You : a novel

Title:

You : a novel

Author:

Kepnes, Caroline, 1976- author.

ISBN:

9781476785592

9781476785608

9781501195433

Personal Author:

Kepnes, Caroline, 1976- author.

Edition:

First Emily Bestler books/Atria Books hardcover edition.

Publication Information:

New York : Emily Bestler Books/Atria, 2014.

Physical Description:

424 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

"Love hurts ... When aspiring writer Guinevere Beck strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe works, he's instantly smitten. Beck is everything Joe has ever wanted: She's gorgeous, tough, razor-smart, and as sexy as his wildest dreams. Beck doesn't know it yet, but she's perfect for him, and soon she can't resist her feelings for a guy who seems custom made for her. But there's more to Joe than Beck realizes, and much more to Beck than her oh-so-perfect facade. Their mutual obsession quickly spirals into a whirlwind of deadly consequences. A chilling account of unrelenting passion, Caroline Kepnes's You is a perversely romantic thriller that's more dangerously clever than any you've read before." -- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Women authors -- Fiction.

Bookstores -- Fiction.

Man-woman relationships -- Fiction.

Sexual attraction -- Fiction.

Secrecy -- Fiction.

Bookstores -- Employees -- Fiction.

Bookstores -- Employees -- Juvenile fiction.

Bookstores. (OCoLC)fst00836517

Bookstores -- Employees. (OCoLC)fst00836520

Man-woman relationships. (OCoLC)fst01007080

Secrecy. (OCoLC)fst01110644

Sexual attraction. (OCoLC)fst01114799

Women authors. (OCoLC)fst01177198

Geographic Term:

East Village (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction.

Genre:

Romantic suspense fiction.

Novels.

Thrillers (Fiction)

Fiction.

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2174502

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC KEPNES CAR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Caruthers Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	KEPNES CA You	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Clovis Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	KEPNES CA You	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Corcoran Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	FIC KEPNES	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Dos Palos Branch Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC KEP	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fig Garden Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	KEPNES CA You	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Hanford Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	FIC KEPNES	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Lemoore Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	FIC KEPNES	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Lemoore Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	FIC KEPNES	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Politi Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	KEPNES CA You	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Porterville Public Library (Porterville)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	KEPNES	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Rathbun Branch Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC KEPNES CAR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Sanger Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	KEPNES CA You	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Tehachapi Branch Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC KEPNES CAR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Tulare Public Library	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	Kepnes Caroline	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Fiction Area	FIC KEPNES CAROLINE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West Fresno Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	KEPNES CA You	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

*Soon to be a Lifetime drama series*

" Hypnotic and scary." --Stephen King

"I am RIVETED, AGHAST, AROUSED, you name it. The rare instance when prose and plot are equally delicious." --Lena Dunham

From debut author Caroline Kepnes comes You , one of Suspense Magazine 's Best Books of 2014, and a brilliant and terrifying novel for the social media age.

When a beautiful, aspiring writer strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he does what anyone would do: he Googles the name on her credit card.

There is only one Guinevere Beck in New York City. She has a public Facebook account and Tweets incessantly, telling Joe everything he needs to know: she is simply Beck to her friends, she went to Brown University, she lives on Bank Street, and she'll be at a bar in Brooklyn tonight--the perfect place for a "chance" meeting.

As Joe invisibly and obsessively takes control of Beck's life, he orchestrates a series of events to ensure Beck finds herself in his waiting arms. Moving from stalker to boyfriend, Joe transforms himself into Beck's perfect man, all while quietly removing the obstacles that stand in their way--even if it means murder.

A terrifying exploration of how vulnerable we all are to stalking and manipulation, debut author Caroline Kepnes delivers a razor-sharp novel for our hyper-connected digital age. You is a compulsively readable page-turner that's being compared to Gone Girl , American Psycho , and Stephen King's Misery .

