Thank you thank you thank you to:
Kristen Pettit, my awesome editor! Thank you for your patience and brilliant insights.
All the amazing people at HarperTeen! You are the best, Clare Vaughn! Thank you for all your hard work. Thank you to Aubrey Churchward, Alexandra Rakaczki, and Jessica White. Also thanks to Farrin Jacobs and Jen Klonsky who both believed in this book a million years ago when I first pitched it.
My amazing team: Laura Dail, best agent ever. Samantha Fabian, new queen of foreign rights. Lauren Walters, my incredible designer and super reader. Caitlen Patton, assistant extraordinaire.
Austin Denesuk, Berni Barta, and Matthew Snyder at CAA.
My critique partners! E. Lockhart and Lauren Myracle, I love you both and wish we could just cowrite everything together. Thank you for reading this as an early, crappy draft and for making it so much better. Hard pass on the fake teeth.
Love to my fab friends who read drafts or chunks of this book or just kept me company while I wrote: Jess Braun, Christina Soontornvat, Karina Yan Glaser, Courtney Sheinmel, Rachel Feld, Anne Heltzel, Jen E. Smith, Katherine Hartman, Mitali Dave, Logan Levkoff, Maverick Cortes, and Alyssa Stonoha.
To Wingate Camp née Pripstein’s! Unlike Sam, I was lucky to find my summer home when I was nine and fortunate to spend ten sun-filled, blissfully happy summers there. Cory Pecker, Ronnie Braverman, Laurie Weisman, Josie Glaser, Dahlia Monk, and of course, Jeremy Rubin: Thank you for all your schedules, help, insights, and for letting me come back for “research.” Wingate inspired only the best parts of Blue Springs. Love to all my former bunkmates, especially my summer BFFs Mel Fefergrad and Ronit Avni. Bunk 9 forever.
More love and thank-yous to family, friends, writers, and others: Elissa Ambrose, Aviva Mlynowski, Larry Mlynowski, Louisa Weiss, Robert Ambrose, the Dalven-Swidlers, the Dattilios, the Heckers, the Finkelstein-Mitchells, the Steins, the Wolfes, the Mittlemans, the Bilermans, the Greens, the Takefmans, Courtney Sheinmel, Anne Heltzel, Lauren Myracle, Emily Bender, Julia DeVillers, Julie Buxbaum, Elizabeth Eulberg, Robyn Spector, Targia Alphonse, Lauren Kisilevsky, Stuart Gibbs, Rose Brock, Aimee Friedman, David Levithan, Adele Griffin, Leslie Margolis, Maryrose Wood, Tara Altebrando, Sara Zarr, Ally Carter, Jennifer Barnes, Alan Gratz, Penny Fransblow, and Maggie Marr.
And so much love for my amazing husband, Todd Swidler, and my girls, Chloe and Anaballe. I love that I get to do sing-songs with you.