The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone Read online

  MICHAEL FRANTIN: She was wearing a loose white dress. It billowed out all around her against the night sky. Is it wrong to say that it was enchanting? I’m sure that sounds overly romantic or something, but it didn’t look morbid. It looked like a movie or a dream.

  LUCY LIM: Lincoln and I always talk about it, how Addy just didn’t have that regular human dose of fear. I can imagine that other version so clearly, her toes on the edge, her dark eyes staring deep down into the water, needing to feel the dare. Another day, she might have jumped. But not that night. No, I don’t think Addy had organized a jump that night. But I think that when she slipped and fell, she would have decided right then that the accident was, in some way, intentional.

  Addy wouldn’t have blamed anyone, wouldn’t have thought about how we all had failed her, although we had. She would have pushed as deep as she could have into the experience, knowing that her death was imminent and rising up to meet her—and I bet she probably would have been thinking, “It’s a perfect summer night, there’s not a cloud in the sky, I told the only boy I ever loved that I loved him, and now I’m hurtling into the most perfect New York death I ever could have imagined for myself.”

  She would have been consumed only by the absolute beauty of the moment.

  If she’d had one regret, maybe, it was that she hadn’t paid someone to film it.

  WHILE I WAS WRITING and researching the book, both Lincoln Reed and Zachary Fratepetro were subjects of ongoing criminal investigation with regard to any culpability in the death of Addison Stone. At the time of this publication, Addison’s death was ruled an accident. Both young men have since been cleared, and all charges against them dropped.

  All artists aspire to a kind of immortality. Like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Dash Snow, and Francesca Woodman, Addison Stone now seems marked for both death and deity—we see her name and we feel its weight. And yet I hope this narrative has sparked an intimate sense of Addison’s life, filled with more scorching creativity than most of us will ever get to experience, even as we cherish, mourn, and remain riveted by her legacy.

  Photograph of Addison Stone by Francisco Marin for ReLive arts magazine.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ADDISON’S STORY IS A chorus, and I am grateful for every voice that contributed to it. Firstly, for their deep knowledge and understanding of this book’s crucial visual art component, I want to thank Alison Blickle, Cat Owens, Fiona Robinson, and particularly Michelle Rawlings, whose haunting portraiture defined Addison’s psyche. For her generous counsel from concept to loft space (not to mention her inimitable paint smock), a big thanks to the brilliant Anna Schuleit Haber. As my ethereal Addison, I am so thankful to Giza Lagarce, the perfect face and muse of this character, who also made her invention such a pleasure. Gabriela Bloomgarden, Max Cosmo, Robbie Couch, P. Zach Garner, Richard Holland, Fabian Lagarce, Monica Lagarce, Sara Li, and Evan Richards, thank you all for populating Addison World and sparking it to life. I am of course grateful to my fellow writers and early true believer readers: Michael Buckley, Julia DeVillers, Jenny Han, Elizabeth Kiem, Courtney Sheinmel, Adam Silvera, Bianca Turetsky, and Jessica Wollman—your affirmation is invaluable. I am hugely appreciative of Charlotte Sheedy and Emily Van Beek, as well as the ever-innovative Carly Croll, for such careful watch over this project from start to finish. I can’t even add up the hours my indefatigable husband, Erich Mauff, spent thinking through Addison Stone with me, but I do know I would not have imagined it nearly as wide and deep and real without him. A big hug for the whipsmart, feisty Soho Teen team; Janine Agro, Meredith Barnes, Juliet Grames, Bronwen Hruska, and Rachel Kowal—what a fascinating journey, thank you so much for all your work to make it happen. Finally, I am indebted to my editor, Dan Ehrenhaft; as a writer, he grasped the strange magic of this book before the first page had been written, and as an editor, he was confident enough let me run with it.