Author: Adi Alsaid
On Sale: April 7, 2020
Publisher: Inkyard Press
Young Adult
978-1335146762; 1335146768
$18.99 USD
352 pages
From Adi Alsaid, the acclaimed author of Let's
Get Lost, Never Sometimes Always, and North of Happy
Every year, lock-in night changes lives. This year, it
might just change the world.
Central International School's annual lock-in is legendary
-- and for six students, this year's lock-in is the answer to their dreams. The
chance to finally win the contest. Kiss the guy. Make a friend. Become the star
of a story that will be passed down from student to student for years to come.
But then a group of students, led by Marisa Cuevas, stage an
eco-protest and chain themselves to the doors, vowing to keep everyone trapped
inside until their list of demands is met. While some students rally to the
cause, others are devastated as they watch their plans fall apart. And Marisa,
once so certain of her goals, must now decide just how far she'll go to attain
them.
Enjoy this excerpt:
Excerpted from We Didn’t Ask for This by Adi
Alsaid. © 2020 by Adi Alsaid, used with permission by Inkyard Press.
The lock-in was going fairly well until Marisa unleashed her
cronies and chained herself to the main entrance.
No one really noticed right away, busy as they were taking
part in a number of lock-in-related activities: laser tag in the parking
garage, a sanctioned food fight in the cafeteria, a photo shoot tutorial with a
renowned YouTube influencer.
Once a year, in April, the doors at Central International
School’s K-12 campus closed—though they didn’t literally lock—to allow the high
school students to roam free for the whole night. Having the next day off
school was nowhere near the best part. Nor, strictly speaking, were the
activities themselves, though they were extravagant and wonderful and
distracted everyone from what Marisa was doing.
People fell in love on lock-in night. They stumbled upon new
passions that would shape the rest of their lives, discovered friendships they
could not imagine living without, before or after. Traumas were resolved on
lock-in night, anxieties disappeared, never to return, not even after the buses
arrived in the morning to take the students back home.
This was well known to the few students who had been lucky
enough to have attended before, or who had siblings who had attended in years
prior. At Central International School, the student body ebbed and flowed,
changing drastically from year to year, and often even more frequently. It was
common to have different classmates every semester, and sometimes students
would find the person who sat next to them in class—the alluring redhead who
scribbled song lyrics on the margins of their textbooks, who one time turned
and asked to borrow a pen they never returned, though they had offered a smile
that carried with it joy beyond a simple gesture; the redhead who might have
one day soon become more than just a classmate—was simply gone from one day to
the next.
Even by international school standards, the turnover rate of
both students and faculty had always been high, though it had a great academic
reputation, and the city in which it sat was a diverse and world-class
cosmopolis. Yet people never seemed to stick around for long, as if families
were carried in by the seaside breeze, and carried away by the same. Most
students had multiple passports, and their parents were multinational, or
transient because they were diplomats, or titans of industry, or missionaries,
or digital nomads, or teachers within the international school world. They had
roots in many places, thought of no one place as home—or rather, thought of
everywhere they’d been as home.
So it was rare for a student to be around for several
lock-in nights. Even the locals, who made up a mere fifteen percent of the
school’s population, often temporarily relocated during their high school
years—a boarding school exchange in Switzerland, a South American road trip in
a van with their family, a missionary excursion in Central America.
Despite all this, the lore surrounding lock-in night was
always momentous, starting as an excited murmur the first day of school and
building to a frenzy by the night before the event itself a month or so before
the end of the year. Students wondered how, exactly, their life would be
improved by the evening. There was no question it would—they could feel it on
their skin, their heartbeats thudded with the knowledge that things were about
to change, they had absorbed the gossip, not just a rumor or two, but dozens
and dozens of first-hand accounts or verifiable secondhand stories, so many of
them that it did not feel like hearsay but like fact—it was the how that was
exciting. Would the redheaded classmate return to slip a hand into theirs
during the movie marathon on the roof garden? Would their fear of heights be
cured by the trapeze the school had set up on the football field? Or would it
simply be a night of such fun that the joy would sink into their bones and
change them into happier people?
Lock-in night, simply put, was magic. Even all those who had
never experienced it knew it to be true.
Which, of course, was why Marisa planned her protest for
that well-loved night. To make people pay attention, disrupt what brings them
joy.
The mad desire to act had existed long before her plan did.
Marisa loved the water as a baby. Her parents told the stories to anyone who
would listen. She always feigned embarrassment at their anecdotes about her
hour-long baths and surprising performance in toddler swimming classes, her
dark, curly hair unfurling in the water behind her like a mermaid, her brown
eyes huge within the goggles she always carried around. But the truth was that
she loved the stories. They confirmed this was not a passing fad, not a childhood
obsession that would lose its significance over time, not a baby blanket
carried around charmingly until age ten, when it was shoved into a box and
donated.
When she discovered snorkeling and, later, diving, that love
blew wide open. This? This had been possible this whole time?
Though Marisa was only seventeen, her parents’ constant
relocations for work meant she’d seen a hefty percentage of the world’s waters.
