Excerpt from Not If I See You First by Eric Lindstrom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Dad? Dad! Are you okay?"

"Parker," he says, his voice oddly flat. Not strained or injured.

"Did you fall? What happened?"

"Listen," he says, still sounding nothing like he should if he were really lying at the base of the stairs. "Everyone has secrets, Parker. Everyone is a secret."

That's when I wake up, like always, but it's exactly what really happened last June third, the week after school let out and two weeks after my sixteenth birthday.

Well, except for two things. One, I really did almost run into the Reiches' van, but that was a different day a couple weeks later. And two, my dad wasn't lying at the bottom of the stairs. I found him still in bed, and he'd been dead for hours.

ONE

Marissa is sobbing. Again.

"And then he . . . he . . . he didn't . . ." Her deep voice almost sounds like grunting.

Pathetic. And she's smart, too, except about Owen. "Can't you guys talk to him?"

I don't reply and neither does Sarah. We offer good advice— for free even—but never get involved. We've told Marissa this countless times; it would waste oxygen to say it again. We just have to wait for her to dry out. There's nothing to do till the bell rings anyway.

Last school year this scene repeated itself every few weeks. Marissa rarely speaks to me otherwise. I can't clearly remember what she sounds like without wailing, snuffling, gasping, coughing on tears and snot, and really needing to blow her nose.


It's a common belief that losing your sight heightens your other senses, and it's true, but not by magnifying them. It just gets rid of the overwhelming distraction of seeing everything all the time. On the other hand, my experience of sitting with Marissa consisted almost entirely of hearing everything her mouth and nose were capable of in sticky detail. That's what unrequited love sounds like to me. Disgusting.

"Parker? Can't you do something?"

"I am. I'm telling you to find someone else." I pause, per the usual script, so she can interrupt.

"Nooooo!"

I'm the reigning queen of not giving a shit what other people think, but Marissa's indifference to a Junior Quad full of people—on the first day of school no less—seeing her imitate a shrieking mucus factory . . . it humbles even me.

"Marissa, listen, soul mates don't exist. But if they did, they would be two people who want each other. You want Owen, but Owen wants Jasmine, so that means Owen is not your soul mate. You're just his stalker."

"Wait . . . Jasmine?" I enjoy a moment of peace as the surprise of this information, which we told her last spring, quiets her for a moment. "Isn't she . . . ?"

"Yes, Jasmine likes girls, but she hasn't found one in particular yet, so Owen stupidly thinks he has a chance. That makes him following her around only slightly more pointless and sad than you following him around. In fact—"

Sarah clicks her tongue and I know what it means but at some speeds I have too much momentum to stop or even slow down.

"—the only thing you and Owen have in common is being in love with someone who doesn't love you back, someone you don't even know. Have you ever even looked up words like love or soul mate or even relationship in a dictionary?"

The silence that follows is the perfect example of the thing I hate most about being blind: not seeing how people react to what I say.

"But . . ." Marissa sniffs productively. "If we spent some time togeth—"

Saved by the bell. Her and me both. But mostly her.

.. .. ..

. . .

"Well, if it isn't PG-13 and her All-Seeing-Eye-Dog." The familiar screech is to my left and accompanied by a locker door clattering open.

Excerpted from Not If I See You First by Eric Lindstrom. Copyright © 2015 by Eric Lindstrom. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.