Someone Like You

I came to Someone Like You through the movie How to Deal, which I saw years before I knew it was a book. The film folds this novel together with Dessen's earlier That Summer, and it smooths out most of the edges. The book is rougher and sadder. I picked it up expecting a light teen romance and got a story that opens with a phone call in the middle of the night and barely lets the two girls catch their breath.

Facts first, so you know what you are holding. Sarah Dessen published Someone Like You in 1998. The first edition was a Viking hardcover, 281 pages, and it was her second novel after That Summer. It is a standalone, not part of a series, though Dessen's books share a loose setting and let characters drift between them. Scarlett turns up again as the manager of a coffee shop in This Lullaby. Halley and Scarlett both work at Milton's Market, a place that reappears elsewhere. None of that matters for following this one.

Two houses and one friendship

Halley and Scarlett live in houses directly across from each other. They have known each other long enough that the friendship does not need explaining. They both work at Milton's Market. At the start of the summer, Scarlett starts dating Michael Sherwood, and the two of them keep it quiet. Michael has just broken up with Elizabeth Gunderson, a cheerleader, and he says he does not want to upset her. Only Halley really knows they are together.

Then Halley's mother sends her to Sisterhood Camp for the last two weeks of summer vacation. Halley does not want to go. Her mother is a therapist who writes books about teenagers, and she has a hard time watching Halley grow up. Camp is her attempt to hold the line. While Halley is there, the phone rings in the middle of the night and someone pulls her out of bed to take the call. It is Scarlett. Michael is dead. He was killed in a motorcycle accident.

Scarlett asks Halley to come home. Halley's mother does not like it, but she drives her back anyway. That drive sets the tone for everything after it. The adults keep trying to manage the situation, and the girls keep needing each other more than they need the managing.

The funeral and the boy in the rain

At Michael's funeral the secret comes apart in a quiet way. Nobody there knew about Scarlett and Michael. Elizabeth Gunderson is wrecked by the loss, and she gets the sympathy that Scarlett cannot claim in public. On the ride home it rains hard, and they pass Macon Faulkner walking along the road. Macon was Michael's best friend. They offer him a lift. He refuses, too upset to sit in a car full of people. Halley remembers him.

School starts, and Scarlett says she feels sick. Halley goes to fix a scheduling mistake and ends up in the guidance counselor's office, where Macon is joking around. He is short, skinny, pale, dressed in black, and he does not seem to care what anyone thinks. He teaches her the "Jedi mind trick," pretending he can move things with his thoughts. Halley is surprised by how friendly he is. They end up in the same P.E. class. The crush begins there.

Macon mentions a party, almost as an afterthought, and Halley says yes. She and Scarlett go. Macon does not appear. The host, Ginny Tabor, throws everyone out, and the two girls sit on Scarlett's porch. Halley says out loud that she does not deserve him. Then Macon shows up at her window. He had been at the party after all, upstairs in the attic, so it was a misunderstanding. He kisses her. Noah Vaughn, Halley's former boyfriend, watches from the kitchen window.

Noah is the safe boy. His family is close to Halley's family, and the parents clearly had a plan. Macon is the opposite of that plan. Dessen makes the contrast plain without spelling out the moral.

Macon starts showing up more. While Halley is mowing the lawn, he arrives with a giant mower to help. Her father is charmed. Her mother is angry, because the mowing was supposed to be Halley's chore and because she can see what is developing. The mother starts asking questions about Macon. She has not even met him yet, and she already dislikes him.

Scarlett's secret

In the second part, Halley and Scarlett are at work when Scarlett pulls her into the bathroom and tells her she is pregnant. Michael is the father. They tell Scarlett's mother, who books an abortion appointment. On the day of the appointment, Scarlett decides against it and calls Halley to come get her from the clinic. Halley asks Macon to drive her, and he does. When they pick up Scarlett, Halley's mother sees the three of them and assumes they were cutting class. She tells Scarlett's mother, and the two mothers join forces to handle it. Halley gets grounded.

There is a birthday dinner the next day. Halley's family, the Vaughn family, Scarlett, and the whole uneasy arrangement sit at one table. Later, Halley sneaks out with Macon. He takes her to a quarry, where they make out. She describes the feeling as the old Halley having left, replaced by someone new. It is one of those passages teenagers recognize and adults remember.

The middle of the book runs two slow pressures at once. Scarlett's body changes and her world narrows to the pregnancy. Halley's world widens and gets more dangerous. Macon keeps asking her to have sex. She thinks about it, but she is not ready. The not-ready part is the heart of her character, and Dessen does not rush her past it. The refusal creates distance between them, and Macon's secretive habits make the distance worse. Elizabeth Gunderson drops hints that Macon is cheating. Whether the hints are true stays murky for a while. Meanwhile Halley's mother keeps asking about Macon and forbids her from seeing him. Halley sees him anyway.

Everyone at school learns about the pregnancy because Ginny Tabor overhears the girls in the bathroom and cannot keep her mouth shut. The private thing becomes public, which is how it always goes in high school.

