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              PENGUIN WORKSHOP An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York    First published in the United States of America by Penguin Workshop,an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2023 Copyright © 2023 by Michael Albo Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. PENGUIN is a registered trademark and PENGUIN WORKSHOP is a trademark of Penguin Books Ltd, and the W colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. Ebook ISBN 9780593223789 Design by Sophie Erb and Julia Rosenfeld, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero This is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. pid_prh_6.0_142242126_c0_r0    for the teachers who got through to me. and for poppy, and a lifetime of reading—ma      1986 Tommy Tommy was crying, holding his head in his hands, saying over and over that he should have kissed Renaldo Calabasas that night when he had the chance. It had been a week since Renaldo was struck by lightning. Tommy was sitting where it happened: under the charred tree in Hollow Pond Park, huddled into the base of the blackened trunk—the exact spot where they almost kissed. He wrote down his thoughts. You are like smoke, a dark dance in the air. No. You are a storm cloud, weightlessly heavy. No. You are as mysteriously beautiful as black smoke. No. A crow. No. A raven? Tommy crossed out his words. He was such a shitty poet. He wasn’t even a smidge as good as René. And his bad poetry couldn’t match what he was feeling. But he kept writing in the book. He had to. Renaldo Calabasas was lost in the astral plane, floating somewhere in its expanse. And it was the book that told Tommy that if he wanted to find Renaldo and bring him back to Earth, he had to write down how he felt. He had to get close to him in words, and the words would be his path to him. The book told him to write it all out. The book. The book.      June, Three Months Earlier Tommy stood at the bike rack watching Renaldo Calabasas unchain his clunky old banana-seat Schwinn. René was sweating through his white button-down shirt, and Tommy could see the contours of his chest through the wet fabric. It was Friday, the last day of school, and everyone had cleared out in an end-of-the-year frenzy, ripping up and throwing away their schoolwork and locker decorations like they were getting out of jail. The trash bins next to them were filled with spiral notebooks, crumpled papers, tattered locker posters of Van Halen and the Doors. All the wealthy juniors and seniors of Herron High had driven away in their cars to some popular person’s party somewhere. Tommy wouldn’t know where. “You ready to go?” Renaldo asked, piling books into his basket before stopping suddenly. He leaned against his bike and stared up at the sky. “What are you looking at?” Tommy asked. “I’ll come to you when the sky is cerulean blue,” René said. “What?” “That sentence. It came to me last night after a dream. Like someone said it to me. I’m just wondering if this is what ‘cerulean blue’ is.” Tommy followed Renaldo’s gaze. The sky was strangely dark in color, like the coldness of outer space was closer than normal. Cerulean, cerulean, Tommy repeated to himself. Renaldo rummaged through the bike basket and ripped out a page from his notebook. Tommy could see that there was a poem written on it titled “Storm Omen.” Even by sight, Tommy knew it would be good and that it would appear in the next Cornucopia—the student literary magazine they worked on. Everything René wrote made it in there. “It’s about lightning,” René explained, still staring at the sky, “about this thing called keraunoscopy. Do you know that word?” “No, sorry,” Tommy said. He wanted to say, Do you know how beautiful you are? But of course he didn’t. “It means divination by lightning,” said Renaldo. “I mean, isn’t that the most amazing word ever? Apparently, the Etruscans believed that lightning and thunder were omens.” Tommy only had a vague idea who the Etruscans were but nodded assuredly, anyway. Renaldo was so well-read. Lightning was his latest obsession. “Lightning on a Tuesday or Wednesday was good luck for crops. But on a Sunday meant a man would die, a whole different thing. On a Friday, it meant something foreboding was coming. I wrote this last night. Well, technically, this morning after midnight, so it was on a Friday.” René talked quickly and floridly, like he always did, and Tommy ate up every word. He scanned the page.  I am naked, only in my skin, bare bark, listening for storms waiting for omens  Tommy couldn’t get the naked part out of his mind. “Come on,” René said suddenly, snatching the poem back, “we have to get to the library.” Tommy watched as he folded the poem meticulously into a triangle, like he was folding a flag for a soldier, and placed the little