Exclusive: Jandy Nelson’s ‘When the World Tips Over’ Excerpt is Filled With Life-Changing Encounters

An Excerpt From When to World Tips Over
By Jandy Nelson

MILES

Encounter #2 with the Rainbow-Haired Girl

No one would ever suspect it, but Miles Fall could see the souls of dogs.

He kept this to himself.

Along with the part about how he communicated with one dog telepathically, a black Lab named Sandro from the Bell Ranch next door, who was barking now as he peeled through the grapevines toward Miles. Sandro always found Miles when he hid in the vineyards, which was what he was doing instead of going to school, because . . . well, that was the question.

An answer: He was hiding from Wynton, who surely wanted to kill him now for breaking his violin bow. (For the record: Wynton deserved it and more.)

Another answer: There was this guy. His mother called him her voice of reason, her steady Freddy. Teachers called him their prize, coaches their star, teammates their bro. His siblings called him Perfect. Girls sent hot pics to his phone. Unsigned love notes found their way into his backpack, were posted on social media, scribbled on bathroom walls. When he arrived at school—always late to avoid the morning melee where he’d have to pretend to be a person who said person things—he’d have leaves in his hair from running in nearby woods and girls named Emma or Demi or Morgan would pick them off of him. Here let me get that for you, Miles, they’d say, then keep the leaves until they were ashes in their pockets.

There was this guy who glided down the hallways of Western Catholic Preparatory High School, talking and partaking little or not at all but no one seemed to notice that or care. No one seemed to notice that he was always trying to get away, that he ducked out of rooms, out of conversations, that he ran so fast at practice because, out there in front of the pack, he could be alone. This was why he climbed walls too—literally. Often, he was halfway up the brick façade of the school the moment after the bell rang, which made him weird, but also cool.

He was weird. He knew this. He suspected he was in the wrong body, family, town, species, that there’d been some big cosmic mix-up. Like maybe he was supposed to be a tree or a barn owl or a prime number. He only found himself, his real self, in novels, not even in the stories and characters, but in the sentences, the lone words.

He also never cried, and this made him feel even less human. Not once that he could remember in his whole life. Though sometimes when he woke his pillow was damp and he’d wonder if he’d cried in a dream.

Early on, Miles had figured out how to be by himself and with people at the same time. There and not there when he sat with the track/cross country teams at lunch, there and not there when he made out with girls at dances or parties. Mostly not there.

Once this all worked fine. But: Not. Any. More.

His mother didn’t know yet. Not that he quit track, the math club, the animal refuge, the academic decathlon. That the grades that were supposed to get him into Stanford were tanking.

That he couldn’t get out of The Gloom Room.

She didn’t know that two weeks ago at an away track meet (right after the suck upon fucksuck night with Wynton), on having the baton slapped into his palm, an entirely newfangled kind of frantic came over Miles, and he’d taken the baton and then he’d run the hell off the track and jumped the fence and then kept on going. And going. And going going going. He’d hitchhiked home and hadn’t been back to school since.

No one knew anything. He’d made sure of it, erasing all email messages and voicemails from his school to his mother. Oh—

Here was Sandro! The black furry fella in a yapping yipping wiggling frenzy despite his advanced age. In human years: eighty-seven. Luckily it was decided by Miles long ago that Sandro would be the first dog to never die.

You don’t look good, Miles, Sandro remarked right away. Like crap actually. This was no surprise. Miles had hardly been sleeping or eating. Like bugly-mahfugly, Sandro added. The old dog loved slang. He picked it up everywhere.

Yeah, tell me something I don’t know, Miles said to Sandro, though really, he didn’t know. He never looked in mirrors if he could help it.

Okay, here’s something you don’t know, Sandro said, his tail stilling. He looked up at Miles so forlornly, it made Miles’s heart skip. Miles kneeled down so he was face to snout with the dog.

What is it? Miles asked. Sandro put both paws on Miles’s thigh.

I’ve been having dark thoughts, Sandro told him. Sometimes I don’t want to be here anymore, here as in Here, as in anywhere.

Miles put an arm around the dog and stared into his plaintive eyes. No, you’re okay, we’re okay, we’re in this together, two bugly-mahfuglys.

Sandro wriggled out of Miles’s touch, stuck his nose in the dirt. I couldn’t get out of my bed this morning. Even getting to my water bowl overwhelms me. I feel so alone all the time. I’m way too anxious to go to the dog park. I curl up into a ball and pretend I’m sick, so I don’t have to go. He picked up his paw and waved it in the direction of their houses. The other dogs don’t get me. No one does. Ever since Beauty left, my life is empty.

