Four Words in an Old Atlas

What would you say if there were time?

That question is written by hand at the top of a stack of blank cards in my new novel. Lin, who is the best friend every seventeen year old deserves, prints it for a room full of students who are all about to leave something behind. I did not know, when I started writing, that it would turn out to be the question at the heart of the whole book. But it is. If You Find This, Stay is a story about the things we mean to say and keep postponing, and about what happens when someone finally gives us a place to put them.

It begins on a bad morning. Maren Olven has just heard, over a breakfast nobody eats, that her mother has found work in another city and they will move when term ends. She goes to the school library early, because it is one of only two rooms where nobody asks whether she is all right. She opens an old atlas across the return desk. The first thing she finds is a sea drawn in the wrong place. The second is a folded square of paper that drops against her shoe, with four words pressed into it in dark ink.

If you find this, stay.

I love that moment because it is so small. Nobody else in the room knows anything has happened. Maren could put the note back. Instead she writes a reply in the margin of her notebook, slips it between the pages and tells herself it is foolish. The next morning, an answer is waiting in blue ink.

Then we can sit here until you can.

I wanted the letters to feel like real letters between two careful people: short, a little guarded, sometimes funny, and every so often reaching somewhere neither writer meant to go. The stranger draws a tiny door with an absurdly careful hinge. Maren asks for four minutes instead of three. The stranger offers five and admits to being terrible at keeping time. By then, I hope, you will be checking the atlas as eagerly as she is.

Then there is Jory Dalen. He works at the library before lessons, carries stacks of returns against his chest and has an irritating talent for turning up exactly when Maren looks foolish. He jokes about almost everything. He repairs things quietly, fresh corners on an old display frame, a wooden hinge that moves with almost no sound, and seems to use his hands to find where space can be made rather than to take it up. He also has an offer of his own, and he is afraid to tell her about it. Writing the two of them together was a joy, mostly because they argue the way people do when they are trying very hard not to say what they feel.

The people around them mattered to me just as much. Ada, Maren's mother, is not the villain of the move. She is trying to build a steadier life and wishes hope did not have to arrive carrying boxes. There is a scene with a piece of cold toast that says more about the two of them than any argument could, and I wanted their love to be visible in exactly that gentle way. And there is Pip, Jory's twelve year old sister, who believes people leave clues about themselves everywhere and is usually right. She takes great pleasure in embarrassing her brother, which makes her excellent company.

The heart of their last term is a room. Above the library is a dusty storage room with tall windows and terrible stairs, and Maren, Jory and Lin turn it into a place where students can leave, without their names, the words they could not say aloud. Some write about people they will miss. Some write about rooms. One writes a furious little paragraph about being told that every departure is an adventure. Maren's plan for the space includes a door wide enough for two people to pass together, and a bench in the middle, because people need somewhere to stand after they read. Or, as she puts it before she can stop herself, a place to stay for a little while.

That phrase, staying for a little while, is what I kept circling. We usually think of staying as the opposite of leaving. Maren and Jory have to discover whether it might mean something else: being known by someone, honestly, even when your roads are about to run in different directions. When the handwriting in the atlas begins to reveal more than either of them expected, the private story they have built has to meet the choices they have kept from each other. I will leave it there.

If you have ever written a note you were not brave enough to sign, or stood in a doorway unsure whether it meant welcome or goodbye, I wrote this for you. Open If You Find This, Stay, find the atlas on its narrow shelf, and see what is waiting between the pages.