The Cartographers

by Amy Zhang

Genres: YA Coming of Age; YA LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

Struggling to balance the expectations of her immigrant mother with her deep ambivalence about her own place in the world, seventeen-year-old Ocean Sun takes her savings and goes off the grid. A haunting and romantic novel about family, friendship, philosophy, and love from Amy Zhang, the acclaimed author of Falling into Place and This Is Where the World Ends.

Ocean Sun has always felt enormous pressure to succeed. After struggling with depression during her senior year in high school, Ocean moves to New York City, where she has been accepted at a prestigious university. But Ocean feels so emotionally raw and unmoored (and uncertain about what is real and what is not), that she decides to defer and live off her savings until she can get herself together. She also decides not to tell her mother (whom she loves very much but doesn’t want to disappoint) that she is deferring—at least until she absolutely must.

In New York, Ocean moves into an apartment with Georgie and Tashya, two strangers who soon become friends, and gets a job tutoring. She also meets a boy—Constantine Brave (a name that makes her laugh)—late one night on the subway. Constant is a fellow student and a graffiti artist, and Constant and Ocean soon start corresponding via Google Docs—they discuss physics, philosophy, art, literature, and love. But everything falls apart when Ocean goes home for Thanksgiving, Constant reveals his true character, Georgie and Tashya break up, and the police get involved.

Ocean, Constant, Georgie, and Tashya are all cartographers—mapping out their futures, their dreams, and their paths toward adulthood in this stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding the strength to control your own destiny. For fans of Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay and Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad Is Untrue.

Release date: January 31, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 320

Sample

If You Give a Rat a Coffee

On the subway, I worried I was already dead. Everything about New York City transit felt like the afterlife—not hell but some kind of middle place, where all the trains ran late or stalled between stations. I had only been living in the city for a month, but for thirty days straight I saw things on the subway that made me dizzy with vertigo: men in loose boots pole dancing in crowded cars, dogs dressed in twenty-gallon grocery bags, pigeons that boarded without paying the fare. No one looked me in the face, and every rat on the platform knew its way better than I did.

The feeling was worse late at night and in unfamiliar stations. Now, alone, higher up in Manhattan than I’d ever been before, I knew for certain I was dead. It was well past midnight. I was alone because my roommates had gone home to hook up with each other. Or so I had heard—neither had bothered to tell me they were leaving. I was only uptown because my roommate Georgie, the occasional comedian, had scored a gig at a decrepit bar and dragged us with her for moral support. But the show ended without Georgie ever taking the stage. I searched the bar for half an hour before another comedian told me Georgie had gotten so jittery that Tashya, my other roommate, had to make out with her in the bathroom until the two of them disappeared into the night. It didn’t surprise me, exactly. The sexual tension between them had been thick enough to cut with a plastic knife.

There was no telling when the next train would come. The electronic display was down. It was a shabby station, and most of the light bulbs were broken, which made everything barely dimensional. There was no one else on the platform. I looked down to the tracks and saw a rat dragging a cup of coffee across the third rail. Though the rat should have been thoroughly electrocuted, it bore on stubbornly. I thought, That’s it, I’ve died. Both the rat and I were dead. I felt full of despair, to be infinite in the subway.

“Hey. Hey!”

I jumped. Then I looked up and saw a boy across the tracks, on the uptown platform. He was outrageously tall and waving both his arms.

“Hey!” he called again. “The trains are down.”

I blinked. What little light there was refracted strangely off the grimy surfaces. Waving as he was, the boy looked exactly like a wind turbine. It was so surreal.

“What?” My voice was raspy. For sure I was dead.

“The trains!” he bellowed, like he was several hundred yards away instead of maybe fifty. Then he held up a finger—wait—and ran back through the turnstiles, then disappeared up the stairs. A minute later I heard footsteps thundering back

down, and then he was jumping the turnstile on my side of the station. My stomach dropped to my feet.

“The trains,” he said. He wasn’t out of breath at all. “They’re not running.”

He was much taller now that he was close, looming over me. There was a crackling sound from the tracks. I looked down to see the rat struggling to pull the coffee cup through a crevice.

“I heard you,” I said. “I meant, like . . . what?”

“No trains,” he insisted. “The power’s down. Look.” He pointed to the train display, as if it were normally a reliable source of information. “The whole city’s blacked out. You don’t know? How long have you been waiting here? Haven’t you seen the sky?”

Nothing he said made any sense. The sky? I had no idea how long I’d been waiting—somewhere between five and forty-five minutes. My sense of time was abysmal even under normal circumstances.

“You have to come see,” he said, extending a hand. I didn’t move. His hand hung there between us, preposterously larger than mine. I wasn’t going to follow him anywhere, this stranger with his strings of words that meant nothing at all. I glanced again at the display.

