19 Love Songs

Published in the United States in 2020

by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2020

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited,

2 Minster Court, 10th floor, London EC3R 7BB

Text copyright © 2020 David Levithan

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2020

ISBN 978 1 4052 98056

eISBN 978 1 4052 98063

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Mayling and Lynda, there at the start

and

To my parents, there long before the start

Track List

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Track One: Quiz Bowl Antichrist

Track Two: Day 2934 (An Every Day Story)

Track Three: The Good Girls

Track Four: The Quarterback and the Cheerleader (A Boy Meets Boy Story)

Track Five: The Mulberry Branch

Track Six: Your Temporary Santa

Track Seven: Storytime

Track Eight: A Better Writer

Track Nine: 8-Song Memoir

Track Ten: Snow Day (A Two Boys Kissing Story)

Track Eleven: The Woods

Track Twelve: A Brief History of First Kisses (Illustrated by Nick Eliopulos)

Track Thirteen: As the Philadelphia Queer Youth Choir Sings Katy Perry’s “Firework” . . .

Track Fourteen: The Vulnerable Hours

Track Fifteen: Twelve Months

Track Sixteen: The Hold

Track Seventeen: How My Parents Met

Track Eighteen: We

Track Nineteen: Give Them Words

Liner Notes

Back series promotional

TRACK ONE
Quiz Bowl Antichrist

I am haunted at times by Sung Kim’s varsity jacket.

He had to lobby hard to get it. Nobody denied that he had talent—in fact, he was the star of our team. But for a member of our team to get a jacket was unprecedented. Our coach backed him completely, while the other coaches in the school nearly choked on their whistles when they first heard the plan. The principal had to be called in, and it wasn’t until our team made Nationals that Sung’s request was finally heeded. Four weeks before we left for Indianapolis, he became the first person in our school’s history to have a varsity jacket for quiz bowl.

I, for one, was mortified.

This mortification was a complete betrayal of our team, but if anyone was going to betray the quiz bowl team from the inside, it was going to be me. I was the alternate.

I had been drafted by the coach, who also happened to be my physics teacher, because while the five other members of the team could tell you the square root of the circumference of Saturn’s orbit around the sun in the year 2033, not a single one of them could tell you how many Brontë sisters there’d been. In fact, the only British writer they seemed familiar with was Monty Python—and there weren’t many quiz bowl questions about Monty Python. There was a gaping hole in their knowledge, and I was the best lit-boy plug the school had to offer. While I hadn’t read that many of the classics, I was extraordinarily aware of them. I was a walking CliffsNotes version of the CliffsNotes versions; even if I’d never touched Remembrance of Things Past or Cry, the Beloved Country or Middlemarch, I knew what they were about and who had written them. I could only name about ten elements on the periodic table, but that hardly mattered—my teammates had the whole thing memorized. They told jokes where “her neutrino!” was the punch line.

Sung was our fearless leader—fearless, that is, within the context of our practices and competitions. Put him back into the general population and he became just another math geek, too bland to be teased, too awkward to be resented. As soon as he got the varsity jacket, there was little question that it would never leave his back. All the varsity jackets in our school looked the same on the fronts—burgundy body, white sleeves, white R. But the backs were different—a picture of two guys wrestling for the wrestlers, a football for the football players, a breaststroker for the swimmers. For quiz bowl, they initially chose a faceless white kid at a podium, probably a leftover design from another school’s speech and debate team. It looked as if the symbol from the men’s room door was giving an inaugural address. Sung didn’t feel this conveyed the team aspect of quiz bowl, so he made them add four other faceless white kids at podiums. I was, presumably, one of those five. Because even though I was an alternate, they always rotated me in.

I had agreed to join the quiz bowl team for four reasons:

(1) I needed it for my college applications.

(2) I needed a good grade in Mr. Phillips’s physics class for my college applications, and I wasn’t going to get it from ordinary studying.

(3) I derived a perverse pleasure from being the only person in a competitive situation who knew that Jane Eyre was a character while Jane Austen was a writer.

