or drinking during this rehearsal, but this dictatorial move has backfired, making Eric irritable and causing Chris to gripe under his breath about lead singers everywhere who think they’re the center of the universe.

Chris snickers at Eric’s comment, and Liam feels like punching Chris in the face. He doesn’t even like Chris, but it’s impossible to find a decent lead guitar in this town. He wishes he could get someone like his cousin Elise to learn to play; she would have a million times more stage presence than Chris, even if she has no discernible musical talent.

“If you guys ever played like you were real musicians, maybe I’d keep my mouth shut,” Liam mutters.

Gavin raises an eyebrow at Liam, then calmly sets his drumsticks down on a nearby stack of paint cans and folds his arms, waiting for the inevitable argument to play out. Gavin has a nature boy/Buddhist monk thing going on, which would be annoying in its own way if it weren’t so damn genuine.

“In what world does you acting like an asshole make us a better band, Liam?” Chris says, his voice taking on that pious and wronged tone that drives Liam insane.

They start engaging in the same old fight; Liam could wage his side of the battle in his sleep by now. His eye continues to throb, and Chris’s phrase “in what world” keeps repeating in his head, jangling something uneasily inside him. He thinks fairly often, actually, of the Many-Worlds concept that Ms. Keeley taught them last year in physics, that quantum mechanics mind-bender in which the universe keeps on branching into copies of itself, over and over again. There’s a version of the universe in which Chris isn’t such a prick, another in which Eric isn’t such a disappointment. There’s a version of the universe in which he, Liam, is already recognized by the world as a musical genius. There’s a version of the universe in which Julian is still alive, in which the very marrow of Liam turned out to be enough to save him. But that’s not the version he’s living in.

The air-conditioning in the aging hatchback is crap, so Elise has the window rolled down all the way, her left forearm propped up to catch the breeze. It’s one of those last sweaty days of August, the humidity and the coming school year bearing down in equal measure. She hasn’t been driving long; she only got her license at the beginning of summer. And yet, she knows this stretch of road well, near the midpoint on the route to her job at the mall, where she piles slices of meat and cheese, soggy pickles, and a confetti of iceberg lettuce onto sandwich buns for the masses of harried shoppers and exercising grannies and bored teenagers who parade through the food court every day. She’s running late, only slightly, but there’s a big slow-moving pickup truck in front of her: Pale blue, starting to rust in patches, it has a bumper sticker on the back that says MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT. She swings her car out into the left lane.

Maybe she does it because she can already envision the annoyed look on her coworker Kent’s face when she shows up past the time she’s supposed to relieve him. Kent is boring—all he talks about is basketball practice and his stupid girlfriend, Andrea—but even so, she would rather not listen to him complain as soon as she arrives.

Maybe she does it because she is the type of person who always chooses action over inaction, who sees a situation, any situation, and immediately feels the itch to change it.

Or maybe she does it out of some darker, deeply buried impulse, some desire to stand on a high ledge and feel the urge to jump.

It doesn’t matter. The universe branches because of particles almost too tiny to imagine, not because of human choice.

Both vehicles are descending a slight hill, and when Elise accelerates to pass the pickup, the truck picks up speed, too. The problem is that there is a garbage truck approaching them rapidly from the opposite direction. Her brain is a panicky firework of indecision, and she doesn’t know whether to slow down or speed up.

She guns the engine to get past the pickup.

On the radio, the singer warbles that she is torn.

What is Elise thinking about in that moment, the moment when the menacing face of the truck is rushing toward her? Not her cousin, who is smoking a joint with the drummer of his band twenty miles away in an abandoned woodshed and trying to forget the frustrations of the day’s practice. Not her childhood friend, who is sitting on the edge of her yellow bedspread, trying to shake the ache out of her left hand before playing her solo selection for the upcoming orchestra audition again and again and again. And not, certainly, the quantum physicist Hugh Everett or his Many Worlds, because Elise has never heard of him and doesn’t have as ambitious of a high school physics teacher as her cousin. She thinks, instead, about a memory from a long time ago, when she was jumping on a neighbor’s trampoline, jumping and jumping until the sensation of her stomach jouncing up and down became acutely uncomfortable and yet she could not bring herself to stop, and even when she did stop, there was still part of her jumping, a shadow self that could not be still.

In 1954, Hugh Everett tried to understand how electrons could really be part of a wave function, existing in more than one place at a time. His insight was that not only are the particles in multiple locations at once, but so are we, the observers. Humans ride the wave function of the universe in exactly the same way that tiny particles do. Elise shoots toward the garbage truck and an electron shoots through space; the electron spins not right or left, but both. Right and left. The world splits into two branches, one more duplication in a near-infinite array of possibilities.

The electron spins to the left, and in one world, Elise’s car pulls ahead, the drivers of both trucks hit their brakes, and she easily slides back into the right lane. The only ripple of what has happened is in the irritated bleat of the garbage truck’s horn and in the racing of her heart for a few seconds until the song on the radio changes and the pickup recedes slightly behind her and the moment gets swallowed by the normalcy of a late-summer afternoon. Of course it does.

Except that in another branch of the multiverse, it doesn’t.

I ALREADY KNOW THAT I’m preaching to the choir, but I let the rant spill out of me anyway: “It’s what sets us apart. Why would we want to water down our sound into bullshit mainstream radio gruel? If anything, we should get harder, faster.”