He let his hand drop. He scratched the back of his head. “Okay, I get it, I’m coming off a bit strong, huh? I’m not a creep, I swear.”

“You should get that tattooed,” I said. “The creep motto.”

He laughed. His laugh surprised me: unabashed and echoing across the empty station, as though I were not a stranger but a friend.

“I guess that’s true,” he said. The laugh was still on his face. I gathered my courage and looked directly at him for the first time, though only for a second, so that I got a smattering of impressions rather than a good look: strong eyebrows and high cheekbones and a wide forehead, planar and strange. His nose was crooked, but his teeth were very straight. He was wearing a black windbreaker that was too big, even on him.

“Look,” he said, “my name’s Constantine Brave.”

“No way,” I blurted. “That’s an awful fake name. Worse than Joe Alibi. Worse than John Smith.”

He threw up his hands. All his movements seemed like this: sudden and a little jerky. I thought of Don Quixote, baffled by windmills and giants. “No, I swear, it’s my real name. Most people call me Constant, and some people just call me Brave, but you can call me whatever you want. What’s your name?”

I felt like I’d walked into a trap, though I hadn’t asked for his name in the first place, or asked him to come to my side of the station. “Ocean,” I said, eventually, when I could think of no way around it. “My name’s Ocean Sun.”

He didn’t accuse me of making it up, though he could have, since Ocean Sun is not empirically more or less ridiculous than Constantine Brave. He only nodded, and repeated it several times. “Ocean, Ocean, Ocean.” Like an incantation. It sounded strange in his voice, almost unfamiliar; I was worried I’d forget

to answer somehow if he ever called me, like it was fake after all. “It’s good to meet you, Ocean. And now you must come see something extraordinary.”

I peered at him, or rather at a spot on his chin that I didn’t feel so afraid to look at directly. The lights in the station were difficult to see by—emergency lights, I realized, on their own little generator. My stomach suddenly felt hollow. I couldn’t remember a single thing I knew for certain.

“Are you dead too?” I asked.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said. “What’s so extraordinary?”

I followed Constant—Constant, the inconsistent, who appeared from thin air—out of the train station and felt powerfully that I was dreaming. His body blocked out everything but the two feet or so directly in front of me. I had some fuzzy peripherals but no aerial awareness at all, since he had probably a foot and a half on me. On the narrow subway steps, he made me claustrophobic.

Over his shoulder he said, “Want to hear me sing, Eurydice?” Then he winked at me and tapped the right side of his nose, thrice.

“Please don’t,” I said. I felt a little nauseous and sent a prayer to anyone listening that he was not a human trafficker or on serious drugs. “Anyway, you looked back.”

He laughed. “Don’t disappear on me, Ocean.” But he didn’t look back again to check.

Then we were outside, and something was wrong with the light. It took me a long time to realize that all the lights were off: the streetlights and the signs and all the windows in all the buildings. There were only headlights, occasionally, feeling their way through the dark. The colors were gone; everything was strange and flat, and fading out of existence once we passed, scenery on a treadmill.

“Turn around,” said Constant.

And then: the extraordinary thing. I turned to face the east, where the sky was incandescent. There was a vivid light on the horizon, as though a star had crashed somewhere in Queens. The sky above the borough was bright and ghost blue.

“Holy shit,” I said, the only thing I could think of to say.

“Is that extraordinary or what?” he said. He sounded awfully cheerful, though it looked like the end of the world.

I felt frantic. What was it? What had happened? Of course a star hadn’t crashed into the earth, but could it be a small asteroid? Was it a bomb? Was it nuclear fallout? I couldn’t remember anything about nuclear fallout, except that you should skip conditioning your hair. Was it aliens? The intense fluorescent blue coming from Queens didn’t seem quite of this earth.

“What is that?” My voice was very high.

“I guess there’s an electric fire at a power station. The transformer exploded or something like that—”

“A nuclear plant?”

No, just a regular power grid station,” he said. He gave me a strange look. “I think they have it under control now, but you know.” He windmilled his arms again. “No power.” When I didn’t say anything, he went on. “Are you okay? How long were you sitting down there? What train were you waiting for? Do you have a way home? Is it too far to walk?”

The way he asked all his questions at once made me feel like my head was being slapped right off my neck. Worse, all his questions were uncomfortable.

“How long is the power going to be down?” My voice was still at a loftier octave than I could ever remember hearing it. “When do you think the train’s going to be running again?”

“Probably not for a while. Can you call a rideshare?”

I could not call a rideshare. I began to panic. There were no trains, and I was probably fifteen miles away from the apartment, which meant I was stranded, and I didn’t know a single person, place, or thing that could help me, except this bizarre person Constant, who despite his name had come from nowhere at all and seemed liable to disappear in just the same way.