You've Reached Sam (You've Reached Sam, #1)

by Dustin Thao

“I wish you were here,” I say. “I wish you were lying right next to me. I wish I could look over and see you smiling back. I wish I could run a hand through your hair, and know you’re real. I wish we could finish school and graduate together. So we can finally leave this place like we always planned, and find an apartment somewhere, and figure out the rest of our lives together so I don’t have to do it alone. I wish you were alive again … and I wish I had picked up the phone that night, so that all this would be different, and everything would go back to before…”

This is one of the scenes that came to me first, long before I knew their names were Sam and Julie. I had a vision of a girl laying out in the fields, afraid to turn her head to see no one there beside her. I think a lot of us have these imagined experiences, where we close our eyes for a moment, pretending the impossible is still a possibility. It's even more complicated for Julie, having Sam partially there. I also think this is the first scene in the book that made me tear up a little as I wrote it.