Author Notes

Caroline Kepnes is the author of You, Hidden Bodies and Providence. She began her career as a pop culture jpurnalist for Entertainment Weekly and a TV writer on 7th Heaven, The Secret Life of the American Teenager and the upcoming adaptation of You. She was born and raised in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Debut novelist Kepnes's seriously unsettling depiction of stalking nevertheless manages to invoke glimmers of sympathy for its perpetrator. Joe is working as a clerk at a bookstore on New York City's Lower East Side when M.F.A. writing student Guinevere Beck (known as Beck) saunters in. Joe knows immediately that they're meant to be together. What follows is a chronicle of Joe's psychotic preoccupation with Beck, told in Joe's relentless, alternately passionate and vitriolic narration and addressed to Beck as "you." Astonishingly enough, his fixation materializes into a relationship of sorts. Joe, who is well-read but never attended college, has a chip on his shoulder about his education and class status and the assumptions people make about him. Beck, for her part, prefers to stir up dramas rather than seriously work on her writing. What's most chilling about this novel, besides its plausibility, is the way in which Kepnes makes the reader empathize with Joe during the journey into his troubled mind. Her book will have readers looking over their shoulders-and examining their own motivations. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

The day Guinevere Beck walks into Joe Goldberg's East Village bookstore, life for both of them will never be the same. Guinevere is a hot young thing, beautiful, creative, and tough, recently transplanted to New York City to attend graduate school. Beck is Joe's dream girl, everything he has ever wanted in a significant other. When Joe rescues her in the subway, a grateful Beck agrees to go out with him. Thus begins a relationship defined by passion, obsession, and even murder. Joe becomes the ultimate stalker. He spies on Beck through her curtainless windows and gains access to her e-mails and tweets by stealing her phone. Written in the second person, You is the story of one man's life, a life where love becomes obsession, and obsession becomes murder, experienced and perpetrated by a character who is strangely likable despite his bad behavior. Kepnes, a television writer and journalist, has written a deeply dark yet mesmerizing first novel of two people caught in a romantic tangle with an ever-tightening knot.--Gladstein, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist

