Дженни Хан (Jenny Han)Acknowledgments
First, my sincerest thanks to Emily Meehan for seeing this book through.
Many thanks also to Julia Maguire for not missing a beat, Lucy Ruth
Cummins for another gorgeous cover, Justin Chanda and Anne Zafian for their steadfast support, and to the whole (frankly, amazing) S&S team. From sales to production to marketing to publicity, you guys are tops in my book.
Thanks as always to Emily van Beek and Folio, to my Pippin family, and also to Siobhan Vivian, my first and finest reader.
On Wednesday nights when I was little, my mom and I would watch old musicals. It was our thing. Sometimes my dad or Steven would wander in and watch for a bit, but it was pretty much always my mother and me on the couch with a blanket and a bowl of sweet and salty popcorn, every
Wednesday. We watched The Music Man, West Side Story, Meet Me in
St. Louis, all of which I liked, Singin’ in the Rain, which I really liked. But I loved none of them the way I loved Bye Bye Birdie. Of all the musicals,
Bye Bye Birdie was my number one favorite. I watched it again and again, as many times as my mother could stand. Just like Kim MacAfee before me,
I wanted to wear mascara and lipstick and heels and have that “happy grown-up female feeling,” I wanted to hear boys whistle and know it was for me. I wanted to grow up and be just like Kim, because she got to have all of those things.
And after, when it was bedtime, I would sing, “We love you, Conrad, oh yes we do. We love you, Conrad, and we’ll be true” into the bathroom mirror with a mouthful of toothpaste. I would sing my eight-nine-ten-year-old heart out. But I wasn’t singing to Conrad Birdie. I was singing to my
Conrad. Conrad Beck Fisher, the boy of my preteen dreams.
I’ve only ever loved two boys—both of them with the last name Fisher.
Conrad was first, and I loved him in a way that you can really only do the first time around. It’s the kind of love that doesn’t know better and doesn’t want to—it’s dizzy and foolish and fierce. That kind of love is really a onetime-only thing.
And then there was Jeremiah. When I looked at Jeremiah, I saw past, present, and future. He didn’t just know the girl I used to be. He knew the right-now me, and he loved me anyway.