Chapter 1 - The Class of 2K15

Transcription

TA B L E O F CO N T E N TS
LOVE & OTHER THEORIES, Alexis Bass........................................................................3
5 TO 1, Holly Bodger........................................................................................................8
IN A WORLD JUST RIGHT, Jen Brooks........................................................................15
TINY PRETTY THINGS, Sona Charaipotra & Dhonielle Clayton........................22
MONSTROUS, MarcyKate Connolly...........................................................................30
MY NEAR-DEATH ADVENTURES (99% TRUE!), Alison DeCamp.......................36
NONE OF THE ABOVE, I. W. Gregorio........................................................................45
FOR THE RECORD, Charlotte Huang..........................................................................55
CITY OF SAVAGES, Lee Kelly.........................................................................................60
ZEROBOXER, Fonda Lee................................................................................................68
UNDER A PAINTED SKY, Stacey Lee...........................................................................76
INK AND ASHES, Valynne E. Maetani........................................................................82
EVERYTHING THAT MAKES YOU, Moriah McStay..................................................92
WHEN REASON BREAKS, Cindy L. Rodriguez.......................................................100
HELLO, I LOVE YOU, Katie M. Stout..........................................................................105
“A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.”
– Marilyn Monroe
Chapter 1
There’s one major reason I’m ready to be done with high school and it’s all culminating now,
the first day back from winter break, in Senior Drama 101. Because where else, right?
“Aubrey Housing,” Mrs. Seymour yells, her mouth full of potato chips. From her seat in the center of the auditorium, she points to the stage—as if I really didn’t know where I was supposed to be
going—and the grease on her hands glimmers in the spotlight.
I take my time walking down the aisle, not only because standing alone on the stage is the last
place I want to be, but because I can. I can take my time if I want to because I’m someone people will
wait for at this school.
I walk to the center of the stage and into the spotlight. Yes, for this first-day-of-the-semester
exercise, Mrs. Seymour has set up the actual spotlight. It was her TA, Melvin’s, idea. Clearly annoyed
that Senior Drama 101 wouldn’t provide him with much real theater experience, he’s trying to
squeeze in as much as possible. Melvin is going to be the rock in my shoe this semester, I can already
tell.
“Introduce yourself. Tell us three things about yourself,” Mrs. Seymour says loudly, the same
thing she’s said to the last eleven students to have a turn. “And remember to speak from your diaphragm.”
I nod at her, but I don’t smile. “I’m Aubrey Housing.” The only things people need to know
about me, they’re already completely aware of. I’m Shelby Chesterfield’s best friend. Trip Chapman’s
final conquest before graduating last year. The only student from Lincoln High in seven years to be
accepted to Barron University.
I reveal the same asinine information everyone’s been divulging. “My favorite color is purple,
I work at the French Roll, and—” I stop only because it gets noisy. There’s a rush of whispering and
squeaking—the sound of butts moving against chairs. It’s weird, being up here, how aware you are
of everything the audience does.
It doesn’t take long for me to notice what the big deal is. It’s a boy. A boy none of us has ever
seen before. No one can be cool. They all stare. Their typical reaction when someone new, good looking, and unapologetically male makes an appearance.
“And my favorite vacation spot is Lake Geneva,” I say loudly—projecting from my diaphragm—
to bring everyone’s attention back to me and away from the new boy walking obliviously down the
aisle toward the stage. He’s even holding his schedule out in front of him like he’s studying it. Like
there might be another auditorium and he’s in the wrong place. But then he looks up at me.
I’m not the first person to notice the new boy, but arguably I’m the first person he notices. Like
really, notices. And it might just be because of the spotlight.
“And what did you do this winter break?” Mrs. Seymour calls to me.
“I went skiing and—” I keep the new boy in my peripheral vision. He takes a seat up close. Not
like most of the other students, who are perched carefully in the back. The glow from the spotlight
makes him really visible to me. Too visible maybe. “And I visited Barron’s campus.”
The new boy smiles. That’s when I know I’m in trouble. His smile is amazing. It fits perfectly on
his face. Which, from what I can tell, is also amazing.
“Robert Jules,” Mrs. Seymour shouts, again with her mouth full.
Robert walks to the stage slowly—because he can—and there’s this awful lull of time when the
room is quiet while I walk back to my seat.
It’s weird. The new boy has chosen the seat exactly three seats away from the one my stuff is
resting on. I’m the only one sitting that close to the stage—just five rows away—and had I known
better I wouldn’t have sat there. But I didn’t know, until Robert Jules laughed at me and asked if I
needed glasses, that Senior Drama wasn’t like all the other classes—real classes—and it was actually
not going to help my grade to sit toward the front.
“I’m Robert Jules,” he says into the mic. “I love beautiful women, parties, and beautiful women.”
Thanks to the spotlight we can all see Robert wink. I shake my head because he just did that. But he’s
Robert Jules so he can do whatever he wants. “And over winter break I partied with beautiful women.
Right Aubrey, baby?”
Whatever he wants.
I cover my eyes with my left hand and continue shaking my head. It’s expected of me to do
this. I saw Robert Jules twice over winter break, which is twice more than I’ve ever seen him over any
of the twelve winter breaks that have passed since I met him in kindergarten. We took Jell-O shots—
that was a first. And he tried to get me to make out with my friend Melissa. That was obviously a bust.
The first thing I do when I uncover my eyes is glance at the new boy. I don’t mean to, but I’m
glad I did. Just as I’d suspected, the new boy is staring at me.
Robert is tall, dark, and muscular, and the consensus at Lincoln High is that he’s attractive. Everyone knows he’s a jokester. That he calls everyone Baby. They also know there never has and never
will be anything romantic or sexual between Robert and me. But the new boy doesn’t know any of
this. He might think I’m Robert’s only baby when really Robert’s been hooking up with my friend
Danica for the last few months. This might have really hurt any chance I have with the new boy.
Or it’s just guaranteed that I’ve got his attention.
Robert saunters down the aisle just as the new boy is walking up it. The new boy turns down
the aisle where Mrs. Seymour is sitting and leans over. She waves her hand toward the stage, and, not
taking his time at all, the new boy takes his position directly in the center of the spotlight. Everyone
gets unnervingly quiet.
He struggles to look at us, which is overly dramatic because I didn’t really think the spotlight
was so bad. “I’m Nathan Diggs,” he says loudly, but he’s definitely not projecting properly from his diaphragm. “I just transferred from San Diego, I’m eighteen, and my favorite food is chicken parmigiana.”
Nathan Diggs.
Nathan Diggs is attractive in a way I’m not familiar with, and it’s not just because he’s the only
boy at Lincoln High I haven’t known since I was five. Sure, he’s different. He’s not wearing the usual
guys o’ Lincoln High outfit of jeans, sneakers, t-shirt, hoodie. He’s not even opting for the I’m country
and rugged faded flannel and lamb’s wool that some of the seniors sported last year. The Chapman
Look, Shelby calls it—named for the style of Zane and Trip Chapman. The new boy is in a leather
jacket. I thought leather on a guy might look tacky. I was so wrong. I thought a leather jacket over a
sweatshirt would look boxy and uncomfortable, but apparently I was wrong about that too.
“I spent my winter break moving,” he concludes. I wait for the depression to come out, to hear
the self-loathing in his voice at having had to move the second semester of his senior year. What kind
of parents would do that? But he seems perfectly pleasant. That’s another thing about him. Even
though his eyes are really dark—darker than his deep brown hair—he still manages to look congenial.
He shrugs—he’s probably gathered that he shouldn’t wait for applause—and moves off the
stage. I watch out of the corner of my eye as Nathan Diggs returns to his chair. Approximately three
seats away from me.
In all honesty, I’m uncomfortable. I stay perfectly still, though, because it’s against everything I
believe in to show how physically altered I feel just because of a boy.
“Hey,” he whispers to me, leaning over the seat next to him.
I would have pretended not to hear him right away, made him work a little harder for my attention, but he’s startled me. My gut reaction was to look at him, so that’s exactly what’s happened.
He’s staring at me expectantly so I lean in toward him.
“Has she handed out the syllabus yet?” he whispers.
“Oh. No. There’s no syllabus.” He looks confused, which I find refreshing because usually everyone pretends they already know everything. “We’re graded on participation only,” I explain. I want to
point out to him that this isn’t a real class. There’s no assigned reading, no reason to sit in the front,
and the teacher eats potato chips while she’s teaching.
One of his eyebrows hitches up, like he’s still a little surprised. “We’ll really get a chance to show
off our theater skills then.”
It takes me a minute to realize that he’s joking. I laugh and am appalled at how breathy it is.
“Tough first day, eh?” he says.
Another joke. This time I’m ready for it and laugh appropriately.
“So who transfers the second semester of their senior year?” I ask him. It’s a legit question.
“I do.” Legit answer. He leans forward like he’s seriously debating getting up and moving to a
seat closer to me. I lean away from him, encouraging this.
Before Nathan can try to speak to me again and I can pretend not to hear him, forcing him to
move closer, Mrs. Seymour begins addressing the class, telling us something about improvisation.
Melvin is handing us sheets of paper. Nathan leans across the seats to pass me the handout and I
hesitate, waiting for him to use this as an excuse to move closer still. But he shakes it at me like he’s
afraid I don’t understand that he’s passing it to me. I snatch it out of his hand.