Beauty was the love of Sandro’s life who ran away years ago. I do, Sandro, I get you, Miles told him, rubbing him behind his ears until the dog lifted his snout high into the air and met Miles’s eyes. I understand how much you miss Beauty. Miles stroked beneath Sandro’s chin. And getting to the water bowl overwhelms me too, Sandro. Everything overwhelms me. I just want to curl up into a ball too. Don’t worry. You can always talk to me. We have each other.

Sandro nuzzled his snout into Miles’s face, his cold nose touching Miles’s warm one. Miles felt his body relax. Sandro was the only one who took the doom out of him. The dog bopped Miles’s cheek with his paw. Maybe I was being a little overdramatic.

“What else is new?” Miles said aloud, standing. “You’re the biggest drama queen in Paradise Springs.”

Takes a queen to know a queen, Sandro quipped.

Miles laughed. Sandro had known Miles was gay since Miles knew, which was pretty much always, though nothing exciting had ever happened about it outside the privacy of Miles’s mind until a few months ago when a cook at The Blue Spoonful followed Miles into the walk-in refrigerator at a restaurant party his mother made him go to and kissed him until his mind reconfigured into a bonfire.

Until that moment, Miles’s religion had been: imagining boys lying beside him, imagining boys walking beside him, imagining boys running beside him, imagining boys naked, imagining boys clothed, imagining boys who imagine boys who imagine boys, and then suddenly there was a way better religion: making out with a boy in a restaurant refrigerator in secret in a hurry.

Even though Miles never felt at ease with anyone, not truly, he had certain ideas about love because he’d been devouring his mother’s stash of romance novels since he was ten, particularly Live Forever Now, which he secretly reread every few months. He wanted to drown in love like Samantha Brooksweather. Really, he wanted to be Samantha Brooksweather.

And suddenly in the walk-in refrigerator that night, he was!

For weeks he replayed the kiss, this Get Out of The Gloom Room Free card. He replayed it while eating tacos with the track team. He replayed it while brushing old horses at the refuge. He replayed it when Amy Cho surprise-kissed him at the dance. He replayed it to get out of bed the mornings when he felt like mold and could barely move.

The night of the restaurant party, he’d been on a lime run for the bartender. He’d had a white plastic container in one hand and was heading into the walk-in refrigerator when someone came up behind him. Miles felt a hand fall on his shoulder, saw another on the walk-in handle in front of him. “Can I join you in there?” he heard. Miles knew who it was right away, not the name of the sauté cook, but the velvet voice that went with a tall lanky body that went with black straight hair that fell into dark sleepy eyes, eyes that had been tracking Miles around the party all night long, making Miles’s neck hot. Miles had sucked in air at the words—Can I join you in there?—wanting to holler yes! Scared to. Stunned that something he’d imagined—he was an expert on these kind of imaginings—was really and truly happening.

Miles looked left and right. It was just them, two shadows in the shadowy back corner of the kitchen. Miles nodded, nervous as hell, like before a race nervous, and then he felt the guy’s chest press against his back as he gently guided Miles backward, pulling open the door and then releasing Miles into the chilly air.

The heavy door thudded behind them, cutting off the music, cutting off the rest of the world. They were alone in the cold with stacks and stacks of eggs, sacks of onions, trays of marinating grass-fed beef filets, crates of zucchini, sheets of fresh herbs. It smelled like chives. It smelled like meat, like blood and bleach. And now hope, excitement, sweat. Miles’s heart pounded through to his fingers as he turned around, his hands damp despite the chill, his breathing quick, his erection straining. He smelled alcohol on the guy’s breath as he approached Miles (the scent familiar from his uncle, his brother). He heard the words: beautiful boy (normally words Miles would’ve unheard immediately, but here now they were flying embers) and then it happened: the collision of their mouths, this guy’s skin so much rougher than the handful of girls he’d kissed in his life, sending currents of yes to his heart, to his head, to his groin, to his former self and to his future one, until they were interrupted by the expediter, a guy named Pete with tattoo sleeves who said, “What the hell? Hands off or I’ll tell his mother and you’ll be out of a job, Nico.”

Nico.