I stop talking and close my eyes against the angry blur of my own words, trying to let a disorienting moment pass. This happens sometimes, this feeling that I am so small that I spin wildly in circles like a tiny subatomic particle without the power to affect anything. A ghost particle. It helps to remind myself: I am Liam, I am a real person, the world really exists, and so does our band.

When I open my eyes, Gavin is slowly picking apart a twig into a pile of curly splinters, a perfect little fire starter if he were setting up camp. Practice long over, we’re sitting in the woods behind his house, his natural habitat. He made Eagle Scout the year before, though no one who sees him dressed in his starched Scout uniform would ever guess that he’s a pretty badass metal drummer in his spare time.

“Yeah,” Gavin says. “But Chris just wants to pretend he’s Stevie Ray Vaughan or something. And Eric… who knows? He wants to play whatever kind of music will get him the most drugs.” He laughs. Gavin is always willing to listen to me vent, but he never gets as upset about this stuff as I do, which sometimes makes talking to him worse than not complaining to anyone at all.

I can feel every little muscle in my arms when I stand up to stretch; I’m still sort of stoned. At least the headache is gone. It would be so easy to stay here and let time wash out from under me, but I need to get home. My ability to avoid my father has been particularly on point lately, but it requires keeping to a strict schedule. I offer my hand to Gavin for a farewell handshake, and he pulls me toward him for a brief manly hug. He’s my only friend who would do such a thing, and I’d never tell him how much I like it, how much I admire how easy and natural everything seems for him.

The wooded slope down to the car is muddy, and even though there’s no one to see, I’m vaguely embarrassed by my constant small slips and missteps, and my boots that are clearly constructed for looks and not functionality. Gavin’s family owns a bunch of land way out here in the sticks, and usually I look forward to the peaceful drive back to town—the full summer trees, the deer eating in the fields that line the road—but tonight I’m too distracted by Chris and Eric and all their bullshit. I want to sing songs that will make people’s heads explode; why is that not a goal of literally everyone on the planet? And yet, no one seems to get it. Muriel had come the closest, I guess, even if she wasn’t a musician, but the whole time we were together, Muriel was caught up in her own cyclone of problems.

As the world blurs beyond the side windows, I envision that I’m being carried down the road by a sound wave racing its way around the globe. It scoops up those who understand the meaning of rock and sucks the rest down into its current.

I was nine years old when I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time, and I was shocked that Earth hadn’t been knocked off its axis, sent spinning end over end by the crashing, cataclysmic sound. But that was a long time ago, and now it is 1998, the radio waves themselves practically yawning every time a new Nickelback or Creed song cycles blandly through them, and it is way past time for the great What’s Next. It is the dawn of a new millennium of music, and I know that I’m supposed to be part of it. If only Eric and Chris would really try once in a while. If only I knew how to show the world how great we could be.

I’m still deep into the puzzle of the newest song when I walk into the kitchen. I know instantly that something is way off. There’s a charge to the air, that sick static of life going off the rails. It’s also quiet—no television, no radio, no sounds of Mom and Dad conversing or making dinner—and bad things always happen in silence.

Mom is sitting at the counter alone, her eyes rimmed in red as if she’s been crying, a glass of white wine half empty in front of her. When she speaks, her voice is hoarse and on the verge of breaking.

“It’s Elise,” she says. “There’s been an accident.”

“IT’S ELISE,” SHE SAYS.

I’ve been standing here with the bow quiet on the strings, imagining myself floating in space, convincing myself that I am Anna, that I am a famous musician in the making, that I can nail this audition, that I am a massive and unstoppable planetary force, when my mother’s voice breaks my reverie. “It’s Elise,” she says again. I open my eyes and shake my head like a dog with an ear problem, hoping she’ll take the hint, but she only shrugs and lets the bedroom door swing open a little wider and retreats down the hallway.

Elise sweeps in with the dramatic air of a Hollywood starlet and flops immediately on my bed, ignoring that I’m in the middle of visualizing the slender margin of perfection necessary for this piece. It is nearly impossible, one of Paganini’s “24 Caprices,” which even my violin teacher, Mr. Foster, who is nothing if not arrogant, has tried to talk me out of playing.

Elise is still wearing her pale blue Submarine Dreams work polo, a small blob of dried mustard staining her left shoulder.

“Two hours of work before they sent me home. Can you believe that? It’s like barely enough to cover gas.”

“Elise, I have to practice. I’m super stressed about this audition. I told you that yesterday.” It’s not a lie; I have my last pre-audition private lesson tomorrow, and as much as I dislike my time with Mr. Foster, he’s so irritatingly talented (and his rates so expensive, as my father is always grumbling) that I have to make my time with him worth it. I cradle the violin like a ukulele, strum the strings so softly that they make no sound. This is a dance that Elise and I have done before, so I’m ready for it. Setting the violin down in its case right now will only lengthen the time before I manage to convince Elise to leave, so I keep it out and engaged, like a weapon.

Elise pushes herself up on her elbows and sighs. “Yes, the audition. The axis around which our days must turn.”

“Your days don’t have to turn around it, just mine,” I tell her. “Weren’t you complaining last week that they overscheduled you? And that you hated your coworkers? Now you have free time.”

“Well, gee whiz, Pollyanna, thanks for sorting all my problems.” Elise wrinkles her nose. It’s unfair that she’s still so much cuter than me, even when she’s making such an ugly face.

Once, when I was a toddler, I fell out the window of the second-story apartment we were living in at the time, and to the amazement of the emergency room physicians, I emerged from the incident c. . .