Color outside the Lines

Sangu Mandanna

Chapters (18)

Published in the United States by Soho Teen

an imprint of Soho Press, Inc.

227 W 17th Street

New York, NY 10011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mandanna, Sangu, editor.

Color outside the lines : stories about love / edited by Sangu Mandanna

ISBN 978-1-64129-046-3

eISBN 978-1-64129-047-0

1. Love—Juvenile fiction. 2. Short stories, American. 3. Short stories. 4. Love—Fiction.

I. Title

PZ5 .C723 2019 [Fic]—dc23 2019017621

Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Editor’s Note

When people ask me why I wanted to put this anthology together, I’m often tempted to give them the simplest answer: because representation matters.

That’s not the whole story.

I first started thinking about this project at a restaurant near my home in Norwich (which, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is a beautiful little city in the east of England). A waiter looked at my husband, at me, and at our three children, and asked, “Are you paying separately?”

It was a pebble in my shoe that I couldn’t quite shake. Given the backdrop of the Brexit vote, especially, with countless families afraid they would be forced to separate, I found myself thinking about what it means to be in a relationship like mine.

Interracial. Multicultural.

Families like mine are just like families where everyone’s the same color. We get excited about Christmas. We go to the beach. We fight over who forgot to post that letter last week (spoiler: it’s never me). We’re just like other families, and we’re not. Interracial dynamics are different. My husband and I spent eight years together before someone asked us if we were paying separately, but someone did eventually. It was this small, unimportant thing that made me think about all the other small, unimportant things and big, important things about families like mine that can’t be told in a single story.

So why not a whole collection of stories?