By Saundra
Mitchell
On
Sale: May 26, 2020
Inkyard Press
YOUNG ADULT
FICTION/Diversity & Multicultural | YOUNG ADULT FICTION/Romance/LGBT
9781335018267;
1335018263
$18.99 USD
416
pages
About
the Book
A
follow-up to the critically acclaimed All Out anthology, Out
Now features seventeen new short stories from amazing queer YA
authors. Vampires crash prom…aliens run from the government…a president’s
daughter comes into her own…a true romantic tries to soften the heart of a cynical
social media influencer…a selkie and the sea call out to a lost soul. Teapots
and barbershops…skateboards and VW vans…Street Fighter and Ares’s
sword: Out Now has a story for every reader and surprises with
each turn of the page!
This essential and beautifully written modern-day collection features an intersectional and inclusive slate of authors and stories.
This essential and beautifully written modern-day collection features an intersectional and inclusive slate of authors and stories.
Buy Links:
Books-A-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Out-Now/Saundra-Mitchell/9781335018267?id=4861510030088
Excerpt
KICK. PUSH. COAST. By Candice Montgomery
Excerpted from OUT NOW: Queer We Go
Again! Edited by Saundra Mitchell, used with permission by Inkyard Press, ©
2020 by Inkyard Press.
Every day, same time, same place, she
appears and doesn’t say a word.
Well, she doesn’t just appear. She takes a
bus. You know she takes a bus because you see her get off the bus right in
front of 56th Street, just in front of the park where you
skate.
You know she takes a bus and gets off right
in front of the park at 56th Street because you are always at the park,
wait-ing to catch a glance of her.
She—her appearance—is a constant. Unlike
your sexuality, all bendy like the way your bones got after yesterday’s failed
backside carve.
Bisexualpansexualdemisexualpanromanticenby
all bleeding bleeding-bleeding…into one another.
That drum of an organ inside your chest
tells you to just be patient. But now, here you are and there she is and you
can’t help yourself.
She’s beautiful.
And so far out of your league.
You’re not even sure what she does here
every day, but you probably shouldn’t continue to watch her while trying to
nail a Caballerial for the first time. Losing focus there is the kind of thing
that lends itself to unforgiving injuries, like that time you broke your leg in
six places on the half-pipe or the time you bit clean through your bottom lip
trying to take down a 360 Pop Shove It.
You’re still tasting blood to this very
day. So’s your skate-board. That one got split clean in half.
She looks up at you from underneath light
brown lashes that seem too long to be real. She reminds you of a Heelflip. You
don’t know her well but you imagine that, at first, she’s a pretty complicated
girl, before you get good enough to really know her. You assume this just given
the way her hair hangs down her back in a thick, beachy plait, the way yours
never could.
Not since you chopped it all off.
That’s not a look for a lady, your mom says
repeatedly. But you’ve never been very femme and a few extra inches of hair
plus that pink dress Mom bought you won’t change that.
You hate that dress. That dress makes you
look like fondant. Someone nails a Laserflip right near where you’re standing
and almost wipes out.
Stop staring. You could just go introduce
yourself to her.
But what would you say?
Hi, I’m Dustyn and I really want to kiss
you but I’m so confused about who I am and how am I supposed to introduce
myself to you if I can’t even get my label right, oh, and also, you make me
forget my own name.
And in a perfect world, she would make eyes
at you. She’dmake those eyes at you and melt your entire fucking world in the
way only girls ever can.
Hi, Dustyn, I’m in love with you.
Eyelashes. All batting eye-lashes.
No. No, the conversation probably wouldn’t
go that way. Be nice if it did though. Be nice if anything at all could go your
way when it comes to romance.
You push into a 360 ollie while riding
fakie and biff it so bad, you wish you possessed whatever brain cells are the
ones that tell you when to quit.
If that conversation did go your way, on a
realistic scale, she’d watch you right back. You would nail that Caballerial.
Take a break. Breathe. Breathe
breathebreathe. Try some-thing else for a sec.
Varial Heelflip. Wipe out.
Inward Heelflip. Gnarly spill.
Backside 180 Heelflip. Game, set,
match—you’re finished. That third fail happens right in front of her and you
play it off cool. Get up. Don’t even give a second thought to your battle
wounds. You’re at the skate park on 56th Street because there’s more to get
into. Which means, you’re not the only idiot limping with a little drug called
determination giving
you momentum.
Falling is the point. Failing is the point.
Getting better and changing your game as a skater is the point. Change.
