A must-read for fans of Morgan Matson and Kasie West, this YA novel in verse and conversation—cowritten by bestselling authors Jeff Zentner and Brittany Cavallaro—follows a girl trying to outrun her problems and a boy just discovering the outside world as they embark on a life-changing road trip.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Wayfarers by Jeff Zentner & Brittany Cavallaro, which is out now.
What do you do
when there’s nothing
in this world you want
more than to spend two
more hours with someone
and nothing in the world
you want less than to only
spend two more hours
with someone?
Sylvie said she wanted to live the van life after high school, but all she really wanted was to escape. With unlimited resources and an escape-artist golden retriever by her side, she keeps her eyes on the road to distract her from everything she left behind.
Knox grew up on the edge of society, without a phone, a school, or a real name. He’s never felt like he had a firm place to stand, but he’s done writing his story in vanishing ink.
On one of the worst days of Sylvie’s life, Knox helps rescue her dog and breaks his arm in the process. To apologize, Sylvie offers him a ride. But Knox is keeping some big secrets, and so is Sylvie. They must decide: If the other person knew the whole story, would they take a chance on—and maybe even fall for—a wayfaring stranger?
EXCERPT
SYLVIE
BRAVE
Out here alone, afraid of the two steps
that would take me out of my van and into
whatever landscape I’d once thought
would transform me into someone else. Do you know
about the dunes huddled against Lake Michigan
like bears bedding down for winter? I’d looked
them up on Google Images and thought about
how this looking would be different,
how it would be to stand here,
dog by my side, sand in my eyes, riot
of hair in the high July wind,
perfected. Like a girl from a story, not a girl
from Springfield, Illinois, town of strip malls,
Sally Beauty Supplies, no portals to Narnia
or anywhere else. I don’t know if I would’ve been brave
enough to leave on my own. I was a girl
who made straight A’s, flew under the radar, wing
to wing with the boy I loved, waiting.
Right after graduation, Cal and I would be gone.
And in the meantime we marked up our maps, got the travel
apps, studied TikToks about dumping black water
(don’t ask). I kept waiting for someone to tell us no
but no one did. My mom, my stepdad, Dr. O,
they all kept nodding. I was so responsible, had a budget,
backup plans B through Z, had my Northwestern acceptance letter
printed and stored in a waterproof sleeve, and if Cal
ever went off course, I’d correct. That’s what
they said. My mom, marveling: my Sylvie, off to see the world.
By May, we’d reached escape velocity. Or
I had. I had. Anymore I feel like
a paper plane in a rainstorm.
KNOX
PULL THE LID OFF
Do you know the meaning of Apocalypse
in the original Greek? I looked it up once
at the library in Fairview, Tennessee,
while passing through:
to pull the lid off. To reveal things
for what they are.
People talk about The Apocalypse
like it’s one event, a fixed point
in the sky around which satellites orbit,
drawing nearer with each pass
until eventually they’ll be consumed.
I know different. That it’s Apocalypses.
A chronic disease that haunts
your life and flares up every so often,
usually when you’re most comfortable.
Say when you’re seven, and your mom rouses you
at 2:36 a.m. and tells you to be very quiet;
that you’re leaving
but your father isn’t coming and the stillness
at that hour is too impossible to be
anything but a dream, so you go without complaint
but then you awake in a nest
of musky blankets at the back of a rattling school bus
with most of the seats removed and filled
with strangers, the road reek of diesel prickling
your nose as the herald of the end of your old life
and beginning of your unmoored new.
Or when you finally turn eighteen in a KOA campsite
in northern Michigan, which you celebrated
with a yellow cake salvaged from a Meijer dumpster that said
in blue frosting, Happy Retirement, Penis!
(I hope you got a corrected cake, Denis, and happy retirement)
and you can suddenly appear back in society
without too many questions and so you go, go in the night
like you did once, go like a ghost, go like a thought
leaving your mind, end your old life
like someone once did for you.