I want to be fair about the middle stretch. It sags a little. The book returns to the same tension, Halley pulled between her mother and Macon, several times, and the repetition wears. It is also where the dated details pile up. Pay phones, a Sisterhood Camp that reads like a relic, the way the pregnancy is whispered about. Some of the girl-on-girl cruelty has aged badly. A lot of the judgment lands on other girls rather than on the boys who share the blame. That is worth naming, even if the book does other things well.

New Year's Eve

The breaking point is a New Year's Eve party. Halley decides she will sleep with Macon. Scarlett tries to talk her out of it, and the two best friends have their worst fight, the kind where neither will speak to the other afterward. Halley drinks too much before anything can happen. She throws up and leaves. Macon is furious. He thinks she has been leading him on. He drives her home while shouting at her, and because he is not watching the road, the car crashes.

Before she is taken into the emergency room, Macon grips her hand and tells her he loves her. Halley is seriously injured. Macon does not visit her in the hospital. Her mother is disappointed in her, not because she knows the truth but because she does not. The gap between what happened and what her mother believes is the loneliest part of the book. Halley is hurt, lying in a bed, and the one person who could explain the truth to her is not there.

This is where the novel earns its reputation. The accident is not a punishment for wanting sex, and Dessen is careful not to make it one. It is the result of a boy's temper and bad driving. The romance that looked like freedom from the start had a price, and the crash makes Halley see it.

Grace

After Halley gets out of the hospital, Macon comes to her window, the same way he arrived the night of the party. This time Halley breaks up with him. He is hurt, and for once he seems to understand what he lost. Her mother comes down and starts to shout at her for seeing Macon. Halley tells her what just happened, and then she tells her how the rules have felt from the inside. The two of them reach an understanding. Both will try harder. It is not a tidy fix, but it is a truce, and it feels earned because Halley finally says what she needs.

Then comes prom. Elizabeth Gunderson is now dating Macon. Halley goes with Noah, the family friend and former boyfriend. Noah gets drunk and rips her dress. She is angry and ends up in the bathroom, where she runs into Elizabeth, who tells her that Macon still loves her. Before that conversation can go anywhere, word comes that Scarlett is in labor.

Getting to the hospital is its own small comedy. The only car available belongs to Macon, and he drives them with Elizabeth in the passenger seat, the two of them clearly mid-fight. Halley calls her mother, who comes down and helps her through the labor. That image is the heart of the ending. The mother who spent the whole book trying to hold Halley back ends up beside her at the moment Halley needs someone steady.

Scarlett names the baby Grace Halley Thomas. Everyone gathers in the waiting room, prom-goers still in their formal clothes mixed with Scarlett's mother's friends, all of them there for the same reason. After the crowd thins and everyone goes home, Halley walks home alone. She is happy. She thinks about the life Grace has ahead of her and what she might offer the child. The book ends there, on the friend's daughter and the road home, not on the boy.

What it gets right and where it shows its age

The best thing about Someone Like You is that it takes the friendship seriously. Halley and Scarlett are the real love story. They fight, they fail each other for a while, and they come back. The pregnancy is not a plot device dropped in to teach Halley a lesson. It is Scarlett's life, and Halley has to learn how to stand next to her without making it about herself.

Macon is the weak spot and also the point. He is magnetic and careless, and Dessen writes him as a boy who means half of what he says and cannot follow through on the rest. Some readers find him flat by the end, a collection of black clothes and moody gestures. I think that is partly deliberate. He looks deep from a distance and thin up close, which is exactly what Halley has to figure out.

The adults are the flattest characters. Halley's mother gets the most shading, but she spends most of the book in one mode, worried and controlling, until the ending softens her. The Vaughns, the other families, and most of the teachers are background. Publishers Weekly made this complaint when the book came out, calling several of the adults flat and some scenes soapy, and I can see it even while I enjoyed the novel.

The prose is plain and quick. Dessen writes short chapters and lets dialogue carry most of the weight. It reads fast. The 281 pages went by in a couple of evenings for me. If you want a book that lingers on sentences, this is not it. If you want a book that gets the texture of being sixteen right, especially the feeling of wanting something you know is bad for you, it does that.

Who it is for. Teen readers working through a first serious relationship will find a lot that feels true here. Adult readers who grew up with Dessen will find a time capsule, and some of the details will land as nostalgia and some as a wince. Readers who want a romance where the boy is the answer should look elsewhere. The boy is a lesson, and the friendship is the answer.

One note on the adaptation. How to Deal came out in 2003 and pulled from both this book and That Summer, so the film is not a faithful version of either one. If you liked the movie, the book will feel darker and less resolved. That is a recommendation, not a warning.

I finished Someone Like You thinking about the phone call at the start, the one that wakes Halley at camp and changes the summer. Dessen builds the whole book out of that kind of interruption, the moment when the plan the adults made stops mattering and the girls have to figure it out themselves. The baby at the end carries two names from two people who kept showing up. Grace Halley Thomas. The order says something about what the book values.