Julie Buxbaum

Everything about Jessie is wrong. At least, that’s what it feels like during her first week of junior year at her new ultra-intimidating prep school in Los Angeles. Just when she’s thinking about hightailing it back to Chicago, she gets an email from a person calling themselves Somebody/Nobody (SN for short), offering to help her navigate the wilds of Wood Valley High School. Is it an elaborate hoax? Or can she rely on SN for some much-needed help?

It’s been barely two years since her mother’s death, and because her father eloped with a woman he met online, Jessie has been forced to move across the country to live with her stepmonster and her pretentious teenage son.

In a leap of faith—or an act of complete desperation—Jessie begins to rely on SN, and SN quickly becomes her lifeline and closest ally. Jessie can’t help wanting to meet SN in person. But are some mysteries better left unsolved?

Tell Me Three Things

Kimmy Hobden

Aubrey Hennig

Sarah Campbell

I never asked her. Why didn’t I ask her? One of the worst parts about someone dying is thinking back to all those times you didn’t ask the right questions, all those times you stupidly assumed you’d have all the time in the world. And this too: how all that time feels like not much time at all. What’s left feels like something manufactured. The overexposed ghosts of memories. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last two years, it’s that memory is fickle. When I read Harry, I can no longer hear my mothers voice, but I picture her next to me, and when even that fails, I imagine the weight of someone against me, an arm against my arm, and pretend that’s enough. 

Perfect days are for people with small, realizable dreams. Or maybe for all of us, they just happen in retrospect; they’re only now perfect because they contain something irrevocably and irretrievably lost. 

Everything passes, Jessie. Remember that. What feels huge today will feel small tomorrow.

Like Jessie, I also lost my mother at fourteen, and of course I’m not going to be coy and pretend that’s a coincidence. It’s not. And I used to do that too: the counting. I still do it, in fact, but now I count in years instead of days. I’m at twenty-four. Twenty-four?!? How is that even possible? 

With Tell Me Three Things, I was finally brave enough to take a look at a period in my life that I long ago boxed up, put away, and marked with a big red label that red “Too Painful”. I wasn’t interested in exploring my specifics, necessarily, but I very much wanted to delve into those feelings of first loss and their immediate aftermath. To look back at what it was like to be a teenager and to have the worst thing you can imagine happening actually happening. 

Because it wasn't okay and never will be. We will power through it; I will continue to power through it all the stagnant, soul-crushing grief but it will never be okay that ny mom is not here. That she will not be at my high school graduation; that she will never give me the lecture, and I won't be able to play along and pretend to be embarrassed and say, Come on on, Mom; that she will not be there when I open my college acceptance letters (or rejections); that she will never see who I grow up to be — that great mystery of who I am and who I am meant to be — finally asked and answered. I will march forth into the great unknown alone. 

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