She’d snorkeled in Mexico, Fiji, the Philippines, the Great Barrier Reef,
Belize. And the more she did it, the more her heart broke. Human beings had
found a way to kill water.
The places famed for their snorkeling were heart-
wrenching. The destroyed beige reefs littered the oceans like ornate
gravestones. They should have been resplendent with color. Books and scientists
told her as much, and other divers did, too. Of course, though, they weren’t.
Not anymore. The world had ruined that particular beauty before Marisa had ever
had a chance to see it, killing the corals with spilled chemicals, suffocating
the oceans with heat. Every time she surfaced, she would dive into the
internet, trying to find a way to help. Changing her sunscreen to the reef-safe
kind, cleaning up plastic on the beach, asking her parents to donate yet again;
nothing felt big enough.
Then came the three-day weekend at the start of the school
year that changed it all. She had convinced her parents to take the family to
the beach, and the Cuevases, who knew their frequent moves could be hard on the
children, relented de-spite the fact that neither of them felt settled in at
work yet, and they would have really liked to stay in the city and run errands.
Marisa had heard amazing things about the snorkeling in the
region surrounding the beach. She was always skeptical when she heard anything
like that; she’d been disappointed enough. She was fine just swimming among
whatever fish remained in the area and pretending this was what it had al-ways
been like, this was the wondrous alien world other divers described. After
their most recent move, she’d done her usual research and found on the most
trustworthy sources that an untouched blip still existed, not too far from her
new school.
She convinced her parents, who knew it was better to indulge
Marisa than fight her, to take a boat to an island, then another, smaller boat
to another, smaller island. Arriving at the clear, turquoise waters, which were
peppered with butterflies from who knows where fluttering across the surface,
whole waves of them outnumbering the tourists she had seen even on the
mainland, Marisa allowed herself to hope. Well before her family was ready,
Marisa was in her flippers and mask, and she sat on the edge of the boat and
let herself fall backward into the warm waters. At first, her heart had soared:
greens! Purples! Oranges! Bright colors in the reefs, finally. The schools of
fish were more like armies, numbered not in dozens but in hundreds, maybe even
thousands, various species all swimming in their separate schools, like great
big flags unfurling mightily in the water.
Marisa followed them, kicking delightedly, her heart
flooding with joy. Then she turned a corner around some rocks and her breath
caught, as if someone had reached inside her chest and closed a massive fist
around her lungs. Even here, she found murk and drudgery, the reef not on
display so much as its dying was.
She emerged from the water and took off her mask, tears
mixing with the waves. People and the trash with which they suffocated the
world. She looked around, shading her eyes from the shimmering sunlight with
her free hand. Maybe it was time to accept the world as it was.
As she turned to swim back to shore, she caught sight of
something on the far end of the island. A construction site. Large, acres and
acres of it, from what Marisa could tell, and a handful of bulldozers. She swam
closer and saw the sign announcing the coming resort. Nearby, a trickle of brown-gray
water weaved its way from below the makeshift wall around the site and dribbled
onto the sand.
Yes, it was a travesty, an outrage that the world had been
ruined before her arrival. But that trickle hadn’t reached all the way to the
shore, not yet.
As soon as she and her family made it back to their
eco-hotel that day, Marisa decided she had to stop that waste from reaching the
ocean. Whatever she could do for the reefs, she was going to do it. If it was
just shutting down that one construction site, or if it was something much
bigger, she had to try. What else was there but to try?
Months of stewing later, of planning, of seeing the ruined
remains of the ocean floors every time she closed her eyes, of thinking of a
way to make everyone else see what she saw. It all led up to this moment, when
Marisa hoisted a chain from the duffel bag she’d hidden on campus a few days
ago. She weaved it through the handles on the double doors that led into the
main school building, then she wrapped it three times around her own body,
uncomfortably tight, so bolt cutters could not break through the metal without
snagging on her skin. When she was satisfied, she grabbed three giant padlocks
from the bag and locked herself in, meaning to stay.
She set the keys in the middle of her palm, rubbing them
each in a pad of butter procured earlier from the cafeteria, and which had
warmed nicely in her pocket throughout the afternoon. Then Marisa, rehearsing
her speech in her mind one last time, looked up. She expected to see a sizable
crowd already gathering. What she saw instead was a lanky blond sophomore
leaving the bathroom across the open expanse of the building’s foyer. The boy
was checking to see if he’d re-membered to zip up. He had not.
When his eyes met Marisa’s, he could tell she had seen him
checking, and he stepped quickly away from her line of sight, failing to notice
the heavy metal chain wrapped around her torso.
About the Author
Adi Alsaid was born and raised in Mexico City. He attended
college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He's now back in Mexico City,
where he writes, coaches basketball, and makes every dish he eats as spicy as
possible. In addition to Mexico, he's lived in Tel Aviv, Las Vegas and
Monterey, California. His books include Let's Get Lost, Never Always Sometimes,
and North of Happy. Visit Adi online at www.SomewhereOverTheSun.com, or on
Twitter: @AdiAlsaid.
Social Links:
Facebook: @adialsaidauthor
Twitter: @adialsaid
Instagram: @uhhdee
Thanks for sharing. I'm looking forward to Alsaid's book! :)
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