I have come to ask if it would ever be possible to read either an excerpt of or to read completely the Miles POV of Made You Up. I really want to know about how Miles thought through Alex being the lemon girl
I went and opened up my Scrivener file for the Miles PoV version of MYU and while it isn't bad writing, it was never updated to match the current version of MYU, and it wasn't edited literally at all.
However, if everyone can BE COOL and understand that this is an unfinished, unedited piece of writing and is inconsistent with the published book, you can have these excerpts:
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“We have to go home, just for a minute, okay?” she said as she settled into the driver’s seat. “I have to get a few things. I’ll just go in and be right back out. Daddy already went to work—he won’t be there. Okay?”
Miles nodded.
June drove much slower than Cleveland, and the entire time her eyes were flicking up and looking at him in the rearview mirror. The closer they got to home, the closer her eyebrows pulled together, the more the corners of her mouth turned down.
When she pulled into the driveway, she rolled all the windows down a little and locked him in the car, then ran inside.
While she was gone, he counted things inside the car. The number of smudges on the window closest to him, the diamonds in the fabric on the seats, the dead flies reflected in the glass of the rear window. It didn’t take long enough. He realized early on that he could count too fast, and that he was too tired to think of anything else. Nothing was interesting enough to focus on for too long, and July seemed to have sapped all the color out of the world outside the car.
His mother returned with a few bags. The first thing she did was change his clothes—she stuffed the ones he’d been wearing into the trash cans at the end of the driveway. No sooner had she buckled him into his car seat again than they were driving down the road.
“We have to go to the grocery store really quick,” she said, glancing in the rearview mirror again to see if there was any recognition in his eyes. He stared back for a moment, then looked out the window.
Part of his mind was racing, wondering where they could be going, because he knew, certainly, that the grocery store was not their final destination, not with the way his mother was acting. The other part of his mind, however, was telling the first part to shut down and just stop working. He was too tired, and it was not worth it.
June did not let him sit in the car when they got to the Meijer. She pulled him out of his car seat and carried him into the store, only setting him down when she had to get a grocery basket. They hurried down the produce aisles, Miles counting the colored tiles that passed under his feet, June looking for something. She let go of his hand only to reach toward a shelf, and he took the opportunity to turn and look around.
That was when he saw her.
She stood at the lobster tank. A thousand different images sprang into his head when he saw her hair; fire trucks, ladybugs, stop signs, strawberries. They flicked by one after another, but none of them did her justice. Saying her hair was like fire would have been incorrect—fire was orange. Her hair was red. Unmistakably, undeniably red.
He took a few steps toward her. If she hadn’t looked about his age, he wouldn’t have bothered. He took a few more steps, these faster than the last. He couldn’t seem to get close to her fast enough. A few more steps, and he could see her pressing her pigtails up against the glass of the tank, could hear what she was saying.
“Dear Mr. Lobster. Do you think my hair is more Communist red, or your red? My daddy says I look like a lobster. I figured you would be the best one to ask.”
Miles realized that she was not speaking to him. He realized that he should not intrude on someone else’s conversation, even if that conversation was with a crustacean. But he could not help it.
“It’s Communist red.”
She startled so badly that she twirled in a circle before she realized that he was right next to her. Then she stared at him, eyes wide, hands still tugging on her pigtails, like he was the strangest thing she’d ever seen before. He tried not to look at her, or couldn’t look at her, or something—the combination of her wide, clear blue eyes and red hair made it hard for him to look at her and think at the same time.
“Do you like communists?” she asked quickly, suddenly, like she’d had the thought and spoken it in the same instant. He glanced at her and shrugged.
“I dunno.”
“Me neither,” she replied quickly. He tried to focus on the tank, but she continued to stare at him until a man came up and pulled one of the lobsters out of the tank. She stared at the creature until it was out of sight, then said, “I want to save the lobsters.”
“Do you have ninety-five dollars and ninety-two cents?” he asked, pronouncing every word very carefully.