Mrs. Seymour tells us to spend the final fifteen minutes of class studying the sheet so we’ll be
prepared for tomorrow. She brushes the potato chips off her skirt and exits stage right with Melvin.
There are three bullet points on the sheet. Because describing a game where everyone stands
in a circle taking turns acting out various scenes takes only three bullet points to describe, and definitely not fifteen minutes to study.
“This is so lame,” I say just loud enough for Nathan to hear me. It is lame. Acting. Pretending to
be someone else in a make-believe scenario. As if high school isn’t fake enough. Especially Lincoln.
“We could…” Nathan pauses thoughtfully. Then he shakes his head, smiling.
“What?” I ask and I’m genuinely curious, though I try to play it off that I’m more annoyed he
hasn’t finished his sentence. “Tell me.”
He shrugs, shakes his head. “I was going to say we could leave.” He gives me a small smile and
keeps shaking his head. He’s joking.
Because leaving is absurd.
Rephrase: Usually, for me, ditching class is crazy. I didn’t get into Barron by cutting class.
I steal another glance at him, at this face I’ve never seen before until today. It occurs to me that
Nathan doesn’t know who I am, or that ditching class, for me, is unthinkable.
“It’s going to be lunchtime soon anyway,” I say. The casualness in my voice scares me, but I soldier on. Nathan’s head is slightly cocked, his large smile shrinking. “Lunch is in fifteen minutes…” I tell
him this as if he wasn’t diligently studying the schedule just minutes ago. “Do you want to just leave?”
He gives me this look then. The look. The one that says I’m all yours. It’s weird when a boy
seems vulnerable like this. It was especially weird when I got this look last year from Trip Chapman,
who wasn’t really ever vulnerable. I was always at Trip’s mercy—everyone was—so when he gave me
this look—eyes wider than usual, waiting for their cue, lips pressed together, too unsure to smile—I
knew I had all the power. It felt good.
“You think we’ll get away with that?” he asks. “You don’t think we’ll get in—caught? You don’t
think we’ll get caught?” he repeats himself, but it’s too late. He was about to say you don’t think we’ll
get in trouble?
I like that he knows he’s not supposed to show he’s afraid of trouble.
I look back at the stage one last time. There’s no sign of Mrs. Seymour or Melvin. I take a deep
breath and repeat in my head the mantra Shelby told me last Monday night before handing me
a homemade margarita. It was exactly twenty seconds before our favorite show, Mercy Rose, was
about to start, so she spoke quickly. “Now that you’ve been accepted into Barron, you need to join
the rest of us and get a real life. It’s your senior year, Brey, time for you to party it up.” I normally never
joined in on Monday nights when my friends decided to drink during our weekly viewings of Mercy
Rose, but I’d polished off two margaritas by the time the show was over.
Shelby was right. She always is.
“I think if you don’t follow me, you’ll be sorry.” I can’t look at him when I say this. I shove past
Nathan, not even waiting for him to move his legs, and walk briskly up the aisle toward the exit. I
know people are staring. They must be. But I just keep walking. As I burst through the back doors of
the auditorium, I don’t even turn around to see if Nathan’s following me. I already know he is.
Chapter 2
My best friend Shelby Chesterfield is never wrong. Not in fourth grade, when she told me that
Jell-O was made from horses’ hooves. Not in eighth grade, when she said that Patrick Smith always
carried his science book around to cover his boner. Not the first day of freshman year, when she
promised me high school would be better than all the grades before it.
And she wasn’t wrong the night of the Homecoming Dance junior year. The night we learned
officially that everything we’d theorized about boys and high school and love was, in fact, true.
“What time is it?” I’d asked. Again. We were standing in the middle of the football field. It was
dark, but I knew Shelby was rolling her eyes. I heard an annoyed sigh and knew it was Danica.
“Chill out,” Danica said, her voice muffled. There was a clicking noise, and a flame appeared in
front of us, flashing light on Danica’s dark brown eyes and wild dark curls. Too close for Melissa’s comfort. She backed away, shrieking a little.
“Jesus,” Danica said, lighting the cigarette sandwiched between her lips. Her voice was raspier
than normal from the cold and from having spent the last three hours singing along with the music
at Homecoming, but she also kept it raspy on purpose. “For seduction purposes,” Shelby claimed, but
I think that voice just came with Danica, and was part of her fierceness. She didn’t move here until
fifth grade, but even then, her voice was on the gruffer side. I think that’s why Shelby started talking
to her, just to hear her talk back.
“Be careful.” Melissa returned to our huddle, but gathered her long blond hair in a side pony.
Away from Danica.
Danica punished Melissa for this by blowing smoke in her face. But the smoke was warm so it
wasn’t exactly a punishment. The ash from her cigarette fell in flakes, the light fading before it hit the
ground. We all watched it flicker in front of us. Because we didn’t have anything else to watch.
“I don’t think they’re coming,” I finally declared. Someone had to say it. I was sure we were all
thinking it.
“I thought you were supposed to be the smartest one out of all of us,” Shelby said. Danica’s cigarette floated a few feet and landed in Shelby’s mouth. She took a long, slow drag. The same amount
of time it took for her insult to sink in.
“And speaking as the smart one, I think it’s time to bail before we all get pneumonia,” I said.
“Maybe we should wait in the car?” Melissa offered. Her teeth chattered on the word the. She
was probably the coldest since she was the skinniest, even though she was almost as tall as Shelby
and me, hitting five-seven when we were five-eight. Shelby claimed to really be five-nine. It was
because Melissa was such a picky eater, a picky person, really. We knew she’d been born like this because Shelby and I had known her since kindergarten.
“If we wait in the car Chiffon won’t see us,” Shelby said. “Were you paying attention to the plan
at all?”
“Yes. I was. I just think…” But Melissa knew better than to finish.
The plan. For Shelby it was a plan. It might have been a plan for Danica and Melissa too. For me
it was a test.
5 TO 1
H O L LY B O D G E R
Sudasa
1.
One month from today,
I’ll wake to a team of
makeup artists—
hair stylists—
buzzing outside my door.
At Nani’s command, they’ll
swarm.
They’ll
poke
me with their glittery swords;
paint
me with their honey.
I’ll fight the urge to scratch it away,
because I’m
Sudasa the obedient
and I must keep my fingers
gluedtogether
like the dolls
Asha and I
left buried under my bed.
When the artists flee,
the designers will inch into place.
They’ll
spin
me in their silks;
garnish
me with their golds.
They’ll lift me onto an easel;
wait for Nani
to stamp me
DONE!
Text copyright © 2015 by Holly Bodger. All Rights Reserved. Published in the United States by Knopf Books, an imprint of Random House
Children’s Books, a division of Random House L.L.C., a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
5 TO 1
After that, I’ll be placed upon
an elephant—
the only creature who’ll appear
more ridiculous than me.
She’ll deliver me
to a temple with
no god.
Then Nani will send me
down the aisle with
strict
instructions
to keep my
gaze
off my
beaded shoes.
The people of Koyanagar will
Watch me.
Question me.
Love me?
Hate me.
Hate me for not marrying
their son.
For not bearing
his children daughters.
For not guaranteeing
his future
At the end of the aisle,
a boy—
squeezed into a black sherwani—
will sit on a chair,
his spine as rigid as its spindles.
He won’t look at me;
won’t dare.
5 TO 1
I won’t look at him either.
Will look at the woman
in front of him.
The one with the stole of
red.
The color of love?
No.
The color of blood.
Blood of birth. Blood of death.
The only things that matter
in Koyanagar.
When I stop in front of the woman—
Koyanagar’s only marriage officiant—
she’ll scan the papers in her hand.
Commence the same speech
she must utter for the
two hundred girls
who turn seventeen this year.
Her first words today—
they won’t be for Papa.
He doesn’t have a say. Can’t give me away.
How could he?
You can only give away
that
which is yours to lose.
No. Instead, she’ll tell me to
 sit 
then she’ll motion
for the flowers to come.
Long garlands of lilies.
Orange lilies.
The flower of purity.
(Or some say, pride).
5 TO 1
She’ll ignite the fire
of butter and wool.
Tell the boy and me to
stand.
link our hands.
She’ll tell us to take
seven steps. Accept
seven blessings. Spend
seven seconds
to circle around the fire.
When we’re done,
she’ll present us to the audience.
Me
and my husband:
the boy.
Only she won’t call him that.
She’ll call him a name.
A name I will not know.
Until then, he’ll be a
n#mber
from the Koyanagar Registry.
Not a boy named
Ravi.
Jamal.
Shahid.
Not a fiancé.
Or a friend.
A n#mber.
5 TO 1
Today,
before any of this can happen,
I have to get out of bed.
Have to put on my sari.
Have to open my door.
Have to accept Nani’s advice.
Have to pretend Mummy gives some too.
Have to get in our carriage.
Have to ride through the crowds.
Have to sit in the theatre.
Have to wait for my turn.
Have to follow the rules.
Have to smile like I agree.
Have to
Have to
Have to
Have to
Choose him.
Chapter 1
It’s two o’clock in the morning, and the streetlight stretches my shadow across Kylie’s lawn up into
her mother’s English garden. My shadow’s head is where the fat yellow lilies will bloom after graduation this summer. Bunches of smaller flowers her mom planted yesterday, a rainbow of color in
sunlight, sleep under a blanket of moonlight gray.
