I'll Stop the World
Lauren Thoman
A NOTE FROM MINDY KALING
Who knew a fast-paced mystery could make me choke up? Considering this novel has serious Back to the Future vibes, it’s not surprising the story had me in my feelings.
Lauren Thoman’s I’ll Stop the World is an incredible coming-of-age mystery that takes place across two lifetimes, and two timelines, as a young man is given an unexpected chance to save his grandparents from their impending murder.
The novel has an amazing cast of characters, but I found myself rooting for the two heroes: Justin Warren, a lost kid who life dealt a crappy hand, and Rose Yin, a perfectionist who feels like an outsider in her own life.
I couldn’t hold back the tears as I watched Justin and Rose race against time. This genre-bending book is much more than just a mystery. It had me thinking about fate, the nature of existence, the power of forgiveness, and second chances. I gasped at the twists and reveals! I had to turn back the pages and reread, looking for all the hints along the way. At Mindy’s Book Studio, I am all about publishing books that are fun and entertaining, and this one will blow you away.
PROLOGUE
The rain was blinding, sweeping down in angry sheets. She clutched her umbrella with both hands as she made her way across the bridge, but it was no use. Like wearing a raincoat in a swimming pool.
Too late, too late, too late, her heart seemed to beat in time with her sneakers as they slapped against the pavement. Tendrils of sopping hair whipped against her neck and into her eyes as water dripped from her nose, her chin, her eyelashes.
She paused, her breathing coming in ragged gasps, holding tight to the bucking umbrella. It was no use. She couldn’t see anything. He’d said it would be raining, but she had never thought it would be like this.
Hunching her shoulders against the relentless onslaught of water, she squinted at her watch, straining to make out the hands of the dial. She tilted her wrist this way and that, trying to catch a glint of moonlight, but the moon was gone, swallowed by heavy clouds.
Not that it mattered. She knew what it would say—that it was over. Everything. And she’d missed it all. Today of all days, how had everything gone so wrong?
Her eyes grew hot, tears mixing with raindrops. Clenching her teeth, she started to run again, ducking her head and fighting to keep her eyes open against the stinging rain. She trailed one hand along the cold metal railing, trusting it to keep her moving in a straight line. It was as good as using her eyes—better, even, in this weather.
A loud squeal, like a hundred jagged fingernails being dragged over a chalkboard.
She froze, her fingers still on the railing, her eyes snapping open. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart thudded to a stop.
Both hands came up in front of her face, though she knew they wouldn’t—couldn’t—help.
All at once, she was washed in light.
FRIDAY
Chapter One
JUSTIN
“Everyone shut up and pay attention,” Mr. Shaw growls as he passes by our row. He sounds menacing—dude looks like a grizzly and has a voice like an auger, so pretty much everything he does is menacing—but then he plops down at the end of a row and pulls out his phone, firing up a game of Candy Crush, so he clearly doesn’t actually care.
I roll my eyes as the cacophony around us dims just enough to sort of hear our student body president, Taylor Strickland, introduce our guest speaker from a podium on the stage.
“As you all know, Mayor Rothman won this award back when he was a senior at this very school,” she chirps into the microphone, tossing her blonde curls like she thinks she’s in a Target ad.
“Whocares,” Dave Derrin coughs loudly from the seat in front of me. I kick the back of his seat, not because I care, but just because it’s Dave and why not.
He spins around and waves his middle finger in my face; I, in turn, make a show of dropping my head onto Alyssa’s shoulder. I’m not tired, but that doesn’t seem like a good reason to pass up an opportunity to piss Dave off. Alyssa’s thick black curls tickle the side of my face, and I reach up to tuck a glossy coil behind her ear, holding eye contact with Dave the whole time.
He’s had a thing for Alyssa since sophomore year, and it kills him that she’d rather hang out with me than him.
Even if Alyssa and I are agonizingly platonic, it’s still more than they are.
That does it. Dave pantomimes gagging, sticking his finger down his throat, but then turns back around and slumps in his seat.
Point, me.
“Get off,” Alyssa mutters, shrugging my head from her shoulder and shaking her hair back into place as she continues adding detail to the page in her sketchbook where my profile is gradually being revealed in gray lines and smudged shadows. Her eyes flit to me, then back to her paper. She fills in the hair falling across my forehead with quick, light strokes.
I wish they meant more, these sketches she does. In a movie, it would mean something that the pages she holds are filled with images of me. My face in charcoals. My hands in pastels. My hunched shoulders; my ratty sneakers; my shaggy hair rendered in careful colored-pencil strokes depicting its current state of nightmarish orange-red, the faded remnants of a rainy-day experiment in Dollar Tree hair dye a few weeks ago.
But all it means—to her, anyway—is that she is an artist, and I am a willing subject, and she needs the practice.
One day, she’s going to be famous; I’m sure of it.
And I will still be here. Alone.
Onstage, the mayor steps up to the microphone. “It’s good to be back here at Warren High, although it had a different name back when I walked these halls,” he says with a smile. “Looked different, too. Did you know the layout is reversed from what it used to be? In my day, this was the administrative wing, and the auditorium was on the other side of the school. But although much has changed over the years, there’s one thing that hasn’t, and that’s the high standards we set for our students. Which is why I’m so proud of each of the applicants for this year’s Buford County Citizenship Award. As you know, we receive applications from all over the county . . .”
He drones on, building up to the ultimate announcement of who’s won this year’s citizenship award, this giant scholarship the county gives out every year, always to the same type of kid: honor roll, student council, lots of extracurriculars, community service, blah blah blah. The type of kid who doesn’t really need a leg up, because they’ve already got so many, but they keep sprouting more anyway, like some sort of overachieving mutant spider.
I slouch in my seat, tuning him out.
“Why does the whole school have to be here for this?” I grumble, closing my eyes. “Why not just email them or something?”
“Shhh,” Alyssa hisses, one of the only kids around us taking Shaw’s shut up command seriously. “It’s a big deal,” she whispers, her voice barely louder than a breath. “Besides, it’s getting us out of Government.”
“But Government is where I nap.”
“You and most of Washington,” she says with zero humor. Alyssa is one of those people who registered to vote the second she turned eighteen, and not just because the school was giving out homework passes for anyone who could produce a valid voter registration. She literally has an election countdown in all her social media profiles that she updates every day.