A name that was turquoise because of Miles’s kind of synesthesia— words came in colors. (When he was little, he’d play this game where he’d pick out the yellow words on a page and rearrange them to make a purely yellow sentence. Or an orange one. Or a striped one. He loved words that didn’t belong together. Like him.)

Anyway, Miles hadn’t known how to make it happen with Nico again—he couldn’t find him online—so he wandered into the restaurant after school daily and stared at the guy like it was an Olympic sport. He was too shy and uncertain to do anything reasonable like talk to him, so staring it was, but Nico, when not drunk, seemed to keep his sleepy eyes on anything but Miles. Still, Miles stared. While he was helping out (Mom: Even with your volunteer work you find time to help out, thank you, always so thoughtful) doing roll-ups or garnishing souffiés or bussing half-eaten plates of coq au vin, he stared. While marrying bottles of homemade aioli and ramekins of lavender butter, he stared and stared and stared like a psychopath. And when he wasn’t staring, he’d go into the walk-in alone and wait, re-enacting the kiss, pressing his hot lips to the cold refrigerator door. He even wrote a poem about it and submitted it to his school’s literary journal. It was called “Finding Religion in a Walk-in Refrigerator” and they’d accepted it. Everyone, including Hot AP English Teacher Mr. Gelman, thought it was about God, not a hot, sleepy-looking sauté cook, probably the only other young gay dude in the whole stupid town where Miles lived—a town that was mostly all yokel with some wine and hippie thrown in. This was why, long ago, Miles made Sandro an honorary member of the human queer community.

I love communities! the dog had told Miles that day. Miles had been ten. Another walk-in encounter never happened, and soon after, Nico was fired for drinking on the job, but that was the kiss that changed everything. Meaning: The Season of Porn—Miles not only devouring it whole but stopping and starting, rewinding and replaying, again and again, trying to figure it all out.

Meaning: He couldn’t get through a run in the woods without ducking behind trees, his hands plunging into his shorts as he dive-bombed into all that would’ve could’ve should’ve happened in that refrigerator, had expediter Pete not barged in.

Meaning: He felt guilty all the time of some unspecified crime, and like he was lying even when he wasn’t.

Meaning: He feared that instead of saying “Please pass the salt,” or “Nice race, dude,” he might, by accident, say “I’m gay. I mean, super-gay. Like you have no idea how gay.”

Meaning: the dating app Lookn. (More on this later.)

Meaning: He began studying other boys like he was an anthropologist. This was how close they stood to each other. This was when they said “yo” or “bro.” This was the pitch they laughed and talked at. This was what they did with their faces instead of swooning like Samantha Brooksweather.

Miles bent down and buried his face in Sandro’s fur.

At least you love me, he said to Sandro.

Oh, I do! I love you so much! You’re my best friend! You smell so good!

Miles and Sandro began the trek back to the house through the vineyard, through the stifling heat. Miles would have to remember to erase today’s messages from the dean and his coach, both on the house phone voicemail and on his mother’s computer. Thank God the school didn’t have her new cell phone number. Though he supposed eventually they’d call the restaurant. Maybe they already had and couldn’t get through? Would they show up at the house or restaurant? He figured eventually they would.

I broke Wynton’s new bow, he told Sandro. He’d sold his motorcycle to buy it. Good. He deserves it after what he did to you that night.

Yeah.

Wish you’d let me bite him already. Me and the other dogs are sick of just growling at him all the time. How about a nip on the leg?

I’ll think about it.

Well?

Yeah okay.

The air was blazing and breathless even this early because of The Devil Winds. The whole valley felt like it was one spark away from bursting into flames. Miles had already sweated through his shirt.

Hey, did you know women have orgasms from brushing their teeth?

Human dude, are you high? That is redonkulous, a soup sandwich, shit-bat mad whack, insane in the membrane.

My thoughts exactly, totally wing-a-ling.

Miles, I think you need a checkup from the neck up. Ah, good one.

Miles learned a ton of slang from Sandro. Slang he hardly ever used except with the dog.

When Sandro and Miles crested the hill, Miles saw some kind of vehicle by the side of the utility road, which was weird. Uncle Clive was vigilant about overnight trespassers (after years of waking to naked tripping hippies). But indeed, there was a vintage orange pickup in mint condition. He walked over to the driver’s-side window and saw that fanned across the double seat was a sleeping girl with a waterfall of multicolored curls.

Green glitter swept across her eyelids. Words were tattooed all over her skin, which shined with perspiration.

Whoa. Sleeping Beauty. For real, he told Sandro.