(4) I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom.

An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell you’re doing, even if the other person isn’t doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because it’s a crush that you haven’t even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there—you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone else’s. But you don’t know why. You don’t know that you’re doing it. You’d follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.

Damien was track-team popular and hung with the cross-country crowd. If he didn’t have any problem with Sung’s varsity jacket, it was probably because none of the other kids in our school defined him as a quiz bowl geek. If anything, his membership on the team was seen as a fluke. Whereas I, presumably, belonged there, along with Sung and Frances Oh (perfect SAT, tragic skin) and Wes Ward (250 IQ, 250 lbs) and Gordon White (calculator watch, matching glasses). My social status was about the same as that of a water fountain in the hall—people were happy enough I was there when they needed me, but they didn’t particularly want to talk to me. I wish I could say I was fine with this, and that I found what I needed in books or food or drugs or quiz bowl or other water fountain kids. But it sucked. I didn’t have the disposition to be slavishly devoted to popularity and the popular kids, but at the same time, I was pretty sure my friends were losers, and barely even friends.

When we won at States, Sung, Damien, Frances, Wes, and Gordon celebrated like they’d just gotten full scholarships to MIT. Mr. Phillips was in tears when he called his wife to tell her. A photographer from the local paper came to school to take our picture a few days later, and I tried to hide behind the others as much as possible. Sung had his jacket by that time, its white sleeves glistening like they’d been made from unicorn horns. After the article appeared, a couple of people congratulated me in the hall. But most kids snickered or didn’t care. We had a crash-course candy sale to pay for our trip to Indianapolis, and I stole money from my parents’ wallets and dipped into my savings in order to buy my whole portion outright, shoving the crap candy bars in our basement instead of having to ask my fellow students to pony up.

Sung, of course, wanted us to get matching varsity jackets to wear to Nationals. Damien already had a varsity jacket for cross-country that he never wore, so he was out. Frances, Wes, and Gordon said they were using all their money on the tickets and other things for Indianapolis. I simply said no. And when Sung asked me if I was sure, I told him, “You can’t possibly expect me to wear that.” Everybody got quiet for a second, but Sung didn’t seem fazed. He just launched us into yet another practice.

If there were four reasons that I’d joined the quiz bowl team, there were two reasons that I stayed on:

(1) I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom. (These things don’t change.)

(2) I really, really liked defeating people.

Note: I am not saying I really, really liked winning. Winning is a more abstract concept, and in quiz bowl, winning usually meant having to come back in the next round and do it all again. No, I liked defeating people. I liked seeing the look on the other team’s faces when I got a question they couldn’t answer. I loved their geektastic disappointment when they realized they weren’t good enough to rank up. I loved using trivia to make people doubt themselves. I never, ever missed a literature question—I was a fucking juggernaut of authors and oeuvres. And I never, ever attempted to answer any of the math, science, or history questions. Nobody expected me to. Thus, I would always win.

The hardest were the scrimmages, when we would split into teams of three and take each other on. I didn’t have any problem answering the questions correctly—I just had to make sure not to gloat. The only thing keeping me in check was Damien. Around him, I wanted to be a good guy.

If I had any enthusiasm for Indianapolis, it was because I assumed Damien and I would be rooming together. I imagined us talking all night, bonding to the point of knowledge. I could see us laughing together about the quiz bowl kids from other states who were surrounding us in their quiz bowl varsity jackets. We’d smuggle in some beers, watch bad TV, and become so comfortable with each other that I would finally feel the world was comfortable, too. This was strictly a separate-beds fantasy . . . but it was a separate-from-the-world fantasy, too. That was what I wanted.

The closer we got to Indianapolis, the more I found myself looking forward to it, and the more Sung became a dictator. If I’d thought he was serious about quiz bowl before, he was beyond any frame of reference now. He wanted to practice every day after school for six hours—pizza was brought in—and even when he saw us in the halls, he threw questions our way. At first I tried to ignore him, but that only made him YELL HIS QUESTIONS IN A LOUD, OVERLY ARTICULATED VOICE. Now anyone within four hallways of our own could hear the guy in the quiz bowl varsity jacket shout, “WHO WAS THE LAST AMERICAN NOVELIST TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE?”