But what if things were on your side? What
if you’d stuck with that first label? What if Bisexual felt like a good fit and
never changed?
Well, then you’d probably be landing all
these 180s.
If bisexual just fit, you’d probably have
been able to holdon to your spot in that Walk-In Closet. But it doesn’t fit. It
doesn’t fit which kind of sucks because at Thanksgiving din-ner two years ago,
your cousin Damita just had to open her big mouth and tell the family you “mess
with girls.” Just had to tell the family, a forkful of homemade mac and cheese
headed into said mouth, that you are “half a gay.”
That went over well. Grams wouldn’t let you
sit on her plastic-lined couches for the rest of the night. Your great-uncle
Damian told her gay is contagious. She took it to heart.
No offense, baby. Can’t have all that on my
good couches. You glance up and across the park, memories knocking
things through your head like a good stiff
wind, and you find her taking a seat.
Oh.
Oh, she never does this. She never gets
comfortable. She’s changing things up. You’re not the only one.
Maybe she plans to stay a while.
You love that she’s changing things up. You
think it feels like a sign. It’s like she’s riding Goofy-Foot today. Riding
with her right foot as dominant.
The first time you changed things up that
way, you ended up behind the bleachers, teeth checking with a trans boy named
Aaron. It felt so right that you needed to give it a name.
Google called it pansexual. That one stuck.
You didn’t bother to explain that one to the family, though. They were just
starting to learn bisexual didn’t mean you were gay for only half the year.
You pop your board and give the Caballerial
another go.
It does not want you. You don’t stick this
one either.
If pansexual had stuck, you’d introduce
yourself to the beautiful girl with a smaller apology on your tongue. Hi, I’m
Dustyn, I’ve only changed my label the one time, just slightly, but I’m still
me and I’d really love to take you out.
And the beautiful girl would glance at your
scraped elbows and the bruised-up skin showing through the knee holes in your
ripped black skinny jeans. She’d see you and say, Hi, small, slight changes are
my favorite. And then she’d lace her bubble-gum-nail-polished hand with yours.
But you changed your label after that, too.
It was fine for a while. Your best friend, Hollis, talked you through the
symp-toms of demisexuality.
No wonder holding the beautiful girl’s hand
seems so much more heart-palpitating than anything else. A handhold. So simple.
Just like an ollie.
You take a fast running start, throwing
your board down, and end up on a vert skate, all empty bowl-shaped pools that
are so smooth, your wheels only make a small whisper against them.
A whisper is what you got that first time
you realized sex was not for you. Not with just anyone. This was…mmm, probably
your biggest revelation.
It was like you’d been feeding your body
Big Macs three times a day and suddenly—a vegetable!
Tic-tacking is when you use your entire
body to turn the board from one side to the other. It’s a game of lower body
strength, but also a game of knowing your weight and know-ing your board. You
are not a tic-tac kind of girl.
You are not a girl at all. You are
just…you.
That.
That one’s sticking forever. You know it
all the way through to your gut.
You make one more attempt, which probably
isn’t super wise because you are so close to the spot where she’s sitting that
not only will she see you bite the dust, but she’ll hear that nasty grunt you
make when you meet the ground.
You coast by.
The friction vibrates up through your
bearings and you know you’re going too fast because you start to feel a little
bit of a speed-wobble, that lovely, untimely, oscillatory behavior that means
bro, you are about to lose control.
And you hate that word. Control. You hate
that word be-cause it is so very rare that you have any. Over your life, your
sexuality, your gender, your pronouns, your heartbeat when you’re around your
beautiful girl.
But then you do.
You gain control. And you nail that
Caballerial.
And the three guys who’ve been watching you
make an ass of yourself all afternoon pop their boards up, hold them over their
heads and let out wolf shouts.
And you’re smiling so hard. You get like
that when you nail a particularly difficult one. You’re smiling so hard you
don’t notice the someone standing behind you.
Beautiful girl. You don’t even want to
control your smile here.
“You did it,” she says.
About
the author
Saundra
Mitchell
has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture deliverer and a layout
waxer. She's dodged trains, endured basic training and hitchhiked from Montana
to California. She teaches herself languages, raises children and makes paper
for fun. She is the author of Shadowed Summer and The Vespertine series,
the upcoming novelization of The Prom musical, and the editor of Defy the
Dark. She always picks truth; dare is too easy. Visit her online at
www.saundramitchell.com.
Social
Links:
Author website: wwww.saundramitchell.com
Twitter: @saundramitchell
Instagram: @smitchellbooks
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