Title: We Didn't Ask For This
Author: Adi Alsaid
Publisher: Inkyard Press
Genre: YA
Release Date: 7th April 2020
BLURB supplied by Inkyard Books
Every
year, lock-in night changes lives. This year, it might just change the world.
Central
International School's annual lock-in is legendary -- and for six students,
this year's lock-in is the answer to their dreams. The chance to finally win
the contest. Kiss the guy. Make a friend. Become the star of a story that will
be passed down from student to student for years to come.
But then
a group of students, led by Marisa Cuevas, stage an eco-protest and chain
themselves to the doors, vowing to keep everyone trapped inside until their
list of demands is met. While some students rally to the cause, others are
devastated as they watch their plans fall apart. And Marisa, once so certain of
her goals, must now decide just how far she'll go to attain them.
PURCHASE LINK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adi Alsaid was born and raised in
Mexico City. He attended college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He's
now back in Mexico City, where he writes, coaches basketball, and makes every
dish he eats as spicy as possible. In addition to Mexico, he's lived in Tel
Aviv, Las Vegas and Monterey, California. His books include Let's Get Lost,
Never Always Sometimes, and North of Happy.
AUTHOR LINKS
Visit Adi online at www.SomewhereOverTheSun.com
Facebook: @adialsaidauthor
Twitter: @adialsaid
Instagram: @uhhdee
EXCERPT
The lock-in was
going fairly well until Marisa unleashed her cronies and chained herself to the
main entrance.
No one really
noticed right away, busy as they were taking part in a number of
lock-in-related activities: laser tag in the parking garage, a sanctioned food
fight in the cafeteria, a photo shoot tutorial with a renowned YouTube
influencer.
Once a year, in
April, the doors at Central International School’s K-12 campus closed—though
they didn’t literally lock—to allow the high school students to roam free for
the whole night. Having the next day off school was nowhere near the best part.
Nor, strictly speaking, were the activities themselves, though they were
extravagant and wonderful and distracted everyone from what Marisa was doing.
People fell in
love on lock-in night. They stumbled upon new passions that would shape the
rest of their lives, discovered friendships they could not imagine living
without, before or after. Traumas were resolved on lock-in night, anxieties
disappeared, never to return, not even after the buses arrived in the morning
to take the students back home.
This was well
known to the few students who had been lucky enough to have attended before, or
who had siblings who had attended in years prior. At Central International
School, the student body ebbed and flowed, changing drastically from year to
year, and often even more frequently. It was common to have different
classmates every semester, and sometimes students would find the person who sat
next to them in class—the alluring redhead who scribbled song lyrics on the
margins of their textbooks, who one time turned and asked to borrow a pen they
never returned, though they had offered a smile that carried with it joy beyond
a simple gesture; the redhead who might have one day soon become more than just
a classmate—was simply gone from one day to the next.
Even by
international school standards, the turnover rate of both students and faculty
had always been high, though it had a great academic reputation, and the city
in which it sat was a diverse and world-class cosmopolis. Yet people never
seemed to stick around for long, as if families were carried in by the seaside
breeze, and carried away by the same. Most students had multiple passports, and
their parents were multinational, or transient because they were diplomats, or
titans of industry, or missionaries, or digital nomads, or teachers within the
international school world. They had roots in many places, thought of no one
place as home—or rather, thought of everywhere they’d been as home.
So it was rare for
a student to be around for several lock-in nights. Even the locals, who made up
a mere fifteen percent of the school’s population, often temporarily relocated
during their high school years—a boarding school exchange in Switzerland, a
South American road trip in a van with their family, a missionary excursion in
Central America.
Despite all
this, the lore surrounding lock-in night was always momentous, starting as an
excited murmur the first day of school and building to a frenzy by the night
before the event itself a month or so before the end of the year. Students
wondered how, exactly, their life would be improved by the evening. There was
no question it would—they could feel it on their skin, their heartbeats thudded
with the knowledge that things were about to change, they had absorbed the
gossip, not just a rumor or two, but dozens and dozens of first-hand accounts
or verifiable secondhand stories, so many of them that it did not feel like
hearsay but like fact—it was the how that was exciting. Would the redheaded
classmate return to slip a hand into theirs during the movie marathon on the
roof garden? Would their fear of heights be cured by the trapeze the school had
set up on the football field? Or would it simply be a night of such fun that
the joy would sink into their bones and change them into happier people?
Lock-in night,
simply put, was magic. Even all those who had never experienced it knew it to
be true.
Which, of
course, was why Marisa planned her protest for that well-loved night. To make
people pay attention, disrupt what brings them joy.
The mad desire
to act had existed long before her plan did. Marisa loved the water as a baby.
Her parents told the stories to anyone who would listen. She always feigned
embarrassment at their anecdotes about her hour-long baths and surprising
performance in toddler swimming classes, her dark, curly hair unfurling in the
water behind her like a mermaid, her brown eyes huge within the goggles she
always carried around. But the truth was that she loved the stories. They
confirmed this was not a passing fad, not a childhood obsession that would lose
its significance over time, not a baby blanket carried around charmingly until
age ten, when
it was shoved
into a box and donated.