Guardian Review

Caroline Kepnes's thriller sees a man taking his pursuit of a woman to the extreme. But from Bridget Jones to Love Actually, romcoms often blur the line between seduction and stalking Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Boy does everything he can to get girl. This is the structure of pretty much every love story, from fairytales to romantic comedies, from The Graduate to Love Actually . As a result, it's the dynamic most of us have grown up as thinking as the norm, even the ideal: the man is the active subject, and the woman is the passive object, who must be persuaded into love. Caroline Kepnes 's ludicrously readable 2014 novel, You , which has been made into a Netflix series, opens with a classic romcom meet-cute. Handsome bookstore manager Joe spots pretty Beck when she walks into his shop. They banter among the bookshelves, he teases, she - he thinks - flirts back. And so the pursuit begins, with Joe finding out where Beck lives so he can walk past her door - except he doesn't just walk past. "We've all grown up watching those movies dozens of times, in which a man pursuing a woman, and sometimes even being horrible to her, is portrayed as romantic," Kepnes says. "I wanted to look at where that would lead when taken to the extreme." Joe watches Beck for days before eventually breaking into her house. When she comes home unexpectedly, he hides in the shower. "I've seen enough romantic comedies to know guys like me are always getting into jams like this," he muses. There might be something alluring about the idea of a man liking you so much he runs across New York City on New Year's Eve to declare his love for you, as Harry (Billy Crystal) does in When Harry Met Sally (as opposed to Hugh Grant's character in Four Weddings and a Funeral , for example, so haplessly passive he merely waits for another wedding, or funeral, where he might bump into you). But where does flirtation end and harassment begin? Take Will Smith's supposedly charming narrator in the 2005 movie Hitch for example: "She might say, 'This is a really bad time for me [to date someone]', but she's lying to you. It's not a bad time for her. She doesn't need any space," he declares. A 2016 study concluded that this kind of narrative "can lead to an increase in stalking-supportive beliefs", and it is these ideas that are explored in Kepnes's novel and the new series. "I think part of the popularity of romcoms is that they reflect a lot of women's subconscious beliefs that they should accept this kind of behaviour from men," Kepnes says. "We're told that a good man is hard to find, so it's easy to think: 'OK, I should like this guy who seems to like me so much.'" Objections to the creepiness of romcoms always lead to some people arguing that such cynicism proves romance is dead. "Did feminism kill the romcom?" one British newspaper asked last year, as if it were mere political correctness that makes storylines like a man convincing a woman with amnesia that she is his wife (1987's Overboard , remade and not improved last year), or a man following a woman he hardly knows to a cabin in the mountains while she's on a minibreak with someone else ( St Elmo's Fire ) look odd. Smart movies also fudge the line between seduction and stalking: in Groundhog Day, Phil (Bill Murray) time travels for the purpose of seducing an unwitting Rita (Andie MacDowell). In Say Anything , the response of Lloyd (John Cusack) to being dumped by Diane (Ione Skye) is to stand outside her house playing the song they once had sex to. This image of Cusack is still regularly used as a symbol of romance, but without the romcom tinted spectacles it is flat-out weird. Hollywood has always romanticised physical violence and psychological manipulation from men in the name of romance Defenders of the genre argue that older romantic comedies, often starring Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn, showed women with more agency, and men with less self-entitlement. But Hollywood has always romanticised physical violence and psychological manipulation from men in the name of romance, whether it's Rhett Butler raping Scarlett O'Hara into happy submission in Gone with the Wind , or Tony Curtis seducing Marilyn Monroe by pretending to be alternately her female friend and a British millionaire in Some Like It Hot . In You , one of Joe's favourite references is Elliot, the character played by Michael Caine in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters . Elliot doesn't just seduce his wife's sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), he stalks her: "He waits near her apartment and stages a run-in. Brilliant, romantic. Love takes work," Joe thinks. But one of the more telling moments in the TV series comes when Beck recognises him on the street, after he has been following her for some time. She approaches him and says hello, then apologises for sounding like "a stalker". Unaware that he has been masturbating outside her house, she is worried that she's the one who comes across as overly keen. Women who pursue men in movies are routinely depicted as farcical (Bridget staking out Mark's parents' house in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason ) or psychotic. If Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction had been a man, and Michael Douglas's a woman, that film could have been a romcom about a man wooing a married woman away from her life of boring domesticity. In Play Misty for Me , Evelyn (Jessica Walter) turns up at Dave's (Clint Eastwood) office and follows him around town. This behaviour, the film says, should be seen as a red flag. But Evelyn looks like a mere amateur next to the men in Love Actually : Colin Firth pursues a woman he barely knows across France, and Andrew Lincoln secretly films the wife of his best friend and turns up to her home to declare his love for her while her husband is inside. What is psychotic from a woman is romantic from a man. "Girls are taught from a young age that if a boy is mean to you that means he likes you, and men are taught that if a woman seems obsessive that means she's crazy,"Kepnes argues. The superlative TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend satirises this while also, to a certain extent, endorsing it: after all, the show says, the only kind of woman who would pursue a childhood boyfriend across America is, as the title says, a crazy one. Some movies have reversed this gender dynamic. In Sleepless in Seattle (written and directed by a woman, the late Nora Ephron), Annie (Meg Ryan) becomes obsessed with Sam (Tom Hanks) after hearing him on the radio. This leads her to research his dead wife, find his address and watch him play with his son, Jonah. The movie ends with Jonah flying to New York to find her, in the belief she is meant to be his new mother. From another screenwriter this could have turned into a horror movie: a bereaved father rescuing his child from a deranged woman. As it's Ephron, it ends with Ryan and Hanks falling in love. In While You Were Sleeping , Lucy (Sandra Bullock) develops a crush on a stranger, Peter (Peter Gallagher). When he falls into a coma she allows his family to believe she was his fiancee. The ruse continues even after Peter wakes up and Lucy only confesses the truth at the wedding altar. In the real world, Lucy could be convicted of fraud. In the romcom world, she marries his brother (Bill Pullman). Both of these movies were big hits, but by reversing the genders they inadvertently exposed the absurdity of romcom tropes. Audiences are very used to accepting men as pursuers, no matter how creepy their pursuit; to see a woman doing the same just looks weird, because it is weird. In Ephron's next movie, You've Got Mail , she reversed the genders back to the more traditional convention, with wealthy bookstore chain owner Joe (Hanks, again) wooing independent shop owner Kathleen (Ryan, again) by pretending to be someone else online. When Kathleen finds out that the man who drove her out of business is her online mystery man, she falls into his arms and says: "I wanted it to be you." There were, strikingly and predictably, fewer complaints about Hanks's behaviour in this movie than there were about Ryan's in Sleepless in Seattle . Kepnes deliberately gave her protagonist the same name as Hanks' character in You've Got Mail : "I've watched that movie about 100 times, and everyone finds it romantic - but he is so horrible to her!" Ephron was one of the earliest screenwriters to cop on to the snooping opportunities provided by the internet. In Sleepless in Seattle , made five years before Google was founded, Annie uses a newspaper's computer database to investigate Sam's personal life. In You've Got Mail , Joe exploits the anonymity provided by the online world to seduce Kathleen. In both cases, she made it look like a fun lark. Now everyone researches prospective dates, current crushes and exes online, scrolling through their old Facebook photos, checking their Twitter timeline. But as Kepnes shows in You , it is a disarmingly short hop from looking through someone's Instagram photos to standing outside their house. Post #MeToo, it is easy to knock romcoms for romanticising stalking, but technology has normalised it. The truth is we're all stalkers now

