Dear Reader,

I am so incredibly pleased and proud to share Mariko Tamaki’s Anne of Greenville with you! For the debut from my new studio, I wanted to take a beloved classic—Anne of Green Gables—and update it for the modern reader. Anne Shirley has always been one of my favorite heroines of all time—spunky, eccentric, warm, kind, and over-the-top—and Mariko’s adaptation brings us an Anne completely of the moment but with the same lovable, garrulous, outsize personality that has endeared her to our hearts forever.

Anne has two moms, a best friend named Berry, and an irrepressible urge to shake things up in this smallest of small towns that she finds herself in. Her story made me laugh out loud and shed a happy tear or two as Anne battles closed-mindedness and finds true love.

This joyous, diverse, feel-good story inspired by a beloved classic is the epitome of what Melissa de la Cruz Studio hopes to bring to the publishing and entertainment worlds.

I hope Anne of Greenville roller-skates into your heart with a crash as it did mine.

Melissa de la Cruz

Title Page

Copyright

Text copyright © 2022 by Disney Enterprises, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.

First Edition, October 2022

Designed by Marci Senders
Illustrations copyright © 2022 by Shutterstock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tamaki, Mariko, author. • Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud), 1874–1942.
Anne of Green Gables.
Title: Anne of Greenville / by Mariko Tamaki.
Description: First edition. • Los Angeles ; New York : MDLC Studio, 2022.
• Audience: Ages 14–18. • Audience: Grades 10–12. • Summary: In this contemporary
retelling of Anne of Green Gables, Anne Shirley, a queer, half-Japanese disco
superfan, moves to a town that seems too small for her big personality and where
she becomes embroiled in a series of dramatic and unfortunate events.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021050338 • ISBN 9781368078405 (hardcover)
• ISBN 9781368083379 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Bullying—Fiction. • Lesbians—Fiction. • Racially mixed people—Fiction.
• Adoption—Fiction. • City and town life—Fiction. • High schools—Fiction.
• Schools—Fiction. • LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.T1587 An 2022 • DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050338

Dedication

For all the kindred spirits out there

NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

This story explores experiences relating to racism and homophobia and includes some offensive language that may be triggering for readers. If these topics are sensitive for you, please read with care.

ONE

Technically a story starts wherever you want it to start.

When you start writing it down, that could be the start of the story. Or maybe the story started before you started writing it down, but then the story was so good you thought. . .

This is really good; I should write this down.

It’s possible the answer to where and when a story starts has something to do with the space-time continuum, and if it does, I would not be the person to talk about that. I am not a space-time continuum kind of person. I’m more of an arts-and-crafts kind of person, which can be just as serious as space-time, especially if you spill purple glitter (or any other color of glitter) on the carpet.

Pretty serious.

I don’t recommend you do this because then glitter will be in that space between the fibers of your carpet for the time period of for ever.

Of course, sometimes you’re working on a particularly cool objet d’art in your living room because you just moved into a new house and your craft area hasn’t been set up yet and these things can’t be helped.

And now we’re into the story.

It’s already started!

If we’re being picky about it, all this already happened and I’m going back in time to tell you the story of how I became Anne of Greenville (formerly Anne of a Few Cities Other Than Greenville). It’s also the story of how I found my true true, and how I needed to maybe come to Greenville, of all places, to make that happen.

Speaking of Greenville, I should probably set the scene a little. Because if you don’t know Greenville, and arguably, if you don’t live here, you’ve probably never heard of Greenville (I hadn’t), you might need a little wiki info to get you started.

Greenville is a very small town in a state that is about six states to the east of any state I have ever lived in. It’s what Millie, my mom, who was born in a small town called Pepperdown, North Carolina (so cute, right?), calls The Ultimate Small Town. Greenville’s total pop. when we arrived was 5,004 (5,007 once my family moved in—so that sign will need to be changed).

My first impression of Greenville was that it was very, very hard to see anything, because it was night. And night in Greenville is, like, really really dark. I arrived with my two moms in a U-Haul full of mostly books and cooking supplies, as well as our ginger cat, Bjorn, and our golden retriever, Monty. Greenville dark is not like city dark, where every street is lit up by a streetlight, as if you had a house and every room had a lamp on. Greenville felt like a house with no lamp on. Admittedly, when I first looked out the moving-van window at our new town, awakened from an in-van nap by a “we’re almost there,” my heart kind of sank. I felt like I was looking out into the void, and it was looking back at me. And not in a pleasant way.

