The book opens with a lightning bolt of a sentence: “It took three car crashes to kill Jake.” But it’s the second line that strikes the heart: “I was there for the first two.”
Jake is 17 when the story begins, and Theron is 15. We hear the story from the survivor, but Jake is no ghost. He is immediately dazzling, even before we know him as anything more than the manager of the hardware store where Theron’s father has insisted he spend the summer working.
Jake is confident and practiced where Theron is nervous and self-conscious (drugs, music taste, human interaction). At first, all Theron can see is Jake’s enviable ease. But he begins to understand that people who move so easily are a little unhinged; that a confident driver is often a reckless one. And somewhere in the process of this understanding, they fall in love.
Some books surprise you with loss, but August Thompson makes grief part of the deal. When you kill a character on the first page, no happiness is pristine — not the sweetness of returning home, exhausted, after getting high and watching the sun set from a Walmart parking lot with your new friend who might also be the love of your life, and not even the thrill of the first kiss, years later, on a dark city street.
In Theron’s retelling, you must read each joy as a memory that he has been left to bear alone: “There are too many lives that exist now, only in me.”
Have you ever loved someone in secret? Have you ever been left to carry the memory of this love alone? Have you ever wished you could tell someone the whole story, 
start to finish?
To be a reader of “Anyone’s Ghost” is to be that someone, for Theron. To bear witness to something almost too tender to tell. To be left with a bursting heart, wanting nothing more than to be back in the passenger seat: moving too fast, music too loud, sure hands steering for miles under blushing skies. Before anyone was a ghost to you, and before you were a ghost to anyone else.
Tags: child of divorce, coming of age, dirtbag summer, Metallica, middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, New York City, unrequited love
