What If It's Us (What If It's Us #1)

by Becky Albertalli

“I’m not a tourist.” “You’re not?” “Okay, I’m not technically from here, but I live here now. Just for the summer. I’m from Milton, Georgia.” “Milton, Georgia.” He smiles. I feel inexplicably frantic. Like, my limbs are weird and loose, and my head’s full of cotton. I’m probably electric bright red now. I don’t even want to know. I just need to keep talking. “I know, right? Milton. It sounds like a Jewish great-uncle.” “I wasn’t—” “I actually do have a Jewish great-uncle Milton. That’s whose apartment we’re staying in.” “Who’s we?” “You mean who do I live with in my great-uncle Milton’s apartment?” He nods, and I just look at him. Like, who does he think I live with? My boyfriend? My twenty-eight-year-old smoldering-hot boyfriend who has big gaping holes in his earlobes and maybe a tongue piercing and a tattoo of my name on his pec? On both pecs? “With my parents,” I say quickly. “My mom’s a lawyer, and her firm has an office here, so she came up at the end of April for this case she’s working on, and I totally would have come up then, but my mom was like, Nice try, Arthur, you have a month of school left. But it ended up being for the best, because I guess I thought New York was going to be one thing, and it’s really another thing, and now I’m kind of stuck here, and I miss my friends, and I miss my car, and I miss Waffle House.” “In that order?” “Well, mostly the car.” I grin. “We left it at my bubbe’s house in New Haven. She lives right by Yale, which is hopefully, hope...