When she
discovered snorkeling and, later, diving, that love blew wide open. This? This
had been possible this whole time?
Though Marisa
was only seventeen, her parents’ constant relocations for work meant she’d seen
a hefty percentage of the world’s waters. She’d snorkeled in Mexico, Fiji, the
Philippines, the Great Barrier Reef, Belize. And the more she did it, the more
her heart broke. Human beings had found a way to kill water.
The places
famed for their snorkeling were heart- wrenching. The destroyed beige reefs
littered the oceans like ornate gravestones. They should have been resplendent
with color. Books and scientists told her as much, and other divers did, too.
Of course, though, they weren’t. Not anymore. The world had ruined that
particular beauty before Marisa had ever had a chance to see it, killing the
corals with spilled chemicals, suffocating the oceans with heat. Every time she
surfaced, she would dive into the internet, trying to find a way to help.
Changing her sunscreen to the reef-safe kind, cleaning up plastic on the beach,
asking her parents to donate yet again; nothing felt big enough.
Then came the
three-day weekend at the start of the school year that changed it all. She had
convinced her parents to take the family to the beach, and the Cuevases, who
knew their frequent moves could be hard on the children, relented de-spite the
fact that neither of them felt settled in at work yet, and they would have
really liked to stay in the city and run errands.
Marisa had
heard amazing things about the snorkeling in the region surrounding the beach.
She was always skeptical when she heard anything like that; she’d been
disappointed enough. She was fine just swimming among whatever fish remained in
the area and pretending this was what it had al-ways been like, this was the
wondrous alien world other divers described. After their most recent move,
she’d done her usual research and found on the most trustworthy sources that an
untouched blip still existed, not too far from her new school.
She convinced her
parents, who knew it was better to indulge Marisa than fight her, to take a
boat to an island, then another, smaller boat to another, smaller island.
Arriving at the clear, turquoise waters, which were peppered with butterflies
from who knows where fluttering across the surface, whole waves of them
outnumbering the tourists she had seen even on the mainland, Marisa allowed
herself to hope. Well before her family was ready, Marisa was in her flippers
and mask, and she sat on the edge of the boat and let herself fall backward
into the warm waters. At first, her heart had soared: greens! Purples! Oranges!
Bright colors in the reefs, finally. The schools of fish were more like armies,
numbered not in dozens but in hundreds, maybe even thousands, various species
all swimming in their separate schools, like great big flags unfurling mightily
in the water.
Marisa followed
them, kicking delightedly, her heart flooding with joy. Then she turned a
corner around some rocks and her breath caught, as if someone had reached
inside her chest and closed a massive fist around her lungs. Even here, she
found murk and drudgery, the reef not on display so much as its dying was.
She emerged
from the water and took off her mask, tears mixing with the waves. People and
the trash with which they suffocated the world. She looked around, shading her
eyes from the shimmering sunlight with her free hand. Maybe it was time to
accept the world as it was.
As she turned
to swim back to shore, she caught sight of something on the far end of the
island. A construction site. Large, acres and acres of it, from what Marisa
could tell, and a handful of bulldozers. She swam closer and saw the sign
announcing the coming resort. Nearby, a trickle of brown-gray water weaved its
way from below the makeshift wall around the site and dribbled onto the sand.
Yes, it was a
travesty, an outrage that the world had been ruined before her arrival. But
that trickle hadn’t reached all the way to the shore, not yet.
As soon as she
and her family made it back to their eco-hotel that day, Marisa decided she had
to stop that waste from reaching the ocean. Whatever she could do for the
reefs, she was going to do it. If it was just shutting down that one
construction site, or if it was something much bigger, she had to try. What
else was there but to try?
Months of
stewing later, of planning, of seeing the ruined remains of the ocean floors
every time she closed her eyes, of thinking of a way to make everyone else see
what she saw. It all led up to this moment, when Marisa hoisted a chain from
the duffel bag she’d hidden on campus a few days ago. She weaved it through the
handles on the double doors that led into the main school building, then she
wrapped it three times around her own body, uncomfortably tight, so bolt
cutters could not break through the metal without snagging on her skin. When
she was satisfied, she grabbed three giant padlocks from the bag and locked
herself in, meaning to stay.
She set the
keys in the middle of her palm, rubbing them each in a pad of butter procured
earlier from the cafeteria, and which had warmed nicely in her pocket
throughout the afternoon. Then Marisa, rehearsing her speech in her mind one
last time, looked up. She expected to see a sizable crowd already gathering.
What she saw instead was a lanky blond sophomore leaving the bathroom across
the open expanse of the building’s foyer. The boy was checking to see if he’d
re-membered to zip up. He had not.
When his eyes
met Marisa’s, he could tell she had seen him checking, and he stepped quickly
away from her line of sight, failing to notice the heavy metal chain wrapped
around her torso.
Excerpted
from We
Didn’t Ask for This by Adi Alsaid. © 2020 by Adi Alsaid, used with
permission by Inkyard Press.
