A Tragic Kind of Wonderful
The heart-rending and inspiring novel from the critically acclaimed author of NOT IF I SEE YOU FIRST.How can you have a future if you can’t accept your past?Mel Hannigan doesn’t have it easy. Mourning the death of her firework of a brother, facing the loss of three friendships that used to mean everything to her and struggling to deal with a condition that even her closest friends don’t know about. To protect herself and everyone else, Mel tries to lock away her heart, to live quietly without pain – but also without hope.Until the plight of an old friend, and meeting someone new, shows her that the risk is worth taking, that opening up to life – and who you really are – is what can make everything glorious… And that maybe Mel can discover a tragic kind of wonderful of her very own.A beautiful, captivating story about living with mental illness, and loving – even with a broken heart.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
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A Tragic Kind of Wonderful
Text © Eric Lindstrom, 2017
All rights reserved
Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublisher’s Ltd 2016
Eric Lindstrom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008147471
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008147488
Version: 2016-11-09
To Mom and Dad, for all the reasons
Contents
My big brother, Nolan, used to say everyone has a superpower. Not a skill you learned, but something you were born with. And it’s not always cool. Some people get perfect pitch or good intuition, while others get something useless like being able to go a long time without blinking. But if you don’t judge, everyone has at least one thing they’re really good at.
Nolan’s superpower was, quote, “I can make myself be happy.”
He proved it by having loud fun with lots of friends most of the time. But it also could be unsettling. Like when he was “happy” at times I knew he shouldn’t be. He wasn’t faking it exactly. It was real in a way, just not … authentic.
Happiness, he said, was like the lights in your house, running on electricity generated by the good things in life. Unhappy people have dark houses without electricity, and they sometimes put candles in their windows to hide their sadness from others, but not Nolan. He said he had a bicycle in his head, attached to an electric generator, and he could imagine pedaling it whenever he wanted to power his real happiness lights.
If you looked closely, though, you could sometimes see his lights dim, or burn too bright, or flicker in ways they weren’t supposed to. And once you saw this, you couldn’t unsee it. Then you saw it a lot. I didn’t understand; I was just a kid at the time. Thinking back on it now, it breaks my heart.
A lot of the time Nolan was naturally happy without having to pedal his imaginary bike. Infectious, too. My happiest memory is from when I was thirteen and he was sixteen, on the first of November.
All of us in Ms. Malik’s eighth-grade English class were slumped over our desks like empty puppets, crashed and crumpled after Halloween on a school night. It was silent reading time and we were silent but not reading. If it had been kindergarten naptime, nobody would have complained.
A knuckle cracked. I saw my brother peeking into the room from out in the hall. He waved for me to come over and then ducked away. Maybe something was wrong.
I asked to go to the bathroom, got the nod, grabbed the Magic Wand, and walked into the hall. Nolan was already outside the glass doors at the far end, on his silver eight-speed touring bike. I wondered how he’d managed to slip away from his prison-like high school without being seen.
When I opened the door, Nolan pointed at the Magic Wand. “What the hell is that?”
It was really a dowel with a plywood star glued to one end, painted with glitter. It was childish, sexist, and I hated it. The boys used a black dowel with white tips. I hated that, too, though not as much.
I waved it impatiently. “Hall pass. What’s wrong?”
“Get on. I’m gonna show you something amazing.”
“Now? I can’t leave school! Why aren’t YOU in school?”
“We won’t be gone long. You can say I made you do it. Get on.”
“I don’t have my helmet.”
“Use mine.” He held it out.
“Then YOU won’t have a helmet.”
He rapped his knuckles on his head. “Don’t need one.”
Classic Nolan. But I knew the risk wasn’t getting hurt, it was getting caught, and I wouldn’t get in trouble if he didn’t wear his helmet. Didn’t work the other way. He often got in trouble for stuff I did because Dad said he was “in charge.”
