EVERYTHING I THOUGHT I KNEW

Shannon Takaoka is the author of the young adult novel Everything I Thought I Knew, which was a 2021 Kansas National Education Association Reading Circle Recommended Title and a 2022 TAYSHAS Reading List Selection. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family, where she also works as a business writer and editor.

“The reader will root for Chloe from page one as she navigates her world post–heart transplant and tries to meld her prior reality with her new one. I couldn’t put it down; it is a beautiful debut from a talented new voice in YA.” —Alexandra Ballard, author of What I Lost

“Romance and quantum physics intertwine in this frothy introduction to multiverse SF.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A thoughtful balance of self-discovery, humor, and realistic relationships will bring in fans of John Green and Nicola Yoon.” —School Library Journal

“A compelling tale of following one’s instincts and for connections that outlast physical life.” —Publishers Weekly

Broken

Here’s one of the many things I thought I knew that turns out to be wrong: you need to fall in love to end up with a broken heart.

That’s not how it was for me. At least not at first.

Sometimes things — glass, eggs, hearts — just break, and there’s no way to put them back to their exact, original form. You can’t stir the cream out of your coffee. A broken plate, even if you glue it, will always have cracks. This is just basic physics, or, more specifically, the second law of thermodynamics. Not to nerd out on you too much.

But I’m already getting ahead of myself, which I tend to do, because my brain never seems to want to slow down and just be still. There’s too much going on in there, especially now. So let’s rewind a bit and begin with the moment the universe decided to start messing with all my assumptions and well-laid plans, big- time.

October 14 at 3:45 p.m.

It’s the fall of my senior year.

I’m running.

“Damn, it’s hot,” I say to Emma as we round the curve at the far side of our high school’s track. The lane lines vibrate ahead of me in the heat. Halloween is a few weeks away, and it must be more than eighty degrees, at least.

Emma, her auburn ponytail smooth and perfect, looks like she’s barely broken a sweat. “Is it?” she asks. “Feels pretty good to me.” A warm spell, typical for the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall, has brought us beach weather in the middle of a month packed with college application submissions, after-school practices, and, as always, piles of homework. The result: we won’t, in fact, be hanging at the beach. Cross-country is basically the only time I get to breathe outdoor air.

We’re doing intervals today, and Emma’s pace seems faster than usual. As soon as we are side by side, she pulls ahead. I have to push myself to catch her. I push, she pulls. She pulls, I push. This is starting to annoy me, even though it’s what Emma and I always do when we practice together — we compete.

She pulls ahead again. I try to focus on increasing my pace.

Focus, Chloe, focus.

But all I can think about is water.

I didn’t drink enough before practice.

I didn’t drink any water, actually. I got held up leaving seventh period because I needed to talk to Ms. Breece about my paper proposal for AP Physics and had barely enough time to pull on my running shoes. My proposal is going to be late, which Ms. Breece made sure to note is “unlike you, Chloe,” which is true, I guess, but it got me thinking about what really, honestly is “like me,” because sometimes, or maybe even all the time, I’m stumped on that one. Which got me stressing again about my college application essays and whether they are mind- numbingly boring, and, by extension, if I am mind- numbingly boring. Which resulted in me I forgetting to fill up my water bottle. This is starting to seem like kind of a big mistake, now that my mouth has gone dry and I’m dizzy and feeling like I might be about to throw up all over my shoes.

I turn to Emma. Her mouth is moving, but I only hear her last few words.

“. . . don’t you think?” she asks. “Chloe?” Cross-country is when we catch up on anything we didn’t get to talk about at lunch.  The pop quiz we weren’t expecting in Calc. Weekend plans. Emma’s ongoing analysis of her five- minute conversation with Liam Morales about Catch-22 — Was it an excuse to talk to her? Or did he just need some quick info from someone who actually read the book? —  a topic that, for my own reasons, I really don’t want to analyze anyway. But I must have zoned out for a few seconds, or minutes, because I have no idea what she just said.

“Think about what?” I barely have enough breath to get out the words, so I slow to a light jog as Emma pulls ahead of me for the third — or is it fourth? — time. Instead of pushing, I just stop. My heart is thumping hard.

Thump thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump. It’s all I can hear. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.

Emma turns around. “Chloe?” The lane lines ahead of me look wrong.  They’re not just vibrating, they’re rippling. Like those wave graphs in my physics textbook.  The whole world around us is rippling. Are we having an earthquake? I look toward Emma, also rippling, who has now stopped running too and is staring at me, eyes wide.

“Chloe, are you okay?” My chest feels like it’s being crushed. My ears are on fire. Sweat is running down my face and my back, soaking my shirt.

Not okay, I think.

Definitely not okay. But I can’t say the words. And then the world that’s spinning, spinning, spinning like a top gets tipped over, me with it.  The last thing I see is the brilliant blue of the October sky overhead.

A Note from Shannon Takaoka

As a writer and reader, I’m drawn to stories that bend the boundaries of genre, mashing up elements of the realistic and the speculative without fitting squarely into one category or box. I’m thinking of books like Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap or The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman—books that ask interesting “What if?” questions; that explore our hopes, our fears, and the mysteries of life, love, and loss; and that make us think about what, exactly, makes us who we think we are. I got the idea for Everything I Thought I Knew after I heard a story about organ recipients who felt like they’d inherited habits and memories from their donors. Whether or not this concept of “cellular memory” is even possible, I couldn’t stop thinking about how strange it must be to know that a part of you—in fact, a part that’s essential to your life itself—once belonged to someone else. So I started writing, and then I just kept asking “What if?”, following the questions to Chloe, and Kai, and Jane, and wherever else they wanted to lead. I love where it all ended up and hope you will, too.