And I’d say, much lower, “James Patterson.”

Sung would blanch and whisper, “Wrong.”

“Toni Morrison,” I’d correct. “I’m just playing with ya.”

“That’s not funny,” he’d say. And I’d run for class.

It did, at least, give me a reason to talk to Damien at lunch. I accidentally-on-purpose ended up behind him on the cafeteria line.

“Is Sung driving you crazy, too?” I asked. “With his pop quizzes?”

Damien smiled. “Nah. It’s just Sung being Sung. You’ve gotta respect that.”

As far as I could tell, the only reason to respect that was because Damien was respecting it. Which, at that moment, was reason enough.

The afternoon hallway quizzing wore me down, though. Sung got increasingly angry as I was increasingly unable to give him a straight answer.

“WHAT WAS JANE AUSTEN’S LAST FINISHED NOVEL?”

“Vaginas and Virginity.”

“WHO IS THE LAST PERSON IAGO KILLS IN OTHELLO ?”

“His manservant Bastardio, for forgetting to change the Brita filter!”

“WHAT IS THE ENDING OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN’S ‘THE LITTLE MERMAID’?”

“She turns into a fish and marries Nemo!”

“Fuck you!”

These were remarkable words to hear coming from Sung’s mouth.

He went on.

“Are you trying to sabotage us? Do you WANT to LOSE?”

The other kids in the hall were loving this—a full-blown quiz bowl spat.

“Are you breaking up with me?” I joked.

Sung turned bright, bright red.

“I’ll see you at practice!” he managed to get out. Then he turned around and I could see the five quiz bowlers on the back of his jacket, their blank faces not-quite-glaring at me as he stormed away.

When I arrived ten minutes late to our final pre-Indianapolis practice, Mr. Phillips looked concerned, Damien looked indifferent, Sung looked flustered and angry, Frances looked flustered, Gordon looked angry, and Wes looked distracted by whatever game he was playing on his phone.

“Everyone needs to take this very seriously,” Mr. Phillips pronounced.

“Because there are small, defenseless koalas who will be killed if we don’t make the final four!” I added.

“Do you want to stay here?” Sung asked, looking like I’d just stuck a magnet in his hard drive. “Is that what this is about?”

“No,” I said calmly, “I’m just joking. If you can’t joke about quiz bowl, what can you joke about? It’s like mime in that respect.”

“C’mon, Alec,” Damien said. “Sung just wants us to win.”

“No,” I said. “Sung only wants us to win. There’s a difference.”

Damien and the others looked at me blankly. This was not, I remembered, a word-choice crowd.

Still, Damien had gotten the message across: Lay off. So I did, for the rest of the practice. And I didn’t get a single question wrong. I even could name four Pearl S. Buck books besides The Good Earth—which is the English-geek equivalent of knowing how to make an atomic bomb, in that it’s both difficult and totally uncool.

And how was I rewarded for this display of extraneous knowledge? At the end of the practice, as we were leaving, Mr. Phillips offhandedly told us our room assignments. Sung would be the one who got to room with Damien. And I would have to share a room with Wes, who liked to watch Lord of the Rings battle scenes to prepare for competition.

On the way out, I swear Sung was gloating.

If it had been up to Sung, we would have had the cheerleading squad seeing us off at the airport. I could see it now:

Two-four-six-eight, how do mollusks procreate?

One-two-three-four, name the birthplace of Niels Bohr!

