North Carolina

I was next. I was next, and my heart was in a million places at once, and my mind was struggling to run through the hundred million things I wanted to say. How do you summarize a lifetime of admiration and respect into a single, three-minute interaction?

*Record scratching*

Yep, that’s me. I bet you’re wondering how I got myself into this situation.

Our story begins somewhere in the mid-2000s. Without a bookstore to sustain her, Yours Truly was scavenging the library shelves, reading anything and everything she could possibly get her hands on. Moving on from the Junior Fiction section to Young Adult felt like a rite of passage, and it was there that I found Sarah Dessen.

I latched onto her books in a way that I still can’t quite understand. Even now, as a Grown-Up reader drifting farther and farther from the core YA demographic, I find myself growing the Dessen collection on my shelf with every book she releases. Every time I think I’ve moved on from the young adult section of the bookstore, she drags me back, and I find myself once again invested in a teen summer love story. She shaped my adolescent reading habits and set the standard for the contemporary styles I still enjoy to this day. Her books have been a solid constant for more than half of my life.

More than that, though, she came to be a role model of sorts. She was so honest about the writing process and how hard it was. I would grow to appreciate this more than I initially realized; when I struggled with my writing, when it became so hard and scary that I doubted whether I had it in me to keep going, I would see photos of her own abandoned projects, see her tweets about her doubts and frustrations, and I would sink in relief. I wasn’t alone—the struggles and doubts were a normal part of the process. Sarah showed me that writing was allowed to be hard.

Fast forward to summer 2017. I packed my entire life—or at least, all that would fit—into a suitcase and flew down to Orlando in May. I got to live my dream of living in Disney World, making magic, meeting amazing people, and going to the parks on almost every day off I had. In fact, there were only three instances in which I didn’t spend my day off in the park: 

1) When I went to the beach and got horrendously sunburnt, even though I put on sunscreen. Twice.

2) When I flew home to surprise my sister for her high school grad, immediately after getting horrendously sunburnt. (Even though I put on sunscreen.) (Twice.)

3) When I took an overnight train to travel through four states to Raleigh, North Carolina, for what amounted to a 12-hour day trip.

Here’s the thing about living in Canada: nobody comes here. Sure, select cities may see a few tour stops from popular bands, but anyone living outside the GTA knows the pain of being skipped over by their favourite artists, musical or otherwise. This is most prevalent in places like southern Manitoba, a location which Taylor Swift has skipped during her last TWO (2) tours. The closest any of the authors on my shelf have ever gotten to Manitoba is Toronto—which is to say, not very close at all.

But as luck would have it, my Disney internship wasn’t the only thing that was happening that summer. In June 2017, Sarah Dessen would be releasing her then-newest novel, Once and For All, followed up by a book tour in select cities across the United States. For the first time, I felt like I had a real chance to actually meet her. Then in May, the dates dropped: 11 stops across six states, and guess which city didn’t make the cut?

So I did what any sane person would do—I looked up every city on the map, found the closest stop to Orlando, and booked a nine-hour train ticket to Raleigh, North Carolina.

The plan was simple: stuff a backpack full of essentials, save money on accommodations by sleeping on the train, successfully meet one of my biggest creative inspirations, and arrive back in Florida in time for work the following evening. All I had to do was get one of my shifts covered, and I was good to go.

I made it to the train station in downtown Orlando with little excitement and fanfare. The station was busier than I expected, filled with families carrying armloads of plastic Disney park bags—a hallmark of the ending vacation. I had travelled by train only one other time in my life. The car then had been barren, but this time the train was packed. “I’m visiting family in Raleigh for the week,” the man sitting beside me said. “What about yourself?”

I told him that I was only going up for a day, for a book signing.

“You wrote a book?” he asked, and he sounded so impressed that I almost didn’t want to correct him. The truth was far less exciting.

Even I had to admit that the whole adventure seemed rather crazy—coming all this way for such a short interaction. But I also knew that I couldn’t miss this opportunity. There was this weird sense of urgency attached to the trip; it may not be my only chance to meet Sarah, but it would definitely be my first real chance, and it would almost certainly be my best chance. Because even when Sarah did make the trek to Canada, she was always farther from me there than she was now, this faithful summer.

Which brings us back here—to me, standing in a bookstore in a city that I hadn’t known existed until a few weeks prior. I could never hope to express to Sarah just how important her writing has been to me, and I certainly couldn’t do it in such a brief encounter. I’m not even sure I remember what I said in the end. Something about being from Canada, but also somehow Orlando, about the long and complex journey I had taken to find myself standing in front of her—the journey I had hardly expected to take at all. 

And then, it was over. I was ushered along, dazed and jittery, to make room for the next reader.

The sun was already setting by the time I boarded the train back to Florida. The lights in the car were dimmed, other passengers more tired and wary than I hunkering down to get some sleep. I knew that I should probably be doing the same—I had to work the next day, after all, and who knew how much time I’d have for sleep by the time I got back home. But when I curled up in my seat, I instead pulled my new book out of my bulging backpack, tracing over the signature on the first page, revelling in my proof that this whole thing had happened. 

Plus, the whole trip counted as my monthly “cultural activity,” as required under my J-1 work visa. So y’know. Two birds, one stone, etc.

Until later,

- Justyne