“Why would I need ninety-five dollars and ninety-two cents?” she replied, enunciating just as carefully. His heart jittered a little.
“There are eight lobsters in the tank,” he said, and he could feel the floodgates of his mind opening up. “Each one costs eleven dollars and ninety-nine cents. So if you want to save them all, you’ll need ninety-five dollars and ninety-two cents. Of course, you’ll have to add in sales tax, which makes it about…one-oh-one dollars and sixty-eight cents.”
“That’s a lot,” she said, looking even more dejected than before. He suddenly wished he could take back what he’d said. She went quiet, and he suddenly became aware of a wonderful aroma—crisp, fresh, not the damp, musky pond scum smell he’d been breathing in all night. The smell helped him breathe, helped him think—
He really couldn’t help himself anymore. He poked her on the arm.
“You smell like lemons.”
Then, startling him, her hand whipped out and grabbed his, and she smiled brightly at him.
“Do you want to be friends?”
He did not know how to respond to such a statement. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had a friend. He’d certainly never held conversations with other children his age before, at least not conversations like this one. He’d never been taught the correct procedure for answering a question such as this.
“Okay,” he said, and that seemed to be what she wanted. He held her hand as tightly as he would have held his mother’s, but it wasn’t the same. It was…better, in some ways. It was like a secret.
He wondered if she would mind, like Cleveland, if he tried to teach her things. He started with the produce they’d passed on their way to the lobster tank, telling her prices per ounce and pound. She listened intently, her free hand still tugging on a pigtail. He switched to U.S. Presidents, and she only seemed to get more excited. She smiled and her eyes shone, and her fingers wrapped tighter around his hand.
“Wait,” She said after he’d gotten to Harrison. “Can you do Roman Emperors?”
“Augustus,” he began, “Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero—”
He got through a few more before she chimed in with, “Nerva! You forgot Nerva.”
“Yeah, Nerva—” and he kept going. He didn’t remember much of anything else that he told her; the facts just tumbled from his brain and out his mouth. No, his concentration was on her hand in his and the fact that she was listening to him.
After a while he started believing that he was merely having a very good dream, a dream that ended only when his friend was drawn away by her mother, leaving him standing alone at the tank, watching as she waved good-bye and disappeared behind the lettuce displays.
“Miles—we have to go, come on.”
June found him and took his hand, and for the first time in his life, he felt lonely. Lonely, when his mother was standing right next to him, holding his hand.
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When they began driving again, it wasn’t long before Miles had to ask Alex to start talking about something just to keep him awake. He considered asking her to scream instead, because her voice was making him fall asleep, and not from boredom. He was surprised that he made it anywhere near home without killing both of them.
“Hey, stop for a minute,” Alex said suddenly, hitting his arm.
“What?”
“We need to go to Meijer.”
“Why?”
“Trust me, we need to go to Meijer. Just pull in and park—there’s the entrance—”
He knew where the parking lot was, he worked there almost every day. Almost before he could turn the truck off, Alex was standing at the driver’s side door, pulling him out of the cab of the truck and toward the store entrance.
“I work here all the time. Why are we here?”
“You’re a baby when you’re tired, you know that?” she said. He knew exactly where she was headed, and it felt like someone had just dropped a solid block of ice on his chest. She stopped walking very suddenly.
“It’s a lobster tank,” he said, staring at her.
Alex took a deep breath. “It’s the lobster tank,” she said. “Your mom told me you remembered.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been completely lost among his thoughts, but this took the cake. He stared at the lobster tank, searching for something—something to say, something to do—he was five again—
“Ninety-five dollars and ninety-two cents…before tax.”
She looked up at him.
“You smell like lemons.”
And then she was kissing him. She pulled him down so she could wrap her arms tightly around his shoulders. He stopped thinking for a moment, long enough to realize that she was holding him and that nothing was wrong.
He put his arms around her and lifted her off the ground.
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