Pick me up. I want to see. Pick me up!

Despite a persuasive bout of head-twisting and tail-wagging, Miles didn’t pick Sandro up. He gave his honorary queer, suicidal, psychic companion a love tap with his foot while he focused on the girl, who seemed to be around his age, maybe a little older. She looked like she should be spinning straw into gold in a forest or locked in a tower or sleeping like this until some prince swooped in and—

Such a hopeless romantic, human dude.

Like you said, takes one to know one. Beauty, Beauty, Beauty.

Miles checked out the avalanche of books all over the girl’s seat, seeing how many he’d read, seeing how many he’d want to. There were some books on California history, on winemakers of Northern California, but there were also novels. There was even one—East of Eden, a novel Miles mostly detested—upright in the girl’s hand as if she could sleep-read. Why was she here? Why was she sleeping in her truck? Why so many books?

Miles tried to decipher some of the words tattooed on the girl’s arms. There was true love and hummingbird and destiny. And then a bunch of words he didn’t know, maybe in different languages? A cool sentence: We were together, I forget the rest. And another: If the path before you is clear . . . but the rest of that one wrapped around her arm and was hidden.

Miles was in contortions trying to see the other half of the sentence when he noticed the light was on in the cab. She must’ve fallen asleep reading that awful Steinbeck book. Miles reached his hand through the half-open window and turned off the overhead, so she didn’t wake to a dead battery. As he was carefully pulling his arm out of the open window, the girl bolted upright, gasped, looked at Miles with fright, then shock, then cried out, “Oh no! Sorry, I’m going.” Her voice startled him. She sounded nothing like she looked. If they were on the phone, he’d bet she was a two-pack-a-day, whisky-swilling guy.

“It’s okay,” he said, unable to take his eyes off her. Her large, pale blue eyes were almost translucent, making her look otherworldly.

She was searching for her keys, first in her pockets, then running her hands all over the seat, in the creases. He watched her, having an overwhelming urge to get in the truck.

“It’s really fine that you’re here,” he said, leaning into the window and getting hit with a powerful blast of flowers—lilacs maybe, roses? He breathed in and then scanned around the truck, expecting a blossoming bush somewhere, but there were just sun-scorched vineyards in all directions. He searched the cab of the truck but the only flowers he saw were sewn-on daisy patches all over her jeans. “My uncle owns this land. He won’t care,” he told her, noting also the ankle bracelet, the toe rings, the skull on her T-shirt, the extensive metal in her ears, the leather motorcycle jacket on the seat. Hippie meets punk meets biker.

The urge to get in the truck with her was so powerful he had to put his hands in his pockets. His words had done nothing to curb the frantic key search. She was bending over the passenger seat now feeling for the keys under it, and although he was trying, he still couldn’t make out the rest of that sentence she loved enough to tattoo on her triceps. She straightened up, keys in her shaking hand, struggling to get one into the ignition. “Are you okay?” he asked. She did not seem okay. Had she run away? “Are you hungry? I live over there.” He pointed down the hill at his house engulfed in morning sunlight, looking like Oz. “We have excellent pastries. Lavender butter too.” What was he doing? Why was he being so insistent? Lately he’d rather climb out a window than make conversation. “Or maybe you need a better novel?”

Somehow this broke through her frenzy to flee. She looked down at the novel still on her lap. Her brow creased. “What? This one? I love Steinbeck.”

“I’ll forgive the lapse in literary judgment if you tell me the rest of that sentence.” He touched his upper arm in the spot where her tattoo was. “Can only see half of it. Total torture.”

Her mouth twisted like she was about to smile but then didn’t. She started the engine.

“Wait,” he said. “Please, just one more minute.”

Creepy, said Sandro. What’s with you?

She shook her head. “Sorry. Places to be, people to see.” She put a hand over her face. Her hand was still trembling. She groaned. “That was so cringe.”

She turned to Miles and their eyes met—it jarred him. Then she smiled and that jarred him further, not only because she had one of those bring-the-dead-back-to-life smiles, but because, well, he didn’t know why, he just knew he couldn’t look away, didn’t want to, never wanted to, and this was making his stomach shift and his heart speed up.

Years passed.

Better, happier years.

“My parting gift,” she said finally in her gravelly old man’s voice, breaking the epic eye lock. “‘If the path before you is clear’”—she did a ta-da with her hands—“‘you’re probably on someone else’s.’ Joseph Campbell.”

