How did Joe Goldberg become Joe Goldberg? What led to his first love…first obsession…first kill? Find out in the highly anticipated prequel to Joe Goldberg is ready for his life to start. He’s seventeen years old, working in Mr. Mooney’s bookshop, falling in love with every girl on the subway all while wondering who will be Then he spots it: MISSED CONNECTION, NYC Bookstore Babe. Someone is looking for With her incisive and darkly comedic prose, Caroline Kepnes captures Joe poised on the edge of manhood, entering the vicious, dog-eat-dog New York dating scene for the very first time, and buffeted by forces that will determine what kind of man he will become--and how he will write his own twisted love story.

Autorentext

Caroline Kepnes

Klappentext

“The most distinctive voice in thrillers is back.”—Lucy Foley, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List and The Midnight Feast

How did Joe Goldberg become Joe Goldberg? What led to his first love . . . first obsession . . . first kill? Find out in the highly anticipated prequel to New York Times bestselling author Caroline Kepnes’s hit You series, which inspired the blockbuster Netflix show.

Joe Goldberg is ready for his life to start. He’s seventeen years old, working in Mr. Mooney’s bookshop, falling in love with every girl on the subway all while wondering who will be the one. He knows what he needs: A woman who will force him to get his GED, go to night school, and make something of himself. But who would ever fall in love with him?

Then he spots it: MISSED CONNECTION, NYC Bookstore Babe.

Someone is looking for Joe. And that someone is Vail Gunderson, a production assistant with a passion for rom-coms. The only catch: she’s twenty-four, which means that Joe has no choice but to lie about his age…and, naturally, nearly everything else in his life. Joe thinks he’s found true love, but when Vail needs more convincing that Joe is her happily ever after, he’s determined to convince her…no matter what it takes…

With her incisive and darkly comedic prose, Caroline Kepnes captures Joe poised on the edge of manhood, entering the vicious, dog-eat-dog New York dating scene for the very first time, and buffeted by forces that will determine what kind of man he will become—and how he will write his own twisted love story.

Leseprobe
1

There’s the blonde to my left, a shy reader with tortoiseshell glasses who took her eyes off the page when I got onto the subway. The floor shook. I stumbled. I could’ve sat beside her, but I didn’t. I’m six seats away, and we’re the only two people on the train, in the universe that is a crowded New York subway car. The tension is there, here. She isn’t reading, not anymore, and I can imagine a life with the blonde. Missionary mornings on a comfy sofa we found on the street, a frisky orange cat we adopt one lazy Sunday in Union Square after a long brunch because we do things like that. We adopt cats and sofas.

But then my Portnoy twitches. Jay-Z and Vince Neil see them too. Girls, girls, girls.

Another one calls, silently. A suited minx with short hair and dark red lips and she’s right across from me. She doesn’t adopt cats, and she would never just lie there and take it. She is the cat. Older. Wiser. Dirtier. Not a shy bone in her lithe, horny body, and did she giggle when I adjusted my pants? Yes. She giggled. She fakes a yawn and strokes her neck, and she won’t look at me again. It’s on me to make the next move. Do I do it? Maybe that’s what I need. A martini of a woman who would hit me straight up, force me to get my GED, go to night school and make something of myself.

“Achoo!”

That’s a wild sneeze and that’s door number three and this girl is different. Not so nervous. Not so domineering. She’s standing, unlike my exes—sorry, ladies, it was fun while it lasted—and she’s holding her Atonement in that way where she wants me to know she walked into a bookstore and bought her Atonement. I work in a bookstore, so already you know we’d have something to talk about. Her coat is too big and too red, and she seems annoyed that she has to break away from Atonement to blow her nose and yeah.

That’s it. That’s my girl.

She’s not a missionary mouse, and she won’t push me to “make something of myself.” She’s cotton panties to the core, but then she crumples up her dirty Kleenex and gasps—I know that book, I know that part—and I can’t do it. I can’t be with someone who’s just like me.

It’s not time for me to atone. I’m seventeen years old. I’ve barely even lived.

This one down the way . . . This one f***ing lives. 2:12 p.m. and she’s visibly, clearly drunk. Wobbly legs in a skirt she put on last night. Chomping on a ham and cheese croissant in that way where you just know she’d devour my Portnoy.

She looks at me. She waves. What the fing f, and I put my eyes on my tote bag. Do I get up? Talk to her? What would I say?

Doesn’t matter. Not anymore. She licked her fingers that were just on the pole, and she scrunches up the tinfoil and tosses it on the floor like we’re not all in this together, like litter isn’t f***ing illegal. Ham and cheese my ass, and it’s true what Mr. Mooney says.

Girls really do have a sixth sense buried in that extra hole between their legs.

She could feel me losing interest. That’s why she bends over and picks up the tinfoil.

Too little, too late, and I spy a prescription in her purse. She pinches her eyes. The pain. I can’t go there. You can’t make a sad girl happy, and I’m way too young to die trying.

“Seventy-second and Columbus!”

This is it. My last chance to make something happen. I freeze up. I do this all day every day. I talk myself into things and out of them and what the f*** is wrong with me? I don’t know these girls and they don’t know me, and it’s all coming to an end. The train slows, a direct f*** you to my speeding, stupid heart.

I rise. Eight eyeballs and four holes to choose from. Pick, Joe, pick.

But it’s predictable. I’m predictable. I don’t make eye contact. I just walk up the f***ing stairs into the street and—

“Wake up, asshole!”

I hold up a hand and wave at the justified old cabbie. “Sorry!”

I’m no good at being a New Yorker lately. I’m just not the same since 9/11, but then again, who is?

My appointment isn’t until three, so I walk into an internet café and pick a computer in the back. It feels weird, choosing this place over the bookshop, shoving my ATM card into the slot like a junkie who needs a fix as I wait for the machine to rob me blind. This should be free, it really should, and I do what I do all day, all night.

I go on f***ing Craigslist.

“Heya, buddy.”

Craig doesn’t say hi back. I don’t even know if he’s a real person with a last name. But God f***ing bless him either way. The world used to be this black hole. You see a girl, you feel something, you chicken out and you know you’ll never see her again. But now we have this magical place called Missed Connections. I’ve fallen in love in my head seventeen times today and there’s a chance that one of the sweet seventeen can’t get me out of her head. The page is loading and . . .

Nope.

I should be used to it by now, the rejection, but Emily Dickinson said it best. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It’s s…