When I got the news that Matthew Malone wished to make my acquaintance, I was rereading the script for
Andy Warhol Never Gets Old in a bare-walled apartment the studio had rented for me. Matthew, I was told, wanted to meet in the lobby of his hotel. We’d all just moved to Pittsburgh, a city not known for its hotels, but Matthew had found the good one, of course. So I took an Uber there, pounding Altoids the whole way, thinking about what I’d say to the one and only Matthew Malone, who was playing Warhol in the movie. Matthew and I had exchanged phone calls and a couple of text messages, but my friends all wanted to know what he smelled like, how he walked, what kind of emotion his eyes held, whether or not he was a typical Pisces, and so on.
The first time we talked, a few months after my mother died, he called me and said, “I’m so excited to work with you on this,” and I said, “Me too,” and then he said, “I know you’ve been crossing through a hard time, and I’m sorry.” What a phrase.
Crossing through a hard time. I was indeed crossing through a hard time.
In the first weeks after Mom died, I mostly felt relief that it was over. I felt like I was coming up for air after a long time underwater. But eventually, I learned that it was not, in fact, over. The dead are not in the past, not really, because you carry them around with you.
—
When I got to the hotel, I walked into the lobby—absurd chandelier, abstract paintings with flashes of neon. I scanned the room for Matthew, but didn’t see him. I noticed instead a beautiful boy—slight, unstyled brown hair, impish green eyes—slumped into a semicircular couch. He was writing in a Moleskine notebook. He looked—I don’t know how else to say it—like a movie star. I am attractive in a way gossip blogs sometimes call
interesting or
surprising. I have a slight overbite. My eyes are just a bit too far apart. I have a face built for the screen: an expressive but not particularly symmetrical one. This boy, though, in his fitted black jeans and his baby-blue button-down shirt, almost seemed to have a visible aura. Plenty of people are attractive. Precious few are genuinely magnetic. I wanted to buy stock in him immediately, even having never seen his acting. I took a few steps toward him and managed to say, “You must be Kai.”
He looked up from his notebook. He was chewing gum, and he smiled shyless and broadly as he removed AirPods from his ears. “Juniper,” he said, as if we’d known each other for years. He stood, and offered me a hand. I shook. Stronger than I expected.
Not long before, I’d gotten out of a relationship, except I hadn’t
gotten out of it so much as I’d been cast out of it, like a fallen maiden cast out of the church’s good graces. On the dude’s way out, he’d told me there’s a word to describe what I felt for him—that the word isn’t
love or
lust but
limerence, a state of involuntary obsession. I was twenty-two. He was thirty-six. He’d been the cinematographer on my last movie, which had sort of flopped, and now he was moving on to the next one.
After the movie did a paltry seven million dollars in its opening weekend, I had nothing lined up, so I enrolled in college and took a course in modernist literature and art. I kind of suspected my life as an actor could be over, but then along came Matthew Malone to save me.
Copyright © 2026 by John Green. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