Kirkus Review

An impending sense of dread hangs over Kepnes' cleverly claustrophobic debut, in which love takes on a whole new meaning. Told from the perspective of Joe Goldberg, a seemingly normal Manhattan bookstore employee, the narrative is structured like a long monologue to the titular "you": a young woman, Guinevere Beck, who becomes the object of Joe's obsessive affection. They meet casually enough at the bookstore, and since she's an aspiring writer just starting an MFA program, they bond over literature. Seems innocuous enough, even sweet, until we learn just how far Joe will go to make Beckher preferred namehis own. Kepnes makes keen use of modern technology to chronicle Joe and Beck's "courtship": He not only stalks her on Twitter, but hacks into her email account and, after casually lifting her cellphone, monitors her text messages. In Joe's mind, he's keeping Beck safe from what he perceives as dangers in her life, particularly the clingy, wealthy Peach Salinger (yes, a relative of that Salinger); Beck's hard-partying ex, Benji; and her therapist, the smooth-talking Dr. Nicky. When Joe and Beck finally, inevitably get together, it only serves to ratchet up Joe's predatory, possessive instincts. Every text is analyzed as if it were the German Enigma Code, and every email is parsed and mined for secret meaning. There's little doubt that the relationship is doomed, but Kepnes keeps the reader guessing on just how everything will implode. There's nothing romantic about Joe's preoccupation with Beck, but Kepnes puts the reader so deep into his head that delusions approach reality. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

When Joe Goldberg meets Guinevere Beck in the East Village bookstore where he works, he instantly knows that she's the one for him. Sure, he thought the same about Candace, but Candace is no longer in his life and he's sure that Guinevere is the one. The only problem is Guinevere doesn't seem to know it yet. So Joe gives her some time. Time he spends watching her, hacking her computer, and even saving her from her mistakes. When she drunkenly falls onto the subway tracks late at night, he's there to offer her a hand. And when he realizes her boyfriend Benji is cheating on her, Joe gets Benji out of the way. In fact, Joe will do pretty much anything, including commit murder, to make sure that Guinevere becomes his. VERDICT Kepnes certainly has the creepy factor down in her debut novel, taking readers deep into Joe's thoughts and feelings, to extremely suspenseful effect. And Joe is entirely believable as the stalker from hell. Though there are no ghosts and the only thing that goes bump in the night is Joe, this will appeal to fans of psychological horror. Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