I glance up and down the street at a neighborhood of unlit windows, to confirm no one saw
me appear out of thin air.
Without crushing anything, I navigate Kylie’s garden and squeeze between bushes to reach the
window. Her curtains are drawn, so I can’t see inside. With a kick to the mulch, I uncover the butter
knife we hid there and slide it along the window’s edge to unhitch the screen. I push the unlocked
window up, then part the curtains to see into the room.
Kylie’s sitting up in bed. Awake. Startled. Watching me come through the window. She relaxes
when she figures out it’s just me, Jonathan, the messed-up boyfriend.
I crash into the room as quietly as I can and slip off my sneakers. Kylie slides over and pulls back
the covers for me to lie down. She won’t ask if I’m okay, because clearly I’m not. I don’t make surprise
nighttime visits casually.
“Did I scare you?” I ask.
“A little.”
“Sorry.”
She props her head on her hand, her long red-brown hair looking black as it trails to the pillow. The darkness smooths her face, gives her two wide eyes over a bump of nose and kissable lips.
Lips denied me in the real world. She presses closer, and our lips meet. For a few glorious moments
we kiss each other, and I start to feel better. She’s warm and smells like she showered before bed, all
coconutty or pineappley or something.
Then she pulls away. Her eyes search my face, waiting.
I don’t actually want to talk. I want more kissing. I want more her. I reach for her hand, separate
out her index finger, and draw it down the left side of my face, from my eye practically to my jaw.
She doesn’t flinch, and that is exactly what I need. I pull up my shirt and place her hand on my chest,
where the scarring is the worst. She moves her fingers over the snarls and craters, caresses them,
then replaces my shirt and kisses the scar on my face.
Her eyes look into mine. Most people can’t look me in the eyes. The real Kylie has never looked
me in the eyes, but this Kylie seeps into me with a gaze. She is not disgusted by me. She loves me.
She puts a finger to the scar on my face. “Is this bothering you again?”
“I don’t know.” Actually, that’s a lie. What’s bothering me is the weird cosmic whisper I got just
before I came here, which scared me more than my near-death memories, but I do not discuss cosmic topics with Kylie.
Thankfully, she rolls with my faked ignorance and stays focused on my scar. “It’s just a line.” She
moves a little deeper into the covers and puts her head on my chest, ear to my heart. “ And
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Brooks. All Rights Reserved.
Published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Excerpt used wtih permission.
evidence that you’re a miracle.”
I enfold her in my arms and say nothing. No one in the real world cares that I’m a miracle, not
since the doctors congratulated themselves and discharged me.
“Seriously,” she says, and I can feel her words vibrate against my chest. “Do you want to talk
about it?”
Talking won’t help. Sometimes the truth cannot set you free. Sometimes, when the night is bad
and the universe taunts me, I just need to be with my girlfriend.
“I feel better now,” I say.
Kylie breathes a contented sigh and snuggles against me. My body practically shivers with the
ecstasy of being with her. She’s everything I need to live, and she’s not even real.
Here’s a story for you. Once upon a time there was this kid named Jonathan Aubrey. He was eight
years old. He had a mom and a dad and a six-year-old sister, Tess, and an Auntie Carrie and Uncle
Joey. One day they all got on a plane to Disney World. Except for Uncle Joey, who was on some business trip or other. It was going to be the funnest, most perfect trip of a lifetime. The airplane took off
. . . and fell out of the sky into Boston Harbor. (Yes, the Tragedy in the Harbor, the famous crash they
contrasted with the Miracle on the Hudson.)
Little Jonathan was one of three people who survived. He spent three months at Massachusetts General Hospital in a coma, and when he woke up, they sent him home. Except there wasn’t
anyone at home anymore. They were in the ground at Pine Street Cemetery, and he had missed all
the funerals and everything.
He went to live at Uncle Joey’s house instead. Uncle Joey tried to be good to Jonathan, but
there was that business thing that often kept him away, and Uncle Joey was grieving just as bad
because he’d lost Auntie Carrie.
Jonathan didn’t come out of that coma the same way he went in. He had a little lag in his
speech. He limped. He had burns and scars on parts of his body. Most of the ugly skin he kept covered with long sleeves and pants, even on days when it got to be almost a hundred degrees. But
one uncoverable, ragged red scar ran from his eye to his jaw, and the marks of the stitches made a
railroad track on his face. When he returned to school, kids were afraid of him. Teachers tried to be
nice, but they just couldn’t stop every kid who whispered “Frankenstein.” Jonathan learned to take it
quietly. At recess he’d sit on the monkey bars pretending he was part of everyone’s play, even though
he got thoroughly ignored. He paid attention in school and liked his teachers, but teachers’ attention
wasn’t enough, and they tried too hard to make him feel normal. He wanted so much to be asked to
play kickball. The closest he got was when Hunter LeRoy made him fetch the ball out of some poison
ivy, saying that if he got a rash it couldn’t make him any uglier. He really said that. Hunter LeRoy is a
jerk to this day.
Jonathan would sit in his room in Uncle Joey’s house and stare out the window. Sometimes he
would pretend the street crawled with kids fighting some kind of rebellion against alien invaders,
and he was their leader. He would have friends and daring escapades with a healthy dose of heroics,
and his scar would be a badge of honor, a war wound.
One day he squeezed his eyes shut so tightly with longing that when he opened them . . . he
was standing in the middle of a battle with a gun in his hands. There were people and aliens running
in the street. Laser blasts shot craters into the manicured lawns. Tanks, helicopters, bodysuits full of
gadgetry everywhere. He was wearing a bodysuit full of gadgetry. “Commander Aubrey!” someone
yelled. Jonathan made a motion with his arm, and a dozen kid soldiers followed him down the street
to fight the alien invaders.
This new world was Jonathan-is-a-hero. He went there a lot. Until he figured out it was not the
only world he could make.
I’m awake before Kylie, watching the red digital numbers count down the time till her alarm. Two
more minutes.
She’s rolled away from me, forehead pressing against the wall, and most of the covers are
bunched in her curled arms. I’m on my back, lying at the other edge of the bed, not touching her
with my disturbed thoughts.
I am here because something happened last night—a breath, a murmur, a shift in the earth,
like everything under me slid a millimeter off center from where it should be, which is a weird feeling
when everything looks perfectly normal and no sound at all has been made. But I got all creeped-out
in a way I feel silly trying to explain, and the shiver I got was so powerful, it sent me scrambling out of
bed and over to Kylie’s, just so she could put right the world.
To a certain extent I just have to put up with weirdness in my totally weird life. Kylie fixed my
mood, so all’s quiet on the western front this morning.
I can’t reward her for her good deed by letting the squawk of the alarm wake her, so I carefully
turn it off and roll myself over to fit my body to hers. She makes a little groany wake-up noise and
pulls my arm over her.
“What time is it?” she whispers.
“Would you believe me if I said school’s canceled?”
She takes a deep breath and sighs it out, and we lie there together, content for a moment before we roll back the covers and rise. We exchange a few kisses laced with morning breath, which are
sweet anyway.
“You okay?” she asks.
“All better.” I convince her with a smile. She reflects it back at me, magnified by her beautifulness, and I come this close to dragging her back under the covers.
With a final kiss she leaves for the bathroom. I slip out the window, replace the screen, and
rebury the butter knife. Since witnesses are waking in the surrounding houses, I crouch in the bushes
to vanish back to reality.
Step one: Squeeze eyes closed.
Step two: Picture world. (That would be the real world this time.)
Step three: Open eyes.
That’s all there is to it.
I’m standing perfectly still in the woods behind Pennington High School, sensing the world
around me. Nothing seems out of place. Relief carries away my tension like rain washing down a roof.
Whatever was worrying me last night has passed.
I trudge up a path through the woods to the school. Because my house is pretty far away, there
wasn’t enough time to walk here and still get to class by the bell, so my sacrifice for a few hours earlier with Kylie is a shower at school.
The back door is always open in the morning, so I sneak inside, grab stuff from my gym locker,
and clean up. My shampoo’s not coconutty or pineappley, but it squelches any thoughts my scalp
might have about starting a dandruff habit. I wore (mostly) clean jeans to Kylie’s last night, so they’re
good to go again today, and the T-shirt I pull out of my backpack smells much better than the one I
slept in. Okay. Ready to face another day.
I push open the locker room door as someone else yanks from the outside. There’s a second of
shock before I recognize the other guy and try to lighten things with a “Hey, Mark,” but he brushes
past me like I’m not there. Not even a grunt of acknowledgment from the kid voted this year’s class
chatterbox.
This real-world invisible treatment, after so many years, has lost its sting. The locker room door
shuts behind me, sealing me in the empty hallway. I shortcut to my E-Hall locker through the weight
room, and a wall of mirrors announces that I, Jonathan Aubrey, do in fact exist. I create a reflection in
a real mirror in the real world, so I can only assume I’m not actually invisible.
Granted, invisibility would be a great superpower to have, but world-making will have to do,
since it’s the power I got.
There’s still about ten minutes before first period, so I take my time at my yellow-over-blueover-brown-over-orange-painted locker. There are so many layers, the lockers stick when you open
and close the doors. Pennington High School is something like sixty years old, a building that’s out of
date without being charming. The desks and chairs are chiseled, and graffitied, and covered in grime
from thousands of student bodies. About half the windows are Plexiglas replacements that’ve yellowed with time.