Then, before we left, as a special treat, Sung would calculate the mass and volume of their pom-poms. Each of the girls would dream of being the one to wear Sung’s letter jacket when he came back home, because that would make her the most popular girl in the entire sch—

“Alec, we’re boarding.” Damien interrupted my sarcastic reverie. The karma gods had at least seated us next to each other on the plane. Unfortunately, they then swung around (as karma gods tend to do, the jerks) and made him fall asleep the moment after takeoff. It wasn’t until we were well into our descent that he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“It hasn’t even occurred to me to be nervous,” I answered honestly. “I mean, we don’t have to win for it to look good on our transcripts. I’m already concocting this story where I overcome a bad case of consumption, the disapproval of my parents, a terrifying history of crashing in small planes, and a twenty-four-hour speech impediment in order to compete in this tournament. As long as you overcome adversity, they don’t really care if you win. Unless it’s, like, a real sport.”

“Dude,” he said, “you read way too much.”

“But clearly you don’t know your science enough to move across the aisle the minute I reveal my consumptive state.”

“Oh,” he said, leaning a little closer, “I can catch consumption just from sitting next to you?”

“Again,” I said, not leaning away, “medicine is your area of expertise. In novels, you damn well can catch consumption from sitting next to someone. You were doomed from the moment you met me.”

“I’ll say.”

I wasn’t quick enough to keep the conversation going. Damien bent down to take an issue of Men’s Health out of his bag. And he wasn’t even reading it for the pictures.

I pretended to have a hacking cough for the remaining ten minutes of the flight. The other people around me were annoyed, but I could tell that Damien was amused. It was our joke now.

We were staying at the Westin in Indianapolis, home to the Heavenly™ Bed and the Heavenly™ Bath.

“How the hell can you trademark the word heavenly ?” I asked Wes as we dumped out our stuff. We were only staying two nights, so it hardly seemed necessary to hang anything up.

“I dunno,” he answered.

“And what’s up with the Heavenly™ Bath? Am I really going to have to take showers in heaven? It hardly seems worth the trouble of being good now if you’re going to have to wear deodorant in the afterlife.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Wes said, making an even stack on the bedside table of all the comics he’d brought.

“What, you’ve never been dead?”

He sighed.

“It’s time to meet the team,” he said.

Before we left, he made sure every single light in the room was off.

He even unplugged the clock.

The competition didn’t start until the next morning, so the evening was devoted to the Quiz Bowl Social.

“Having a social at a quiz bowl tournament is like having all-you-can-eat ribs and inviting a bunch of vegetarians over,” I told Damien as the rest of us waited for Sung and Mr. Phillips to come down to the lobby.

“I’m sure there are some cool kids here,” he said.

“Yeah. And they’re all back in their rooms, drinking.”

Some people had dressed up for the social—meaning that some girls had worn dresses and some boys had worn ties, although none of them could muster enough strength to also wear jackets. Unless, of course, it was a varsity quiz bowl jacket. I saw at least five of them in the lobby.

“Hey, Sung, you’re not so unique anymore,” I pointed out when he finally showed up, his own jacket looking newly polished.

“I don’t need to be unique,” he scoffed. “I just need to win.”

I pretended to wave a tiny flag. “Go, team.”

“Alright, guys,” Gordon said. “Are we ready to rumble?”

I thought he was kidding, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I looked at our group—Sung’s hair was plastered into perfect place, Frances had put on some makeup, Gordon was wearing bright red socks that had nothing to do with anything else he was wearing, Damien looked casually handsome, and Wes looked like he wanted to be back in our room, reading Y: The Last Man.

“Let’s rumble!” Mr. Phillips chimed in, a little too enthusiastically for someone over the age of eleven.

“Our first match is against the team from North Dakota,” Sung reminded us. “If you meet them, scope out their intelligences.”

“If we see them on the dance floor, I’ll be sure to mosey over and ask them to quote Virginia Woolf,” I assured him. “That should strike fear into their hearts.”

The social was in one of the Westin’s ballrooms. There was a semi-big dance floor at the center, which nobody was coming close to. The punch was as unspiked as the haircuts, the lights dim to hide everyone’s embarrassment.

“Wow,” I said to Damien as we walked in and scoped it out. “This is hot.”

Damien had such a look of social distress on his face, I almost laughed. I could imagine him reassuring himself that none of his other friends from home were ever going to see this.

“The adults are worse than the kids,” Wes observed from over my shoulder.