As we pulled into our driveway, Monty looked out the window and whined. I opened the van door and the only thing in the wind was the soft rustle of leaves and crickets.

That’s it.

“Hear that quiet?” Millie said, stretching her arms from the drive. “That’s country quiet.”

“This isn’t the country,” Lucy, my other mom, corrected, digging our new house key out of her purse.

“Oh, it’s country all right.” Millie grinned, striding to the front door. “Just you wait.”

A few more things about Greenville I noticed once I actually saw it in the daylight:

1. Greenville is the kind of place where everyone keeps a wreath on their door. Even if it isn’t a winter holiday. Most of these wreaths are decorated with plastic flowers.
2. Greenville is the kind of place where everyone has two cars because everything is so far apart you have to drive everywhere (unless you roller-skate, which I think is preferable).
3. Most of Greenville doesn’t have sidewalks, maybe because everyone drives (see #2).
4. All the trees in Greenville are puffy and green, like someone drew them with a crayon.
5. Greenville is a place that feels both very very big and very very small. Like maybe because there’s no tall buildings, there’s so much more room for the ground and the sky to stretch out, which feels big. But also there’s so little to look at besides the green ground and the blue sky, it feels. . .small.

Mostly I couldn’t decide if any of the things I noticed about Greenville were good or bad. Maybe because I couldn’t decide what they meant. And where in them would fit the puzzle that was me. Or vice versa.

I tried not to think about it those first few days. I unpacked (sort of), lost Bjorn (three times), found Bjorn (three times), and made papier-mâché disco globes (because I had all the materials).

And then, on the day of the beginning of my story, which, yes, we’re now getting to, it was sunny, I had to start thinking about it.

Greenville and me.

It was August, so, it was hot. Not like your-sequins-are-going-to-melt-off-you hot (which is too hot). But hot.

I loaded my newly (sort of) dry disco globes into the back of Millie’s car because she was going to drop me off in the town center while she went off to do house stuff like go buy forks because we still couldn’t find any forks, which was weird because we could find spoons and we definitely packed forks! (What, were the forks and spoons fighting or something? Did the spoons win?) During the drive, Millie eyeballed my disco balls. “Those aren’t going to get glitter all over my car, are they?”

“Probably, yes.”

I’d lived in small cities before Greenville, just FYI, but most of them had at least three grocery stores and a corporate retail chain or two. Greenville had: A grocery store, A drugstore, and A post office, plus An ice cream parlor, A place to get wings, and A place to buy running shoes. OH. And A pizza place.

It was Saturday and pretty much everyone seemed to be out and about; everywhere you could see the citizens of Greenville walking around with ice cream cones and shopping bags in groups of three or four, in what I would call Greenville’s Times Square, the intersection of the streets of Main, Center, and Division. One thing I will say, as far as town squares went, Greenville’s was at least very clean. No garbage anywhere. Everyone seemed to have their natural hair color, and everyone except me was wearing sandals and nice shirts. And shorts/pants obviously.

Imagine moving to a town where no one wears pants.

After assessing what space was available, I picked a spot by a big brass statue of an old white man and started hanging up my globes on the signposts, at which point an old guy with white hair under a white baseball cap started surveilling me with what I hoped was a mix of curiosity and anticipation.

I taped my last papier-mâché disco ball to the last post and placed my speaker at the edge of what I determined to be my “performance space.” I strapped on my favorite pair of roller skates, which are orange leather with green sparkly wheels and yellow laces, which not coincidentally matched the orange and green of my amazing polyester sequined jumpsuit with extra-wide bell-bottom cuffs (custom, obv). Putting on my skates is very often, if not the best part of my day, like, pretty high up there on the list. I personally, not that anyone has asked, think everyone should own a pair of roller skates. It’s like putting wings on your feet, like that god Hermes, but with way less family baggage.

I took a breath.

“Here we go,” I whispered to myself.