Fellow seniors in this hallway grab books and move on, talking about college plans, sports
practice, homework they need to copy. When I feel that stalling another second at my locker will
be overkill loser-ish, I slam the door shut and head off for a walk around the more crowded halls of
freshmen, sophomores, and juniors who take the bus and therefore arrive sooner. I’ll be just another
anonymous walker until it’s safely late enough to grab my seat in first period.
As usual, no one greets me in passing. No one looks at me in their rush to do whatever they
need to do. I could be here or not and the school day would go on just the same. I’m missed only by
the computer that adds up the absences my teachers input when I’m gone to Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend.
I’m halfway up B-Hall when I see her talking to a teacher at the far end.
The real Kylie Simms.
She looks exactly like my Kylie, from her ponytail to the toes poking out of her sandals. Gorgeous. Athletic. Smart. Confident. Kind. A million other adjectives to fall in love with. She’s wearing a
royal-blue T-shirt with a winged-foot logo and Pennington Track and Field in white. There’s a meet
today, so all the track girls will be wearing them. Kylie is team captain and one of the top sprinters in
the state. Her devotion to the sport is the reason I joined the track team myself in Kylie-Simms-is-mygirlfriend.
I try not to stare at her, but I can’t help myself. One would think that having an exact Kylie copy
all to myself in another world would satisfy my craving for her, but one would be dead wrong. My
curiosity knows no bounds.
She doesn’t spare a glance in my direction as I walk by. Not that I expect her to. Kylie Simms
might be a nice girl, but she doesn’t have much reason to talk to a loner like me. As I keep going
down the hall, forcing myself not to look back, I feel the small thrill of potential fading away. Whenever I see Kylie, there’s always the chance she’ll notice me, but I haven’t hit that lottery yet.
How would she feel to know that in another world not only does Jonathan Aubrey love her but
she loves him right back?
It’s sick, I know. What I’ve done. But it’s all I have for happiness, and just thinking about Kylie in
Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend makes me realize I forgot to give her the yearbook form I picked up for
her that’s due today. I look at my watch. Six minutes to first period is enough time for a quick errand.
I duck into the nearest bathroom, second stall, and find it empty. Without wasting time I
squeeze my eyes shut, picture the same exact bathroom in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend, and open
them.
I’m crouching on top of the toilet. Since this stall’s been locked for ages due to a broken flusher,
it’s the safest place to switch worlds in a hurry. Before I can crawl out, the main door creaks open and
then bangs closed. I’m stuck listening to the sounds of someone doing their business while at least
a minute ticks by. When whoever it is finally finishes washing his hands and exits, I look again at my
watch. I can still make it.
After a careful listen to make sure I’m really alone, I climb off the toilet and under the locked
stall door, ready to find Kylie.
It doesn’t take long. School in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend appears pretty much the same as
it does in the real world, so I’m not surprised to see a lot of the same people in this hallway as I did
a moment ago. I expected to search for Kylie by her locker in D-Hall, but she’s here, in B-Hall not far
from the doorway where real Kylie was talking to the teacher. She’s with Lilly DeMarco, who is also
dressed in the blue-and-white Pennington High track shirt, and they’re headed my way. Some teeny
part of my brain finds this odd, since Kylie isn’t usually this early for class, but I dismiss it so I can get
back to the real world in time for my own class.
Locker doors slam. Cell phone screens flash as students shield them from teachers. The hallway
is backpacks and hair and books and voices. Arms brush in passing. I hold my books a little more
tightly and prepare to greet Kylie with our usual peck on the lips. Her red-brown hair, tied up in a
ponytail, sweeps back and forth with her stride. She flashes a smile at another track girl pulling books
out of a locker. Lilly says something to make Kylie laugh.
I’m smiling myself. I know I just saw her this morning, but sappy smiles just burst out whenever
I see her. I slow my stride to meet up with them and offer that kiss. Kylie doesn’t take any notice of
me. I’m right in front of her, but she keeps talking to Lilly as if I’m just another kid going to class. I’ve
moved into the middle of the hallway to join her, and I get bumped by a freshman with an enormous
backpack. I take a step to catch myself, and I’m touching Kylie. She finally looks at me and my smile,
and as I lean toward her face, I sense that something is very, very not okay. I pull away, kiss aborted,
and register the shock on her face. It might even be horror as her eyes travel down my scar.
Lilly takes her arm and pulls her down the hall away from me. They giggle, exchange a few
words I can’t hear. Kylie looks back at me strangely, then they sort themselves into their separate
classrooms.
Slowly, the realization of what has happened dawns on me. I think I’ve just done something
I’ve never, ever done before. But how? HOW? I started the day in the real world and switched in the
bathroom. I know I did. But somehow, maybe, I didn’t.
I mixed up my worlds.
I check the hallways for the truth, but my two school worlds are mostly the same except for
track and Kylie. Maybe today they are a little too identical. Although my worlds contain the same
people, they’re rarely doing the same exact things at the same exact times. The answer comes when
Rob Finkelstein passes me. Rob is in my running group and a good friend in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend. He totally ignores me on his way down the hall.
Oh, God. How did this happen?
My gut twists and my tether to the real world goes slack. I lean against a locker and take a
shaky breath. I just tried to kiss the real Kylie Simms. Lilly will tell the whole school by third period.
Later I’ll have to go to real creative writing class and face Kylie. I think of how much we mean
to each other in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend, how good it feels to run side by side for a few miles, to
make out on the couch with the TV on mute, to talk for hours over hot chocolate at Lacy Pastry. The
reminder that in reality I mean nothing to her at all makes me sick. I stumble back into the bathroom.
I’m pretty sure nobody notices.
Cassie
It always feels like death. At least at first. Your muscles stretch and burn until they might rip. The
bones in your hips threaten to rotate right out of their sockets. Your spine lengthens and twists into
impossible shapes. The veins in your arms swell, blood pulsing through them. Your fingers tremble
as you try to hold them taut but graceful, just so. Your toes jam into a pretty pink box, battering your
feet with constellations of blisters and bruises.
But it all looks effortless and beautiful. I hope. Because that’s all that really matters.
Studio B is a fishbowl today, and I wish the three glass walls were blacked out or covered up.
I can feel Liz’s glare hot and heavy, her face pressed up against the glass. I knew she wanted this—
maybe even more than me—but that doesn’t mean she deserved it. She’ll claim that I got lucky, that
it was nepotism, that being Mr. Lucas’s niece has its perks. I mean, Bette told me she said as much in
her drunken babblings last night. But I know better. I earned this.
Morkie barks orders at the corps girls, then turns to the pianist to nitpick a chord pace for the
spring ballet, La Sylphide. I’m the only Level 6 girl cast as a soloist, and while the others pretend to
be happy for me—well, most of them anyway—I know they’re hoping to see me fail. But I won’t give
them the satisfaction. Even though it’s hard being the youngest one in here. And earlier, when one
of them asked me if I was fifteen, I wanted to lie and say I was seventeen or eighteen like them. As I
watch the other dancers fly across the floor in a series of pirouettes, I keep my smile plastered across
my face. I won’t falter. I can’t let them know how hard this is. My muscles ache and my stomach
churns, empty from a morning spent reliving last night’s revelries. I never should have let Bette talk
me into drinking. I’m definitely paying the price now.
The music stops abruptly, and Morkie towers over Sarah Takahashi, making her do the turn
over and over again, yelling corrections in Russian like Sarah understands her. Sarah bows, and it
seems to infuriate Morkie even more. She’s my understudy and a Level 8 girl. An 8 girl should’ve had
the lead – an opportunity for the company masters to see her talent and offer her a spot.
I take every second of this break to review the variation in my head, to think through the music.
Morkie does the steps one by one, stamping her little heeled ballet slippers. Even nearing seventy,
she’s still a strong portrait of grace—a true danseuse russe.
Bette slips through the door. And she lets it bang closed so I know she’s here. I hate how she
always finds a way to announce herself, but I could never tell her that. Everyone watches—her halo
of blond hair pulled taut in its bun, her designer dance skirt floating around her like cotton candy,
her pink lipstick expertly applied. She’s told to find a spot in the back, and plops down right near the
dance bags. There were rumors that a fat check from her mom secured her a seat in the studio to
learn the role, too, but I didn’t dare ask her. She’s been so gracious and helpful. Defending me to Liz
and the others when I first got here, showing me the ropes, threatening the other girls if they didn’t
stop messing with me.
Will enters a few moments after. His red hair is gelled up, and he’s wearing a face full of makeup. He blows me a kiss and waves. It was announced this morning that he’d be my pas partner’s
understudy. He sits in the back with Bette.
Morkie calls me to the center. The music starts, light and fluttery and serene. Usually I let it take
me, the notes lifting me away so I’m no longer myself, the movements of my arms and legs transforming, allowing me to become the forest fairy romancing the Scotsman. But today I’m very much
anchored in my too tall, lumbering body. I can feel the pull in each muscle as I glide across the floor,
trying to make sure I land every step in the right spot.
I catch myself looking down at the tape marking the stage placements, focusing on the counts
in the music. I try not to think of each precise motion making up the variation. Old habits. Bad habits.
I should know this by heart now. I should embody the sylph spirit. I tell myself I’m as light as air. But
my feet are a second too slow, my arm movements too heavy.
