ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks, Mom, for the endless love and patience (even when I was nine and drove the car across the bank’s parking lot while you ran inside, especially since I was definitely still young enough to get kidnapped). You’re a saint, and always have been.

Thanks, Dad, for all the character building (car window, car battery…) but never being afraid to kiss us goodnight or tell us “I love you.”

Thank you, Jess, for always being the big brother I need, and never being anything less than my biggest advocate in every aspect.

Thank you, Karen Olson, for being my first reader, my best friend, and my excitement translator.

Thanks, Seb, for being my other first reader and for putting eyes on “Charlie” (as well as everything else) from its earliest stages. Drinks are on me, bud.

Thanks for being as weird as me, Eric—I would have ended up being a boring asshole if it weren’t for you. I’m glad we didn’t blow up the neighborhood after digging up that gas pipe in my backyard when we were kids.

Thanks, Emilia, for sitting across from me at a steakhouse in Michigan forever ago and telling me that this was something I could actually do. To say nothing of taking my author photos and putting up with me since high school.

Thanks, Jillian, for knowing I was a writer before I did.

Thanks, Paul, for the deer and for being a creative sounding board since I was like ten years old.

Thank you, Thisbe Nissen and T. Geronimo Johnson, for being such pillars of empathy and creativity. Thanks, Scott Bade, for the same.

Thank you, Jennifer Kocis and Steve Chisnell, for showing me how to care about reading widely and writing creatively.

Thank you, Susan Paley, and Emily Dumas, and Dean Hauk—there are people in the world who would have never become readers without you. You’re real-life superheroes.

Thanks to my family, for being so relentlessly supportive and for never asking why I didn’t go to school for something else. Thanks for the endless supply of love and stories. Grandma and Nana, you kept us from sinking: thank you.

Thanks to Molly Ker Hawn, for saving me from working at the US Post Office by sending me an email in the frozen heart of winter telling me you wanted to talk. Bonnie-Sue was right about you: you’re half editor, half lawyer, half superhero, and all badass (she was right about the mama moose thing, too). I don’t think you’ll ever really know how much good you do in this world.

On that note: thanks, Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock, for being a voice of support since day one.

Thank you, Sarah Dotts Barley, for taking a chance on me and for never telling me there were too many swear words or that any of the jokes were too dark. Moreover, thank you for bringing me into the Flatiron family—I can’t imagine a better home for Moses and his friends.

Thanks, Noa Wheeler, for reading Moses’s story early on and helping get it into the shape it needed to be in.

Thank you, Anna Leuchtenberger and Melanie Sanders, copy editors extraordinaire—I don’t know how you do what you do (or how you do it so well), but writers like me would be lost without you.

Thanks, Bo Barley, for making sure the JAMA network doesn’t come after me with torches and pitchforks (and for explaining tension pneumothorax in terms I could understand37); thanks, Natalie, for the help with Ambu bags.

Thanks, Keith Hayes, for the cover I never would have in a million years been able to design. It’s perfect, and everything I never would have thought to make.

And finally, when I was seven or eight years old, a grizzled, well-read, tattooed, punk-rocking Lumberjack of Death from Detroit let me blast him point blank in the face with a baseball—just to show me it only stings for a minute. Thank you, Jimmy Doom, for teaching me to never be afraid of the pitch.