You 1 YOU walk into the bookstore and you keep your hand on the door to make sure it doesn't slam. You smile, embarrassed to be a nice girl, and your nails are bare and your V-neck sweater is beige and it's impossible to know if you're wearing a bra but I don't think that you are. You're so clean that you're dirty and you murmur your first word to me--hello--when most people would just pass by, but not you, in your loose pink jeans, a pink spun from Charlotte's Web and where did you come from? You are classic and compact, my own little Natalie Portman circa the end of the movie Closer, when she's fresh-faced and done with the bad British guys and going home to America. You've come home to me, delivered at last, on a Tuesday, 10:06 A.M. Every day I commute to this shop on the Lower East Side from my place in Bed-Stuy. Every day I close up without finding anyone like you. Look at you, born into my world today. I'm shaking and I'd pop an Ativan but they're downstairs and I don't want to pop an Ativan. I don't want to come down. I want to be here, fully, watching you bite your unpainted nails and turn your head to the left, no, bite that pinky, widen those eyes, to the right, no, reject biographies, self-help (thank God), and slow down when you make it to fiction. Yes. I let you disappear into the stacks--Fiction F-K--and you're not the standard insecure nymph hunting for Faulkner you'll never finish, never start; Faulkner that will harden and calcify, if books could calcify, on your nightstand; Faulkner meant only to convince one-night stands that you mean it when you swear you never do this kind of thing. No, you're not like those girls. You don't stage Faulkner and your jeans hang loose and you're too sun-kissed for Stephen King and too untrendy for Heidi Julavits and who, who will you buy? You sneeze, loudly, and I imagine how loud you are when you climax. "God bless you!" I call out. You giggle and holler back, you horny girl, "You too, buddy." Buddy. You're flirting and if I was the kind of asshole who Instagrams, I would photograph the F-K placard and filter the shit out of that baby and caption it: F--K yes, I found her. Calm down, Joe. They don't like it when a guy comes on too strong, I remind myself. Thank God for a customer and it's hard to scan his predictable Salinger--then again, it's always hard to do that. This guy is, what, thirty-six and he's only now reading Franny and Zooey? And let's get real. He's not reading it. It's just a front for the Dan Browns in the bottom of his basket. Work in a bookstore and learn that most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are. I bag the Dan Brown first like it's kiddie porn and tell him Franny and Zooey is the shit and he nods and you're still in F-K because I can see your beige sweater through the stacks, barely. If you reach any higher, I'll see your belly. But you won't. You grab a book and sit down in the aisle and maybe you'll stay here all night. Maybe it'll be like the Natalie Portman movie Where the Heart Is, adapted faithlessly from the Billie Letts book--above par for that kind of crud--and I'll find you in the middle of the night. Only you won't be pregnant and I won't be the meek man in the movie. I'll lean over and say, "Excuse me, miss, but we're closed" and you'll look up and smile. "Well, I'm not closed." A breath. "I'm wide open. Buddy." "Hey." Salinger-Brown bites. He's still here? He's still here. "Can I get a receipt?" "Sorry about that." He grabs it out of my hand. He doesn't hate me. He hates himself. If people could handle their self-loathing, customer service would be smoother. "You know what, kid? You need to get over yourself. You work in a bookstore. You don't make the books. You don't write the books and if you were any good at reading the books, you probably wouldn't work in a bookstore. So wipe that judgmental look off your face and tell me to have a nice day." This man could say anything in the world to me and he'd still be the one shame-buying Dan Brown. You appear now with your intimate Portman smile, having heard the motherfucker. I look at you. You look at him and he's still looking at me, waiting. "Have a nice day, sir," I say and he knows I don't mean it, hates that he craves platitudes from a stranger. When he's gone, I call out again because you're listening, "You enjoy that Dan Brown, motherfucker!" You walk over, laughing, and thank God it's morning, and we're dead in the morning and nobody is gonna get in our way. You put your basket of books down on the counter and you sass, "You gonna judge me too?" "What an asshole, right?" "Eh, probably just in a mood." You're a sweetheart. You see the best in people. You complement me. "Well," I say and I should shut up and I want to shut up but you make me want to talk. "That guy is the reason that Blockbuster shouldn't have gone under." You look at me. You're curious and I want to know about you but I can't ask so I just keep talking. "Everybody is always striving to be better, lose five pounds, read five books, go to a museum, buy a classical record and listen to it and like it. What they really want to do is eat doughnuts, read magazines, buy pop albums. And books? Fuck books. Get a Kindle. You know why Kindles are so successful?" You laugh and you shake your head and you're listening to me at the point when most people drift, go into their phone. And you're pretty and you ask, "Why?" "I'll tell you why. The Internet put porn in your home--" I just said porn, what a dummy, but you're still listening, what a doll. "And you didn't have to go out and get it. You didn't have to make eye contact with the guy at the store who now knows you like watching girls get spanked. Eye contact is what keeps us civilized." Your eyes are almonds and I go on. "Revealed." You don't wear a wedding ring and I go on. "Human." You are patient and I need to shut up but I can't. "And the Kindle, the Kindle takes all the integrity out of reading, which is exactly what the Internet did to porn. The checks and balances are gone. You can read your Dan Brown in public and in private all at once. It's the end of civilization. But--" "There's always a but," you say and I bet you come from a big family of healthy, loving people who hug a lot and sing songs around a campfire. "But with no places to buy movies or albums, it's come down to books. There are no more video stores so there are no more nerds who work in video stores and quote Tarantino and fight about Dario Argento and hate on people who rent Meg Ryan movies. That act, the interaction between seller and buyer, is the most important two-way street we got. And you can't just eradicate two-way streets like that and not expect a fallout, you know?" I don't know if you know but you don't tell me to stop talking the way people sometimes do and you nod. "Hmm." "See, the record store was the great equalizer. It gave the nerds power--'You're really buying Taylor Swift?'