“More! More!” Morkie yells, her voice bouncing off the mirrors. I feel my smile falter. I’m totally
graceless in her presence. My confidence seeps out of me with my sweat. Scott waits for me stage
left. I flitter over to him, presenting my hand. He pulls me into his chest.
Morkie yells over the music. “Smile. You’re in love with him.”
My grin looks pained in the mirror. My stomach muscles clench when his hands squeeze my
waist, and prepares to lift me.
Morkie waves her hands in the air. We stop midlift.
“You’re supposed to be in love. Where is it? Where is it?” she says, motioning me out of the center. “Did we make mistake in casting, Cassandra?” Her Russian accent makes the words sharp like tiny
knives tearing at my insides. “Find it! Find the reason we picked you.” She waves me away with one
skinny arm.
Sarah takes my place with Scott to practice the flying shoulder lift I couldn’t do. I try to tell myself that it’s fine. Necessary. Both boys have to learn how to lift Sarah, then me. Just in case. Frustrated, I head to the back corner, toward Bette and Will. “You’ve got to,” I hear her whisper, but he shushes
her as he watches me approach.
“Hey.” He grins, patting the floor next to him. “Rough start, huh?”
I catch my breath, wiping away the little beads of sweat on my top lip. As Bette’s ice-blue gaze
settles over me, I feel disgusting and heavy and off. Will gives me a sad frown, like I’m a puppy who’s
just been kicked. “Don’t take it to heart,” he whispers again. “Morkie’s a beast.”
“You okay?” Bette asks, offering a smile that’s half grimace.
“I don’t know where it all went,” I say, closing my eyes. I stretch my limbs out every which way. “I
was fine yesterday. You saw me.”
“You looked scared of him,” Will says, his eyes on Scott, tracing his every movement. “Have a
little crush?”
“I have a boyfriend,” I snap without meaning to. I wish I was partnering with Henri, but he’s at
the Paris Opera School. I trust his hands. “Sorry, I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me.”
“Hmm,” Bette says, noncommittal. “Too much alcohol is my guess.” And it makes me remember
how she kept filling my cup with the expensive wine she’d taken from her mother’s collection, despite my protests.
I nod my head, eager for an excuse. “I should’ve gone straight to bed after we hung out.”
“You didn’t?” Her forehead crinkles with surprise.
“Sometimes I dance late at night, so it can all stick in my head when I finally sleep.” I put a hand
on my forehead, not sure why everything is coming out of me right now. But I can trust her. Alec told
me so, even when I doubted Bette at first. And Will is Alec’s best friend. “My legs are a mess.” I scoot
over a little, pressing my back against the glass wall that faces out onto the street. The warmth of
sunbeams erases the cold that’s settled in my stomach. Even though it’s spring, I’m shivering. “What
should I do?”
Bette and Will share glances. They know what Morkie wants. They’ve been here forever. They
know how to please her.
“You need to get it together,” Bette says, picking invisible lint off her impeccable sweater.
“Morkie doesn’t do drama or excuses.” She leans into a stretch, warming up as if she’ll be called to the
center any second. As if she’s here for a reason. “And you need to not drink so much.”
“Ouch, Bette,” Will says.
I try to keep the shock off my face. “I actually never drank before,” I tell her in a whisper. If
Bette is surprised, she doesn’t let it show. But it’s humiliating to say it. Before I came to New York and
moved in with my cousin Alec and his family to go to the conservatory, my whole world was just
dance class and school and sitting on the couch with my British host mother, waiting for a call or text
from Henri. New York is totally different from London. “I didn’t know it would hit me that hard.” I want
to call Bette out for pushing the wine on me, but I don’t. She’s pretty much the only real friend I’ve
made since I’ve got to New York, and I’m not about to mess that up.
“Some days we’re just off,” Will says, and pets my leg like that will help.
I feel my eyes get watery. I lick the strawberry gloss off my lips, hearing my mom’s scolding
voice in my head as I do it. She says it’s totally unladylike. I look over my shoulder and watch Sarah
Takahashi nail the lift with Scott that I couldn’t. Morkie beams at her.
“Don’t worry, Cassie,” Bette says. “Will can help you look good out there. He’ll rescue you like
he’s always done for me.” The word rescue lands hard. Will’s eyes dart around the studio, like he’s
watching a fly.
Bette flashes me a smile that’s so big I can see all her teeth. Perfect, just like the rest of her. I’m
called back to the center, and now with Will too. I can feel Bette’s gaze following Will as Morkie shows
Will and me the next part of the pas. We mark the movements one at a time, with painful precision.
It takes me almost an hour to perfect them the way Morkie wants them before letting us try on our
own. Then, finally, I stand in the center, ready to show her what I’ve learned.
I prepare to dance, waiting for the chord of music to start moving. My mind quiets: the worries,
the criticisms, the faces in the glass all drift away. I see Will ahead waiting for me. I pretend that it’s
Henri. I step into my first movement, folding myself into the music, each arm motion embodying the
cadence. I jump and turn and leap and glide. I flutter over to Will.
“Right on the melody,” Morkie yells.
Will’s hands find my waist. He lifts me up into a flying shoulder lift. His right shoulder presses
into my butt, carrying my weight, effortless.
“She’s not a box, William,” Morkie says. “She’s a jewel. Carry her like one. So pretty. So light.”
His fingers press into my hipbones as he struggles to hold me there.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Morkie yells over the music. “Smile, Cassandra.”
I smile as hard as I can. I keep my eyes on the mirror and focus on Morkie’s instructions. Here
comes the fish dive, slow, graceful, deliberate. Except it’s not. Will’s not supporting my weight anymore, and I wobble, trying to counterbalance, but it’s too late. His fingers feel like they’ve disappeared. Not at all like we’ve practiced. With his support gone, my right leg drops.
I topple, like I’ve fallen off the edge of a cliff. The floor feels so far away until I hit it.
ACT I
Fall Season
1. BETTE
They say anticipation is sometimes sweeter than the actual event, so I’m going to enjoy every moment of the waiting. Mr. K certainly loves dragging it out. We swarm around him in the American
Ballet Conservatory lobby, waiting for his annual speech on The Nutcracker. Then he’ll reveal the
student cast list. Twice a year, in the fall and the spring, students get to replace the company dancers
for a night at Lincoln Center, a test of our mettle. A taste of our future.
That piece of paper basically sums up your worth in our school, the American Ballet Company
feeder academy. And I’m worth a lot. Alec and I hold hands and I can’t contain my smile. In just a few
moments, my name is going to be on the wall next to the role of Sugar Plum Fairy, and the rest of my
life can finally begin.
I saw my older sister, Adele, dance the role six years ago, when I was cast in the part of a cherub and bouncing around in gold wings and my mother’s lipstick. Back then, the anticipation wasn’t
the best part. Back then, the best part was the heat of the lights on my skin and the presence of the
audience before us, and dancing in perfect time with my little ballet girlfriends. The best part was
the scratchy tights and the sweet metallic smell of hair spray and the sparkling tiara pinned into my
baby-fine hair. The glitter dusted onto my cheeks. The best part was the hole of nervousness in my
stomach before getting onstage and the rush of joy after we pranced off. The best part was bouquets
of flowers and kisses on both cheeks from my mother and my father lifting me in the air and calling
me a princess.
Back then, it was all the best part.
The school’s front doors are closed and locked. Mr. K’s speech is that important. I glance over
my shoulder through the big lobby windows and see a few people with red noses, bundled up to
fight the October air. They’re stuck on the stairs, and in the Rose Abney Plaza, named after my grandmother. That door won’t open again until he’s finished. They’ll just have to freeze.
Mr. K rubs his well-groomed beard, and I know he’s ready to start. I know these little things
about him, thanks to Adele, a company soloist. I straighten up a bit more and wrap my hand around
Alec’s neck, tickling the place where his buzzed blond hair meets his skin. He grins, too, both of us
perfectly poised to finally take our places as the leads in the winter ballet.
“This is it,” I whisper in his ear. He smiles back and kisses my forehead. He’s flushed with excitement, too, and I just know that from here on out I will love everything about ballet again. Both of our
auditions went well. I remember how ridiculously happy Adele looked when she was dancing the
Sugar Plum Fairy, and how the role got her plucked straight out of the school and given a spot in the
company, and I just dream of feeling that full. There’s no one standing in my way. Liz is struggling a
little bit this year. And no one else can do what I can.
I drop my hand down to his and squeeze Alec a little tighter. Alec’s best friend—my ex-friend—
Will glares at me. Jealous.
Parents and siblings grow quiet, standing behind the expanse of black leotards.
“Casting each of you in The Nutcracker isn’t just an exercise in technique,” Mr. K begins. Our
ballet master speaks slowly, like he’s just deciding on the words right now, even though he gives
some version of this speech every year. Yet I cling to every word, like I’ve never heard it before. Mr. K
is the single most deliberate human being I’ve ever met. He makes eye contact with me, and I know
my fate is cemented in that quick connection. That look my way is purposeful. It has to be. I bow my
head a bit with respect, but can’t stop the edges of my mouth from doing their own little upward
pull.
“Technique is the foundation of ballet, but personality is where the dance comes to life. In The
Nutcracker, each character serves an important purpose to the ballet as a whole, and that is why
we take such care in assigning each of you the perfect part. Who you are comes across in how you
dance. I’m sure we all remember when Gerard Celling danced the Rat King last winter, or when Adele
Abney danced the Sugar Plum Fairy. These were seminal performances that displayed unbelievable
technique as well as exquisite joy and beauty. The students stopped being students and transformed
into artists, like a caterpillar leaves its chrysalis and becomes what it was designed to be—a butterfly.”