I pressed play and set the wheels in motion (literally) for my introduction to Greenville, by way of a hastily assembled roller disco performance to the best song in the world: “Funkytown.”

Extended mix.

“Funkytown,” by Lipps Inc, is a track from their debut album, Mouth to Mouth. It was written by musician, composer, and record producer Steven Greenberg and sung by Cynthia Johnson, who later became a member of the gospel group Sounds of Blackness. I’ll say the album, on the whole, is not a full-on collection of hits. “All Night Dancing” is a little slow, and you’ve probably never heard of “Rock It” and “Power.” But “Funkytown,” the hit single, has survived many decades as an amazing and relevant dance track for a reason: It is so so so so good. “Funkytown” is a song I often use as the base or first act of my various performances.

My moms say I have a tendency to get “lost” in things: Millie says I am a daydreamer, Lucy will say I am sometimes easily distracted. Both are definitely true when I am making art or performing. I don’t know what a person is supposed to be thinking when they’re making art, or dancing, or singing. I mean it’s not like my brain stops working when I’m doing any of these things. But it definitely works different. Like when I’m just normal me, I can see the things that are in front of me, like a tree, or a fountain, or a lamp. When I’m making art, it’s like everything gets. . .intense? Or like, lighter but deeper?

Like, I can see the things, but I can also see all these things that could be. Like all the symbolism jumps out, and the fountain is suddenly “flow” and “rejuvenation” and all that junk. And I can see me in those things, in these evolving worlds, I guess? And in those evolving worlds, anything is possible.

Anything is possible feels like a fresh slice of lemon in your brain.

I could feel the smile spreading out over my lips as my skates glided over the pavement.

“Boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop.”

As my wheels rolled over the concrete, everything went rainbow gooey. The sequins on my outfit flashed in the sun and sent little prism rainbows around the square, which was what I’d hoped would happen. About two minutes into the song, after a series of slow swoops around the fountain, just to let people know what I was about, I did a back walkover into a spin and down into the splits.

That kind of move is what is called a “crowd pleaser” in that way most circus/gymnastics–type stuff is crowd pleasing (or Cirque du Soleil wouldn’t exist). This move is normally where I pause, if only for a moment, and take in what Lucy calls “the temperature of the room.”

Or the square in this case.

I looked up from my splits, my palms pressed onto the baking pavement of the square, to the equally heated glares of the residents of Greenville, some with ice creams, some without.

Not the best reception.

Which was not entirely unpredictable.

TWO

Okay. For most of the time I have known myself, I have always been a person who is. . .different.

Mostly when other people talk about me being different they want to talk about the fact that I have two moms, which is not super different depending on where you are, but it’s a little different than a lot of the kids I’ve gone to school with.

I’m adopted; both my moms are white and I’m half-Japanese. I am the biological child of my mom Millie’s cousin Susan and was adopted after Susan and my bio dad, Dean, died in a car accident. I was three when this happened, so I mostly only have vague glowy memories of my biological parents. I know my grandma Hana looks like an old female version of Dean. (I have a sum total of four grandmothers, two moms, one grandfather, and one step-grandfather as a result of this family setup, which is either a lot or enough depending on what I need at any given time).

Really, I think the thing that sets me apart from my moms, like if you look at us from a distance, is the fact that when I was ten, I started dying my hair orange because it’s my favorite color and my parents said so long as I didn’t get it all over the bathtub it was okay.

(I totally get it in the bathtub, though.)

Once, when I was twelve, an old lady stopped me in the elevator and told me I shouldn’t dye it. To which I replied, “Maybe YOU should mind your own business.” Lucy said this would have been an acceptable response to the lady’s very rude comment if I hadn’t yelled it super loud into her face.

No one in my household is okay with yelling. Which means you can pretty much say whatever you want if you say it in an even tone. Nothing you say in anything resembling a shout is going to be okay.

Ahem.

Of course, you could also say that everyone’s upbringing and hair is unique and not really worth calling out as “different.” Both of my moms hate the word normal, like as in what is a “normal” family? Like who defines that, right? The patriarchy? Probably.

Unfortunately, a complete discussion of the origins of the so-called normal and why normal is a construct would get us way off course storywise, so let’s say the previously mentioned things are part of who I am and things that have been called out as being different. But really there are just so many other more interesting ways a person can be. . .unusual.

