Ask Me Again

CLARE SESTANOVICH, named a “5 Under 35” honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2022, is the author of the story collection Objects of Desire, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

"At sixteen, Rosa meets Jamie by chance. She lives in middle-class South Brooklyn; he comes from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She's observant, cautious, eager to seem normal; he's curious, bold, full of mysteries. She keeps a keen intelligence under wraps; his eccentric brilliance is all but impossible to repress. While Rosa welcomes Jamie into her family's embrace, he avoids going home; with little in common, these two questers are drawn together in a deep friendship. As Rosa goes off to an elite college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and joins the Occupy Wall Street movement. Rosa, so often trapped by self-doubt, is both awed and repelled by the strength of Jamie's convictions. Carried forcefully along by Sestanovich's highly observant, butterfly-pinning prose, these two characters, pulled into separate spheres, circle the same questions: how to define their values and find their purpose, how to create a sense of self while discovering what they owe to society and to the cause of justice. The geometry of their platonic love leads us on a surprising journey of intimacy across time--exposing the alchemy of connection, of the relationships that can define who we are and can even change us, and the possible futures we might not have imagined for ourselves."