Mr. K calls us his butterflies. We’re never his students, dancers, athletes, or ballerinas. When we
graduate, he’ll give the best dancer a diamond butterfly pendant—Adele still only takes hers off for
performances.
“It is because of Adele’s and Gerard’s relationships to the roles of Sugar Plum Fairy and Rat King
that they experienced such success,” he adds. “It was the connection they forged with the part.”
I bow my head even farther. Mr. K talking about my sister is another deliberate nod to me, I’m
sure of it. Adele’s performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy has been a topic of conversation since the first
night she’d performed it six years ago. She was only in ballet Level 6 and hadn’t even turned fifteen
yet. It was unheard of for such a young dancer to be given such a role over the older Level 8 girls. And
when I was that seven-year-old cherub hugging my sister with my fiercest pride and congratulations,
Mr. K approached us both with a confident smile.
“Adele, you are luminous,” he’d said. It’s a word I have been itching for him to call me ever since.
He still hasn’t. Not yet. “And darling little Bette, I can tell from your lovely dancing tonight that, in no
time at all, you will be following in your sister’s footsteps. A Sugar Plum Fairy in the making.” He’d
winked, and Adele had beamed at me with agreement.
He is surely referring to that moment now. He is letting me remember his prediction and assuring me that he had been right all those years ago.
I shift onto my tiptoes, unable to suppress that bit of excitement. Alec squeezes my hand.
Mr. K’s voice softens. “Young Clara, for instance, must be sweet and invoke the wonder of
Christmas with every step and glance.” His gaze drifts to a pretty petit rat in a navy blue leotard, her
dark hair in a perfect bun. She blushes from the attention, and I’m happy for tiny Maura’s moment of
joy. I played Clara when I was eleven. I know the thrill, and she deserves to experience every second
of it.
Years later, I still think of that performance as the most fun I’ve ever had. It was right after the
Christmas season that my mother started showing me old videos of Adele and asking me to compare
my technique to hers. It was that Christmas when everything between my mother, Adele, and me
shifted beyond recognition, distorting into a bad TV drama. I get a little light-headed just thinking
about it. I can still hear the whir of the X-ray camera like it was yesterday. Looking too hard at those
memories isn’t a good idea, so I close my eyes for an instant to make the thoughts disappear, as I
always do. I give Alec’s hand another squeeze and try to focus. This is my big moment.
“Uncle Drosselmeyer must be mysterious and clouded—a man with a secret,” Mr. K says. “The
Nutcracker Prince should be regal and full of confidence. Untouchable and elegant, but still masculine.” Mr. K looks then at Alec, who breaks out into a fully dimpled grin. He is describing Alec to a tee,
and I lean against him a bit. He lets go of my hand and wraps his arm around my shoulders. As if this
moment weren’t wonderful enough, Alec’s affection has me soaring even higher. Mr. K lists off a few
more characters and the necessary qualities the dancers must bring to them. I smooth my hair to
make sure I look perfect for my big moment.
“And the Sugar Plum Fairy,” Mr. K continues, his eyes searching the crowd. “She must be not
only beautiful but kind, joyful, mysterious, and playful.” His eyes are still searching the crowd, which is
strange, since he knows exactly where I am. I try to dismiss it as a bit of Mr. K playing around, as he’s
known to do.
The Sugar Plum Fairy’s ideal qualities—they’re not mine. They are not words anyone has ever
used to describe me.
But the part is mine. I know it is because of the way Mr. K finishes his speech.
“Above all else,” he says, “the Sugar Plum Fairy must be luminous.”
I squeeze Alec’s hand again.
That is me.
I am luminous, like Adele. It is me. It has always been me.
But still, Mr. K’s eyes do not find their way to mine.
M O N ST R O U S
M A R C Y K AT E CO N N O L LY
Day One
I will never forget my first breath. Gasping. Heaving. Delicious.
When I opened my eyes, the colors of the world swarmed me, filling up all space with hues and
objects for which I had no name.
Three seconds later, I passed out from sensory overload, or at least that is what Father says. He
fixed me up and when I woke the second time, the world became a more comprehensible place. The
object hovering over me was a face, the circles within it were eyes, and the warm, wet drips leaking
from them were tears.
The crease across the bottom that widened under my gaze was a smile.
“You’re alive,” Father said.
Even now, hours later, he mutters it still.
Copyright © 2015 MarcyKate Connolly. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt used with permission from HarperCollins Children’s Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
M O N ST R O U S
Day Two
I lean back against the willow and hold out my arms, studying them under the waning sunlight. The
thin red lines marking the sections of my body have faded to nearly nothing; all that remains are the
many shades of my flesh and the tiny metal bolts fastening tail to spine, joint to wing, and neck to
shoulder, along with a dull ache.
Father, his silver hair flapping in the summer breeze, lays out logs and strange steel pipes in the
field. They will be used for my training. He has not told me what I am preparing for, only that he will
when I am ready. He waves when he notices me watching.
I am sure I will be ready soon. Father is astonished at my progress. Yesterday, I mastered walking within one hour and running in two, and now I can even jump to the lowest branch of the willow
with ease.
Father says his biggest coup is my speech. He managed to preserve that part of my brain, so I
talk just as I did when I was human.
Before.
My only regret is he was not able to carry over my memories. I know nothing of who I was.
Nothing of my mother. Even my memories of Father are out of reach.
But I do not need them to know how precious I am to him. Every time he looks at me, his face
fills with surprise as though I am some kind of miracle.
I suppose I am.
The maze of tones on my arms, legs, and torso fascinates me to no end, because my face is only
one plain shade of porcelain. Father says I must look as human as possible from a distance, but no
one will see my arms or legs under my cloak. When I bore of studying my arms, I tuck my long, dark
locks behind my ears and curl my green tail up to get a better look. It has a three-pronged point at
the end. A barb, Father called it. He said I need to be careful not to swish too hard or I might sting
myself or him.
I run a finger over the iridescent scales surrounding the hard brown spikes. I rather like the
scales. They are lovely in the last beams of the day. I wonder what the barb does, and I tap it ever so
gently—
M O N ST R O U S
Day Four
I sit by the fire in our little red cottage, pestering Father with questions while I toy with the end of my
tail. He dances around the answers, just as my fingers dance around the stinging tip. I am much more
cautious now. The venom puts people to sleep. The last time, I pricked my finger and did not wake up
for half a day.
A lesson well learned.
“Why do you not have a tail, Father?” I ask.
He gives me the same response he gives to all questions along these lines. “I am not special like
you, Kymera. Most people are not. You have a purpose. Your parts will aid you.”
“How?” I frown at the barb, then shake my tail as if to make it frown back. Instead, the scales
glitter in the firelight.
“I will tell you when you are ready.”
Frustration warms my face, but when he reaches over and places his hand against my cheek, I
lean into the affectionate gesture. I am becoming fond of this place, with its worn wooden walls, high
hedges, and rose garden. Even the tower beside the cottage feels like an old friend.
Mostly I cannot help but stare at Father—the man who made me—and memorize every line
and plane of his face. That, too, is nearly as worn as the walls, but radiates a kindness, a warmth that
even the fire cannot match.
A yapping brown dog with sparrow wings skids to a landing by Father’s plush armchair. Pippa.
He calls her a sperrier.
I call her delicious.
But I am supposed to pass as human, and humans do not eat sperriers or terriers or any other
animal they care for as pets.
Pippa keeps her distance from me, venturing into the same room only when Father is around. I
swish my tail in irritation. I am hungry.
Crash.
A book falls off the shelf behind me and Father sighs. It is a volume he gave me on my first day
of life. Its cover is frayed around the edges, but the words are lovely, full of magic and life and mystery. He calls them fairy tales. They are supposed to be a part of my education. I rise—more carefully—to retrieve the volume. I have not yet gained control over all my parts and it worries him. I return
it to the shelf, wiping my dusty hands on my dress.
I do not want Father to worry. This is the fifth time he attempted to reanimate me and the only
time he succeeded.
I have not yet asked what happened to my other bodies. For now it is enough for me to know I
am alive and strong, though perhaps more clumsy than I would like.
He created me for a purpose—a noble one, he claims—with the tail of a snake, the wings of a
giant raven, and the claws and eyes of a cat. Much to his dismay, I have not yet mastered flying,
M O N ST R O U S
either. But I am rather good at knocking things off shelves.
Father suffered for me and I hope I can live up to his expectations.
“Kymera, come sit. You are making Pippa nervous with your pacing.” He pats the chair across
from him. Pippa squirms in his arms, as though she is considering taking flight again.
I bare my teeth at her and hiss as I sit in what I hope is a ladylike fashion. Pippa leaps up to the
rafters. I giggle.
“You should not do that. This is the one place you will find other hybrids. Pippa is a kindred
spirit.”
She whines as though she understands his every word. I roll my eyes.
“I am better than a puppy with wings. You made me so.” I grow bolder at his smile. “Why did
you create me?”
His eyes soften. “Kym, you are my daughter.”
“Yes, but what drove you to try over and over? If you cannot tell me my purpose, at least tell me
that.” I blink, switching from yellow cat’s eyes to my blue human irises. He is more accommodating to
my requests when I wear those.
