Excerpt from Hello Goodbye by Emily Chenoweth, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There is so much to do—she has to find out Regina’s court date and get Bill Gordon’s transcript and see if she’ll be able to beg him in to Kenyon despite his two turns in juvie (his SAT scores are excellent), and she has to defrost the ground beef for dinner, and she hasn’t called Abby in a whole week—

Wait, she thinks. Wait.

But the light doesn’t wait. The light explodes from a star that suddenly rises up from the kitchen sink. It shines in all the colors she has ever seen and in colors that don’t exist on this earth—colors of nebulae or comets, colors of time and gravity. There is a glow that contains an afterglow; there is a light that eats itself and grows brighter. There is a candle burning in the center of a supernova. The light has arms, fingers, wings. The light is splendid, but there is no word for splendid anymore.

A great wonder of anguish washes over her. Her hand slips from the counter and she falls down. The sun climbs the trunks of the trees, and the clouds from the hospital billow and pulse and pull themselves apart in the sky. On the counter in the chilly morning, the coffeemaker fills with weak coffee. There is a prism in the window, and soon it will fling rainbows about the room.

This is the full text of the first chapter of Hello Goodbye by Emily Chenoweth. Copyright © 2009 by Emily Chenoweth. Reprinted with permission of Random House.