19 Love Songs. David Levithan

      

      Published in the United States in 2020

       by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

       a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York.

      First published in Great Britain in 2020

       by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited,

       2 Minster Court, 10th floor, London EC3R 7BB

      Text copyright © 2020 David Levithan

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

      First e-book edition 2020

      ISBN 978 1 4052 98056

       eISBN 978 1 4052 98063

       www.egmont.co.uk

      A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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       To Mayling and Lynda, there at the start

       and

       To my parents, there long before the start

       Track List

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

Track One: Quiz Bowl Antichrist

Track Two: Day 2934 (An Every Day Story)

Track Three: The Good Girls

       Track Four: The Quarterback and the Cheerleader (A Boy Meets Boy Story)

       Track Five: The Mulberry Branch

       Track Six: Your Temporary Santa

       Track Seven: Storytime

       Track Eight: A Better Writer

       Track Nine: 8-Song Memoir

       Track Ten: Snow Day (A Two Boys Kissing Story)

       Track Eleven: The Woods

       Track Twelve: A Brief History of First Kisses (Illustrated by Nick Eliopulos)

       Track Thirteen: As the Philadelphia Queer Youth Choir Sings Katy Perry’s “Firework” . . .

       Track Fourteen: The Vulnerable Hours

       Track Fifteen: Twelve Months

       Track Sixteen: The Hold

       Track Seventeen: How My Parents Met

       Track Eighteen: We

       Track Nineteen: Give Them Words

       Liner Notes

       Back series promotional

TRACK ONE

       Quiz Bowl Antichrist

      I am haunted at times by Sung Kim’s varsity jacket.

      He had to lobby hard to get it. Nobody denied that he had talent—in fact, he was the star of our team. But for a member of our team to get a jacket was unprecedented. Our coach backed him completely, while the other coaches in the school nearly choked on their whistles when they first heard the plan. The principal had to be called in, and it wasn’t until our team made Nationals that Sung’s request was finally heeded. Four weeks before we left for Indianapolis, he became the first person in our school’s history to have a varsity jacket for quiz bowl.

      I, for one, was mortified.

      This mortification was a complete betrayal of our team, but if anyone was going to betray the quiz bowl team from the inside, it was going to be me. I was the alternate.

      I had been drafted by the coach, who also happened to be my physics teacher, because while the five other members of the team could tell you the square root of the circumference of Saturn’s orbit around the sun in the year 2033, not a single one of them could tell you how many Brontë sisters there’d been. In fact, the only British writer they seemed familiar with was Monty Python—and there weren’t many quiz bowl questions about Monty Python. There was a gaping hole in their knowledge, and I was the best lit-boy plug the school had to offer. While I hadn’t read that many of the classics, I was extraordinarily aware of them. I was a walking CliffsNotes version of the CliffsNotes versions; even if I’d never touched Remembrance of Things Past or Cry, the Beloved Country or Middlemarch, I knew what they were about and who had written them. I