He sighs. It is working.
“Most of your human parts come from my daughter. A year ago, a wizard abducted you. Your
mother attempted to stop him, and the wizard murdered her in the ensuing struggle. He vanished
and only later when he was done with you did I find your body. After that, it became my life’s work
to bring you back.” He settles deeper into his chair, and the flames in the fireplace recede to embers.
Fury builds inside me. The cat’s irises slide back into place, and the claws in my hands ache to unsheathe.
“What sort of person would murder the child of a good man?” This question pains Father, but I
do not regret asking.
“Wizards are naturally power hungry, but this one was also driven mad by grief. He lost his own
daughter to illness not long before and is so jealous that he steals any other girl who crosses his path
and kills her. I suspect he aims to work some sort of dark magic to bring his lost child back.”
“But how?”
“Humans may not have magic in them, but young blood is a powerful ingredient in black-magic spells. From what I hear, his magic has only gotten darker since he lost his child, and he needs a
steady supply of sacrifices for his spells.”
“I was one of those sacrifices.”
Father bows his head.
“Then you saved me.” The emotions swelling in my chest confuse me. Pride and love for my
father, grief for my mother, and a raw, burning hatred of the man who destroyed everything I must
have once loved.
M O N ST R O U S
“It was tricky work and I could not bring you back exactly as you were. Your memories I could
not salvage.” He sighs. “With each attempt, I lost more and more of your original body. I did manage
to preserve the speech center of your brain, and words will come back to you as you need them.
And most importantly, I made you stronger each time. I just needed to find the right combination of
parts.” He brushes his finger over my chin. “When you were human, I always said you were my greatest creation. Now you truly are.”
His expression always contains a hint of pain. I remind him of his wife. My mother. I wish I could
remember her. I wish I could remember myself.
Most of all, I wish to claw the heart from the wizard who did this to my family.
He is monstrous.
Chapter 16
After lunch, I meander into the kitchen to find myself a snack, when lo and behold, I find Geri up to
her elbow in a raw chicken.
“What in the dickens are you doing?” I ask, shocked.
She flails her arm around, and the headless, featherless bird bobs up and down like a strange
sort of puppet.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she asks crossly.
I jump back a little so uncooked poultry doesn’t hit me. That would be a difficult bruise to explain. “Well, if you must know, it looks like you have a chicken for a hand puppet.”
“Ugh!” Geri flaps her arm and the dead bird on the counter.
“If it makes you feel any better,” I add encouragingly, “I think you’re onto something. People
would pay good money to see a dead chicken puppet show.”
“I am not putting on a puppet show! I’m practicing my
medicine!”
I notice the needle and thread in her left hand pulling
tiny stitches through the bird’s skin.
“You’re sewing a chicken?” I’m not ashamed to admit I’m
more than a little confused. And worried.
“No,” Geri says, peering into my face and stretching the
word like I’m four quarters short of a dollar. She’s got a lot
of nerve, considering what she is presently wearing on her
arm. “I’m practicing my stitches and setting a broken leg.” She
finishes her stitch, quickly knots it, and picks up the chicken to
admire her handiwork.
Although I will never tell Geri, I am impressed. Not everyone can sew up a hole in a chicken.
“Thank you.” She looks pleased.
Then she grabs the drumstick in both hands and snaps it in half. It’s enough to make me want
to sit down. In the other room.
She is violent.
“There,” she says in a satisfied voice. She grabs a knife and some string, straightens the leg, ties
the knife to the broken drumstick, and stands back proudly to survey her handiwork.
“Not bad,” I say.
Geri’s head swings around so fast it might fly off her neck and land in the sink. “Not bad?
You’re kidding, right? I stitched up that chicken and set its broken leg in less time than it takes you to
tie your boots.”
“And just in time for dinner,” I reply. Whether the chicken has stitches or a broken leg won’t
matter a wooden nickel in about two hours and forty-three minutes, because we will have eaten it.
“Oh, what do you know. Now help me peel the potatoes.” I reach for a peeler and a spud, but
Geri slaps my hand for no good reason before I can get close to either one. “Wash your hands before
you touch anything,” she orders.
“Why? They don’t even look very dirty,” I argue. “Didn’t I just see you pick your nose?” Geri accuses me. “Wha . . . ? What are you talking about?” I stuff my hands in my pockets while Geri looks at
me out of the corner of her eye.
“Why in tarnation”—I glance around quickly, making sure Granny isn’t lurking somewhere—“would I need to wash my hands?”
She sighs. “It is well known in educated medical circles that washing hands prevents disease.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes himself recommended it years ago. Louis Pasteur believes it stops the
spread of germs.” She waits for my reaction.
All I can do is shrug.
“Boogers carry germs. Germs make you sick.”
This coming from someone who carries bacon in her
pocket and had a dead bird on her hand.
“That’s different.” Geri snorts as she slams the chicken
into my gut and stomps off. And, of course, this is the exact
time Granny chooses to enter the kitchen. “Stanley Arthur
Slater! In all my born days! What are you doing with that chicken? That’s dinner, not a toy! Wasting food is not an option
unless you want fifty hungry lumberjacks on your hide!” She
goes on and on about my lack of responsibility and disregard
for the value of money and good food.
Once again, I’m left holding the bag, or in this case, the
chicken, and blamed for something I did not do, and Geri gets
off free and easy.
Women.
Chapter 17
At dinner, I find my father. It sure took long enough. First of all, I’ve been so busy these last two
weeks beating Stinky Pete at cribbage every night, I’ve almost forgotten to look. I also beat him at
euchre, hearts, and one hand of poker when Granny wasn’t looking. He makes me a little nervous,
however, when he points his finger at me like a gun, winks, and says he’ll get me tomorrow. Maybe
it’s not such a good idea to beat a cold-blooded killer at card games.
Also, my plan to prove my manliness, and thereby prove my ability to help on the river drive,
has been greatly hampered by Mama’s insistence that I wear an apron at all times in the kitchen. And
it just so happens the only apron in my size has large red flowers on it, so my Man Plan is on the back
burner. Just until I lose that apron.
In the meantime, I had to shake Granny off my tail so that I could sit down and talk to some
of the shanty boys, one of whom I’m sure is my father. I do not have a minute to waste. Uncle Henry
keeps a close eye on the weather and the amount of board feet piling up on the roll-aways near the
river, so that river drive is happening with or without me. I’m planning on with.
And today I realize, now that I’ve had the chance to ask some investigative questions, that my
father is obviously Knut Knutson: he likes both bacon and me, not necessarily in that order, and he’s
always slapping my back and telling me bad jokes. Yesterday’s joke was “Vat time is it ven an elephant sits on a fence? Time to buy a new fence!” Then he laughed and I laughed. At that time I suspected he might be my father—a good sense of humor could very well run in our family.
But when he walked in today whistling, I knew for sure.
I myself am a whiz at whistling, I don’t mind saying. It must be a family talent.
Also, he was the first lumberjack to walk in, and my time is short.
I squeeze in between Cager and Knut to tell him the good news.
“Hey, Knut,” I say. “Good news! You are my father.”
He is so glad to hear the news he chokes on his ham. “Uh, Stan,” he says, “I joost met ya two
veeks ago.”
“Um, so?” I reply.
“I cannot possibly be yer far.”
I look at him squinty-eyed.
“Well,” I say, “you are.”
Knut grins his toothy grin because that’s how happy he is to hear he has a son.
Stinky Pete elbows him from the right. “Congrats, old man! It’s a boy!” He sniggers. I’ve got my
eye on him. He killed a man.
“I vood love to be yer far, but . . .”
“Should I call you that?” I interrupt. “Should I call you ‘far’?” I try the strange word on my
tongue. “It’s not proper English, you know. Well, it’s pretty much not English at all, but I am a whiz at
other languages, I don’t mind saying. I speak Canadian like I was born there.”
“But,” Knut continues, waving his fork for emphasis, “it cannot be possible.”
“Uh, yeah, it is. You have blue eyes and you whistle just like me.”
“Yah,” he agrees.
“You do have blue eyes, Knut.” Stinky Pete nods solemnly. “And I’ve heard you whistle.”
I lean around Knut to face Stinky Pete. “I’ve got my eye on you, Stinky Pete,” I hiss as he draws
back from fright.
“Who is Stinky Pete?” he asks, looking confused. He acts so innocent, but he knows that I know
that he knows that I know he killed a man.
Now I’m confused, too, so I turn my attention back to Knut.
“Well, Knut, as I said, I have blue eyes like you. And you have a nose . . .” I wait for this to sink in.
“Well, true . . .”
“Me too! And you . . .”
But he rudely interrupts me. “Vat year ver ya born, lad?”
I eye him suspiciously. “It’s not polite to ask a lady her age.”
“Ya do know yer not a lady, eh?” I nod. “Vat year, den?” “Eighteen eighty-three,” I reluctantly
reply.
Knut pounds the table. “Ya see! I didn’t even get ta Mitchigan till eighty- nine! You ver six!”
“I can do math,” I say, suddenly feeling quite irritated.
Knut’s voice softens. It sounds like butter on corn bread, so
it’s not so easy to get mad at him.
Also, I like butter. And corn bread.
And I’m hungry.
“If ’n I ever haf a son, I’d be lucky if ’n he vas like you.” Knut
pats my knee with a little comma of a smile.