Then Miles was watching her drive away, wondering what had just happened to him. Had he seen her soul? He felt like he had. But he’d never seen a person’s soul before, only dogs’. She was driving slowly, and he could tell by the angle of her neck that she was looking at him in the rearview mirror.

He felt a tugging at the center of his chest.

She looked sad too, didn’t she, Sandro? Wouldn’t know. Someone wouldn’t pick me up. Who is she?

I’m going to bite you.

God, talk about gorgeous.

I thought you only liked boys.

Miles didn’t reply. He didn’t know how to. He never reacted to girls like this. He wanted to run after her. He wanted to drive all night with her through the empty desert and then read together in some noisy diner.

He wanted to tell her everything.

Human dude, have you turned into a country song? Or one of those romance novels you read?

I don’t read romance novels.

Sure you don’t, Samantha Brooksweather.

Miles ignored Sandro and pulled his pad out to write down the Joseph Campbell sentence. If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. It was a good one. Especially because the path before him, which used to be fairly clear, was now an effing thicket. He could barely move. And when he did, he went the wrong way. He then wrote down the one that was on her forearm: We were together, I forget the rest.

“Come back,” he said aloud.

Right before the turnoff onto the main highway, the orange truck stopped, and the passenger door swung open. A big fat balloon of hope swelled in Miles’s chest and then he was running like it was a prison break, Sandro at his heels, toward the open door.

From Miles’s Pocket Pad:

Miles can’t come to the phone, to school, to your party, to practice, to existence. He has a terrible case of doorknobs. He has a terrible case of sludge, of dead birds, of what have I done, of keep out. He has a terrible case of fuck off already all of you. He’ll get back to you when he’s found someone to trade heads with. Thanks for being in touch.

Miles Pretending to Be a Person Conversing with an Actual Person at School:

Real Person: Yo, Miles, what’s good, didn’t see you at Julie’s this weekend.

Perfect Miles: Was there for a bit, it totally raged, man.

(He wasn’t there for any bits, he was home reading Charlotte Brontë, he was in a field with some warblers and daffodils, he was talking to a dog named Sandro.)

Real Person: Yeah it did. McKenzie and Conner—

(Yada, yada, yada.)

Perfect Miles: So dope/Count me in/What a joke/Yeah/Who knew?/Whatever with that/I feel you/Got you/So down.

(Words, words, words coming out of his face on his body, which was a combination of carbon molecules on a rock hurtling through space.)

Real Person: Miles, want to come—

Perfect Miles: Hey, gotta go, man, talk at lunch.

(At lunch Miles will tear-ass to the creek, collapse onto his back, look up at pieces of blue sky through green canopy, glide his fingers along hot river stones, breathe in, breathe out, try to keep his spirit from falling out of his body.)

Miles Conversing with the Lady on the Depression Hotline:

Lady: To put it as simply as possible, depression is grief not in proportion with an individual’s circumstances. Did something happen to make you feel this way? Or—

Miles: Yes, something happened.

(However, not how Miles would describe depression. He’d go with something more along the lines of waking up to find you’ve turned into a cockroach like in that story Hot AP English Teacher Mr. Gelman had them read by Kafka.)

Lady: When was this event?

Miles: A couple weeks ago but I don’t know maybe it isn’t that . . . maybe what happened wasn’t that big a deal.

(Because did this all really start after that night with Wynton? No. But Miles never used to think he was depressed depressed, he just thought he was one of the sad solitary people. Like if he were in a Victorian novel, he’d be the melancholic who constantly fainted and took to her bed.)

Lady: Would you like to share what happened? I think it would help.

Miles:

Lady: Well, do you think the level of heartbreak you’re experiencing is commensurate with what happened?

Miles: I don’t know.

(Was heartbreak what he was experiencing? And how do you quantify losing your shit anyway? He guessed there was an amount of unraveling that was acceptable. He felt like the sun was slowly being extinguished inside of him—was that acceptable?)

Lady: Can you describe how you’re feeling?

Miles:

(He was afraid to tell her.)

Lady: You can tell me anything. This is a safe space. I want to help you.

Miles:

Lady: Is there someone in your life you can talk to? A parent? A teacher? A priest? A guidance counselor at school? An older sibling?

(An older sibling. His fucking older sibling. He hung up.)

Excerpt from When the World Tips Over, copyright © 2024 by Jandy Nelson, published by Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

When the World Tips Over, by Jandy Nelson, will be released on September 24, 2024. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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