--even though all those nerds went home and jerked it to Taylor Swift." Stop saying Taylor Swift. Are you laughing at me or with me? "Anyway," I say, and I'll stop if you tell me to. "Anyway," you say, and you want me to finish. "The point is, buying stuff is one of the only honest things we do. That guy didn't come in here for Dan Brown or Salinger. That guy came in here to confess." "Are you a priest?" "No. I'm a church." "Amen." You look at your basket and I sound like a deranged loner and I look in your basket. Your phone. You don't see it, but I do. It's cracked. It's in a yellow case. This means that you only take care of yourself when you're beyond redemption. I bet you take zinc the third day of a cold. I pick up your phone and try to make a joke. "You steal this off that guy?" You take your phone and you redden. "Me and this phone . . ." you say. "I'm a bad mommy." Mommy. You're dirty, you are. "Nah." You smile and you're definitely not wearing a bra. You take the books out of the basket and put the basket on the floor and look at me like it wouldn't be remotely possible for me to criticize anything you ever did. Your nipples pop. You don't cover them. You notice the Twizzlers I keep by the register. You point, hungry. "Can I?" "Yes," I say, and I am feeding you already. I pick up your first book, Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray. "Interesting," I say. "Most people get his monologues. This is a great book, but it's not a book that people go around buying, particularly young women who don't appear to be contemplating suicide, given the fate of the author." "Well, sometimes you just want to go where it's dark, you know?" "Yeah," I say. "Yeah." If we were teenagers, I could kiss you. But I'm on a platform behind a counter wearing a name tag and we're too old to be young. Night moves don't work in the morning, and the light pours in through the windows. Aren't bookstores supposed to be dark? Note to self: Tell Mr. Mooney to get blinds. Curtains. Anything. I pick up your second book, Desperate Characters by one of my favorite authors, Paula Fox. This is a good sign, but you could be buying it because you read on some stupid blog that she's Courtney Love's biological grandmother. I can't be sure that you're buying Paula Fox because you came to her the right way, from a Jonathan Franzen essay. You reach into your wallet. "She's the best, right? Kills me that she's not more famous, even with Franzen gushing about her, you know?" Thank God. I smile. "The Western Coast." You look away. "I haven't gone there yet." I look at you and you put your hands up, surrender. "Don't shoot." You giggle and I wish your nipples were still hard. "I'm gonna read The Western Coast someday and Desperate Characters I've read a zillion times. This one's for a friend." "Uh-huh," I say and the red lights flash danger. For a friend. "It's probably a waste of time. He won't even read it. But at least she sells a book, right?" "True." Maybe he's your brother or your dad or a gay neighbor, but I know he's a friend and I stab at the calculator. "It's thirty-one fifty-one." "Holy money. See, that's why Kindles rule," you say as you reach into your Zuckerman's pig-pink wallet and hand me your credit card even though you have enough cash in there to cover it. You want me to know your name and I'm no nut job and I swipe your card and the quiet between us is getting louder and why didn't I put on music today and I can't think of anything to say. "Here we go." And I offer you the receipt. "Thanks," you murmur. "This is a great shop." You're signing and you are Guinevere Beck. Your name is a poem and your parents are assholes, probably, like most parents. Guinevere. Come on. "Thank you, Guinevere." "I really just go by Beck. Guinevere's kinda long and ridiculous, you know?" "Well, Beck, you look different in person. Also, Midnite Vultures is awesome." You take your bag of books and you don't break eye contact because you want me to see you seeing me. "Right on, Goldberg." "Nah, I just go by Joe. Goldberg is kind of long and ridiculous, ya know?" We're laughing and you wanted to know my name as much as I wanted to know yours or you wouldn't have read my name tag. "Sure you don't wanna grab The Western Coast while you're here?" "This will sound crazy, but I'm saving it. For my nursing home list." "You mean bucket list." "Oh no, that's totally different. A nursing home list is a list of things you plan on reading and watching in a nursing home. A bucket list is more like . . . visit Nigeria, jump out of an airplane. A nursing home list is like, read The Western Coast and watch Pulp Fiction and listen to the latest Daft Punk album." "I can't picture you in a nursing home." You blush. You are Charlotte's Web and I could love you. "Aren't you gonna tell me to have a nice day?" "Have a nice day, Beck." You smile. "Thanks, Joe." You didn't walk in here for books, Beck. You didn't have to say my name. You didn't have to smile or listen or take me in. But you did. Your signature is on the receipt. This wasn't a cash transaction and it wasn't a coded debit. This was real. I press my thumb into the wet ink on your receipt and the ink of Guinevere Beck stains my skin. Excerpted from You by Caroline Kepnes All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.