Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling (14 page)

Deborah Heiligman, Patricia Lakin Koenigsberg, Elizabeth Levy, Roxane Orgill, and Erika Tamar, for their sustaining friendship, brilliant suggestions, and fine editing skills these many years.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for creating the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and for her warmth and enthusiasm when The Girls received the award.

My editor, Anne Schwartz, for believing that the early pages she saw could be a book, and then, with tenacity and great good humor, urging it into being and making it more than I’d dreamed. Stephanie Pitts, for her enormous care with the manuscript from beginning to end.

I must also thank Richard Jackson, from whom I’ve learned so much, so happily.

Chess and Shannon’s story is entirely fiction, but I’ve tried my best to get the medical details right and to accurately present what is known about Crohn’s disease at this time. For that, and so much else, I thank Dr. Scott Weber.

There are no words for my gratitude to my husband, Peter Frank, for his incomparable editor’s eye and for encouraging, inspiring, and sticking with me. Through everything.

Lucy Frank won a PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for her work on
Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling.
The author of eight novels for young adults and middle graders, she divides her time between New York City and upstate New York. Learn more at
lucyfrank.com
.