“You’re right,” I said. Because while the quiz bowlers were mawkish and awkward, the faculty advisors were downright weird, wearing their best suits from 1980 and beaming like they’d finally gone from zeros to heroes in their own massively revised high school years.

Out of either cruelty or obliviousness (probably the former), the DJ decided to unpack Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” A lot of the quiz bowlers looked like they were hearing it for the first time. From the moment the beat started, it was only a question of whose resolve would dissolve first. Would the team captain from Montana start break dancing? Would the alternate from Connecticut let down her hair and flail it around?

In the end, it was a whole squad that took the floor. As a group, they started to bust out the moves—something I could never imagine our team doing. They laughed at themselves while they danced, and it was clear they were having a good time. Other kids started to join them. Even Sung, Frances, and Gordon plunged in.

“Check it out,” Wes mumbled.

Gordon was doing a strut that looked like something he’d practiced at home; I had no doubt it went over better in his bedroom mirror than it did in public. Frances did a slight sway, which was in keeping with her personality. And Sung—well, Sung looked like someone’s grandfather trying to dance to “Hollaback Girl.”

“This shit really is bananas,” I said to Damien. “B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Look at that varsity jacket go!”

“Enough with the jacket,” Damien replied. “Let him have his fun. He’s stressed enough as it is. I want a drink. You want to get a drink?”

At first I thought he meant breaking into the nearest minibar. But no, he just wanted to head over to the punch bowl. The punch was übersweet—Kool-Aid that had been cut with Sprite—and as I drank glass after glass, it almost gave me a Robitussin high.

“Do you see anyone who looks like they’re from North Dakota?” I asked. “Tall hats? Presence of cattle? If so, we can go spy. If you distract them, I’ll steal the laminated copies of their SAT scores from their fanny packs.”

But he wasn’t into it. He kept checking texts on his phone.

“Who’s texting?” I finally asked.

“Just Julie,” he said. “I wish she’d stop.”

I assumed Just Julie was Julie Swain, who was also on cross-country. I didn’t think they’d been going out. Maybe she’d wanted to and he hadn’t. That would explain why he wasn’t texting back.

Clearly, Damien and I weren’t ever going to get into the social part of the social. He had something on his mind and I had nothing but him on my own. We’d lost Wes, and Sung, Frances, and Gordon were still on the dance floor. Sung looked like it was a job to be there, while Gordon was in his own little world. It was Frances who fascinated me the most.

“She almost looks happy,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her happy.”

Damien nodded and drank some more punch. “She’s always so serious,” he agreed.

The punch was turning our lips cherry red.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Okay.”

We were alone together in an unknown hotel in an unknown city. So we did the natural thing.

We went to his room.

And we watched TV.

It was his room, so he got to choose. We ended up watching The Departed on basic cable. It was, I realized, the most time we had ever spent alone together. He lay back on his bed and I sat on Sung’s, making sure my angle was such that I could watch Damien as much as I watched the TV.

During the first commercial break, I asked, “Is something wrong?”

He looked at me strangely. “No. Does it seem like something’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “No. Just asking.”

During the second commercial break, I asked, “Were you and Julie going out?”

He put his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

“No.” And then, about a minute later, right before the movie started again, “It wasn’t anything, really.”

During the third commercial break, I asked, “Does she know that?”

“What?”

“Does Julie know it wasn’t anything?”

“No,” he said. “It looks like she doesn’t know that.”

This was it, I was sure—the point where he’d ask for my advice. I could help him. I could prove myself worthy of his company.

But he let it drop. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to watch the movie.

I realized he needed to reveal himself to me in his own time. I couldn’t rush it. I had to be patient. For the remaining commercial breaks, I made North Dakota jokes. He laughed at some of them, and even threw in a few of his own.

Sung came back when there were about fifteen minutes left in the movie. I could tell he wasn’t thrilled about me sitting on his bed, but I wasn’t about to move.

“Sung,” I told him, “if this whole quiz bowl thing doesn’t work out for you, I think you have a future in disco.”