And I am all of them. I think.

Like, I’m pretty sure I don’t think like other people. Aside from the things I see when I’m making art, I bet I spend way more time than most people thinking about things that could exist versus all the things that do exist. Like once I spent a week dreaming about all the different ways an elephant could look. Like what if their ears were softer and covered in fur and stuck up in the air?

When I was six, I had an imaginary friend named Danny, a purple unicorn who was also a lawyer and a model. And I would spend all this time talking to Danny about fashion and my dreams, and my moms would have to remind me that he was imaginary so I would calm down about getting him to his auditions and court appearances on time.

“If Danny’s not there, who else is going to stand up for the little creatures of the magic forest?” I wailed, on a particularly vexing day. “Who will grace the cover of Unicorn Fair?”

“Oh, sweetie,” Lucy cooed, “why do you insist on using your imagination to worry yourself into more problems?”

I had a friend once who was obsessed with knowing which of my moms I was “actually related to.” Which to me was and is just absurd (and I would never tell her, which is why we stopped being friends). Like, honestly, who cares? One, we’re a family; two, they both have to look after me—it’s not like biology changes that; and three, I am so clearly the result of both of their influences and obsessions. Like how Lucy likes to learn as many new things as possible. For example, the whole reason I learned how to roller-skate was because she saw a movie about roller-skating and then she wanted to learn how and teach me how.

The gift that keeps on giving.

And Millie is the artist who likes to try to look at things from as many different angles as possible. Like how she takes pictures of people from a camera mounted over their heads or at their feet, which is the series she started working on before we moved to Greenville.

As moms, sometimes I think Lucy has more patience for my stuff because she’s a teacher. But I think Millie gets me more because she’s an artist. Like, I think Millie gets why I need to make a thing because it’s in my head and I want to see it in the world. Even if the trip from my head to the world can be. . .rocky.

(Side note: Millie and Lucy are both kind of athletic and wear what I would describe as sensible shoes. I can almost immediately tell whether someone else is queer by whether they think Millie and Lucy are sisters or partners. Like sisters? Are you for real? Look at their matching sensible shoulder bags!)

Actually one of my first performances was a tribute to mothers, created for Lucy’s grandmother’s ninetieth birthday when I was seven. (Originally it was supposed to be a ninety-minute performance, but I was told I had six minutes, max—a time allowance I know Lucy fought for.)

It was a dance, not to “Funkytown,” but a song Grandma Shirley liked, “Sing Sing Sing (with a Swing)” originally written by Louis Prima and covered by Benny Goodman. I made tap shoes and decorated my leotard so I would look like what in my mind was an old-timey dancer.

Halfway through the dance, Lucy’s cousin Herbert ran up and pulled me off the stage because he said I was up there “shaking my hips in my underwear” and it was disgusting.

The first abrupt end to one of my performances.

But not the last.

Not everyone gets it. Or almost no one gets it.

I know that.

And sometimes, the not getting it can be louder than disco.

Oh. Also, I go off on what Millie calls “epic tangents.” Which are (almost) always relevant. And eventually connect back to the story.

THREE

See?

Okay, so there I was. In Greenville. The last strains of “Funkytown” fading into the sunny day. Either my audience was not loving what was happening or they were the quietest audience in the history of audiences. Or both.

I was getting up from my epic splits, brushing the bits of gravel off my palms, thinking.

I had two choices: One, keep going. Like, the show must go on (a theater saying that people used to say way back in the 1900s and also a song by the epic band Queen). Two, act like the three-part disco roller performance was actually a one part, take my bow, and roll off into the sunset.

If you’re caught up, it’s not going to surprise you to hear that I took option one.

Heck yeah, I did! Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” came on (recorded in 1978 and originally released as a B-side if you can believe it). That’s like the most powerful gay song (not sung by a gay person) in the world!

I blew a kiss to the crowd, did a jump turn, pumped twice, and flew into a sit spin. I came out of that, waved to the crowd, and went right back into a series of hurricane kicks that I then transitioned into a heel toe spin, because I love spinning; the world flew into a stream of light and dark when suddenly. . .

The music cut out.

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