“Shut up,” he grumbled, taking off the famous jacket and hanging it in the closet.

We watched the rest of the movie in silence, with Sung sitting on the edge of Damien’s bed. As soon as the credits were rolling, Sung announced it was time to go to sleep.

“But where are you sleeping?” I asked, spreading out on his sheets.

“That’s my bed,” he said.

I wanted to offer Sung a swap—he could stay with Wes and talk about polynomials all night, while I could stay with Damien. But clearly that wasn’t a real option. Damien walked me to the door.

“Lay off the minibar,” he said. “We need you sober tomorrow.”

“I’ll try,” I replied. “But those little bottles are just so pretty. Every time I drink from them, I can pretend I’m a doll.”

He chuckled and hit me lightly on the shoulder.

“Resist,” he commanded.

Again, I told him I’d try.

Wes was in bed and the lights were off when I got to my room, so I very quietly changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth.

I was about to nod off when Wes’s voice asked, “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Damien and I went to his room and watched The Departed. It was a good time. We looked for you, but you were already gone.”

“That social sucked.”

“It most certainly did.”

I closed my eyes.

“Goodnight,” Wes said softly, making it sound like a true wish. Nobody besides my parents had ever said it to me like that before.

“Goodnight,” I said back. Then I made sure he’d plugged the clock back in, and went to sleep.

The next morning, we kicked North Dakota’s ass. Then, for good measure, we erased Maryland from the boards and made Oklahoma cry.

It felt good.

“Don’t get too cocky,” Sung warned us, which was pretty precious, since Sung was the cockiest of us all. I half expected “We Are the Champions” to come blaring out of his ears every time we won a round.

Our fourth and last match of the day—in the quarterfinals—was against the team from Clearwater, Florida, which had made it to the finals for each of the past ten years, winning four of those times. They were legendary, insofar as people like Sung had heard about them and had studied their strategies, with some tapes Mr. Phillips had managed to get off Clearwater local access.

Even though I was the alternate, I was put in the starting lineup. Clearwater was known for treating the canon like a cannon to demolish the other team.

“Bring it on,” I said.

It soon became clear who my counterpart on the Clearwater team was—a wispy girl with straight brown hair who could barely bother to put down her Muriel Spark in order to start playing. The first time she opened her mouth, she revealed their secret weapon:

She was British.

Frances looked momentarily frightened by this, but I took it in stride. When the girl lunged with Byron, I parried with Asimov. When she volleyed with Burgess, I pounced with Roth. Neither of us missed a question, so it became a test of buzzer willpower. I started to ring in a split second before I knew the answer. And I always knew the answer.

Until I did the unthinkable.

I buzzed in for a science question.

Which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People?

I realized immediately it wasn’t Saul Bellow or Kenzaburo Oe.

As the judge said, “Do you have an answer?” the phrase The Double Helix hit in my head.

“Crick!” I exclaimed.

The judge looked at me for a moment, then down at his card. “That is incorrect. Clearwater, which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People ?”

It was not the lit girl who buzzed in.

“James D. Watson,” one of the math boys answered snottily, the D sent as a particular fuck you to me.

“Sorry,” I whispered to my team.

“It’s okay,” Damien said.

“No worries,” Wes said.

Sung, I knew, wouldn’t be as forgiving.

I was now off my game and more cautious with the buzzer, so Brit girl got the best of me on Caliban and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. I managed to stick One Hundred Years of Solitude in edgewise, but that was scant comfort. I mean, who didn’t know One Hundred Years of Solitude ?

Clearwater had a one-question lead with three questions left, and the last questions were about math, history, and geography. So I sat back while Sung rocked the relative areas of a rhombus and a circle, Wes sent a little love General Omar Bradley’s way, and Frances wrapped it up with Tashkent, which I had not known was the capital of Uzbekistan, its name translating as “stone village.”

Usually we burst out of our chairs when we won, but this match had been so exhausting that we could only feel relieved. We shook hands with the other team—Brit girl’s hand felt like it was made of paper, which I found weird.