I return to my room and pull out my Scrapbook. The envelope is still in there, still empty, still full of secrets. What was my
father doing in Texas? I sit down, envelope in front of me, and imagine how great my father
probably is—my real father, not some silly but nice guy who tells bad jokes.
I imagine he’s out in the world doing something amazing, like mining gold or riding through
the Wild West on horseback.
I casually walk to the kitchen to show my letter to Geri, who is standing on a chair, hanging up
wet dish towels. This is just the thing to prove to her I have a dad, too.
“Look!” I say. “Look at the letter from my dad! Who misses me and is a gold miner cowboy!”
She climbs down, hands me a damp towel, and takes the paper. “Hmmm,” she says jealously.
She looks from the letter to me and back to the letter. Her eyebrows squeeze together so tightly, it
looks like two hairy caterpillars are having a conversation on her forehead.
“How do I know this is really from your dad?”
“Here’s a picture!” I shove a photo at her.
“It looks like someone cut this out of a magazine,” she says as she flips it over. I quickly snatch it
away.
“Look!” I point to the spot signed “Dad.”
Geri looks a little confused. Then her face clears and she nods.
“Oh! Well!” She pauses, obviously trying to get her jealousy under control. “Um.”
She clearly needs more time to think about all of this, and I agree—my dad is pretty impressive,
even if he does appear to have been cut out of a magazine.
“I’m glad he’s doing so well,” she says; then she gets a strange, sad look and leaves the room.
She is going to have to face the facts: Uncle Henry is good-natured, trustworthy, reliable, and
all, but my dad is a lot more interesting than her dad.
However, he just might be a lot harder to find.
NONE OF THE ABOVE
I . W. G R EGO R IO
Chapter 1
Dawn is my favorite time of day. There’s something sacred about being awake when the rest of the
world is sleeping, when the sky is just turning toward the light, and you can still hear the sounds of
night before the engines and conversations of the day drown them out. When I start out on an early-morning run, there’s a clarity to the world, a sense that it belongs to me.
The morning before Homecoming, I met Sam at the bottom of my driveway as usual. He had
started to warm up, his breath coming out in puffs visible in the chilly late autumn air. He looked
serious, almost solemn as he stretched, but when he saw me his face lit up and he leaned in for a kiss.
For a moment everything felt perfectly still.
Then we were off. Over hundreds of runs, Sam and I had established a rhythm, a pace that we
no longer had to think about, as if we were running to the same internal song. Sam pulled back his
stride a little to match mine, and I stretched out just a bit to match his. On some days, it even seemed
like we even breathed in sync.
We didn’t talk much at first, not until we got to our one-mile mark—the entrance to Gordon
Park. Normally, Sam’s as much of a stickler about routine as I am. So it surprised me when he kept on
the paved trail instead of running through the uneven paths in the woods.
“Last thing you need is to bust your ankle, too.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. It had been a week since my best friend Vee’s injury, and every day I
had to talk her off the ledge. She was convinced that her Homecoming was ruined. Plus, her mom
had been telling all her friends that Vee was a shoo-in for Queen, so now she was worried about losing face. “I told her she’ll still get enough votes, but she doesn’t believe me.”
“More drama that way.”
“That’s why we love her, right? Never a dull moment.”
“Something like that.” Sam had never been Vee’s biggest fan, but he tolerated her because he
knew we were like sisters. “One way or another, it’ll all be settled tonight. We’re meeting at six, right?”
“Five thirty,” I corrected him. “Faith wants to get pictures of us in our dresses and tuxes while
the sun is still up.”
“Shit!” Sam exclaimed.
I nearly tripped over a crack in the road. “Oh my God, what?”
He looked over at me, hands held over his mouth in horror. “I was supposed to get a tux?”
I almost choked on my laughter and lunged to my right to side-check him. We ran pressed up
against each other for a few seconds before settling back into our run, grins on our faces. Over the
months that we’d been dating, there wasn’t much Sam and I hadn’t shared. We’d debated the merits
of State versus the Big U ad nauseam, and we knew each other’s workout playlists by heart. He knew
about my family’s dogged obsession with the New York Rangers, and had come with me the last
time we’d made our annual visit to my mother’s grave. But sometimes I felt closest to him when we
weren’t saying anything, when we were both just concentrating on the soft percussion of our
Copyright © 2015 Ilene Yi-Zhen Wong. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt used with permission from Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
NONE OF THE ABOVE
I . W. G R EGO R IO
footsteps, the rhythm of our breathing, and the road in front of us.
By the time we got to my neighborhood and could see the oak tree that we’d measured to be
fifty yards from my house, my legs felt like molten lead and my lungs were screaming.
Time to run faster.
When we passed the oak tree, Sam and I didn’t even look at each other. As if a starter gun had
gone off in our heads, we accelerated into a sprint. My body became a blur of straining muscles, and
for the umpteenth time, I repeated my team’s mantra: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
Nine times out of ten, Sam beat me to my house, but that morning one of my neighbors’ kids
had left their bike standing in the middle of the sidewalk. While Sam swerved to avoid it, breaking his
stride, I sized the bike up and hurdled instinctively. Takeoff. Transition. Touchdown. Coach Auerbach
would’ve been proud.
I slapped my mailbox two seconds before Sam caught up to me, and shimmied a victory dance
in my driveway. Sam dropped his hands to his thighs and bent over, wincing.
“Nice finish,” he panted.
“You could’ve won if you’d just jumped the bike,” I said as we jogged a cooldown lap around my
block.
“Maybe. Or I could’ve wiped out.” Sam looked over at me and grinned. “I don’t have your form.”
The wind had picked up, and now that we weren’t running I had started to feel the cold, but
Sam’s praise warmed me down to my toes. I grabbed at his T-shirt and pulled him into a kiss, my
heart still pounding, my skin flushed from the adrenaline.
We had stopped running, but the rest of the world was just getting started. A car door
slammed. My neighbor’s cocker spaniel barked. A boy on a bike sped past us, yelling, “Get a room!”
“Get a life,” Sam shouted back.
Reluctantly, I pulled away, the salty taste of his kiss lingering on my lips, but before I could head
back to my house Sam bent over to whisper in my ear.
“To be continued.”
I shivered with anticipation.
Ten hours later, I stood in front of the full-length mirror in Vee’s room, thinking that I’d rather be running.
“Krissy, you know I love you. But did you have to wear sleeves?” Vee asked as we got ready for
the dance, her voice a tug-of-war between admiration and horror.
As Faith zipped me up, I checked to make sure the seams I’d tailored weren’t noticeable. The
dress had been my mom’s, and it didn’t have real sleeves, just wide triangular straps to hopefully
de-emphasize my javelin shoulders.
“What’s the matter with sleeves?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure everyone else is going strapless,” Faith said sympathetically. Her own dress had
a sweetheart neckline that perfectly showed off the jade necklace her grandmother had given her
NONE OF THE ABOVE
I . W. G R EGO R IO
for her sixteenth birthday.
“Even the people who shouldn’t are doing it,” Vee added. “It’s, like, a Homecoming law.” When
she saw me lifting up my arms and twisting down to peek at my underarms, she relented. “Come on,
are you seriously worrying? You look good in everything.”
I glanced up at the edge in her voice, and caught her running her finger against the rough
fiberglass of her ankle cast, which Vee had had specially tinted to match her skin.
“I can’t wait to see you in your dress,” I said, changing the subject.
“Let me go get it,” said Faith, going over to Vee’s closet, where the four-hundred-dollar ankle-length dress she’d rush-ordered the day after her accident hung like some holy relic.
Vee tossed her dirty-blond hair like a horse swatting off a fly. Just like that, the moody snarkmistress was gone, replaced by the girl who had set me up on a double date with Sam after I told her
how cute I thought he was. The girl who held my hair back and gave me a Sani wipe when I threw up
my first tequila shot. The girl who helped me sort out my mother’s clothes the day my dad left them
on the front curb because he couldn’t deal with having them in the house anymore.
Faith and I helped her slip her dress on, and the three of us stood in front of the mirror. We’d
literally been friends since we’d been born, when our mothers bonded in a postnatal yoga class. In
grade school, my mom would comment on how well Vee and Faith complemented each other as
friends. “Sweet and spicy,” she said. “They balance each other out.” Even then, Vee had an edge, while
Faith was the sugar.
“But what am I?” I asked.
“You, my Krissy?” my mom said. “You’re the steady.”
I didn’t think that was too exciting, but my mom just smiled, stroked my hair, and said, “It may
not sound exotic, but it’s the best thing to be.”
I smoothed down Vee’s dress. “See?” I said. “You can’t even see your cast.”
Vee leaned against me and turned to her side, cocking her head. “Still wish I’d listened to Ms.
Green when she said we should have people vote the week before the dance.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s in the bag.”
As Faith and I helped Vee down the stairs, the camera flashes went off like fireworks. My dad was
waiting at the bottom of the steps with Faith’s parents and Vee’s mom, his eyes bright with tears.
“God, you’re an angel,” he said, “just like her.” He pressed me into his shoulder and I closed
my eyes, fighting off embarrassment but finding myself tearing up anyway. Even though he wasn’t
wearing his warehouse uniform, he smelled faintly of metal and wet cardboard, which isn’t exactly
perfume but always smelled like home to me.
Faith’s mom asked me to take a picture of them. They were almost exactly the same height, and
could’ve been sisters with their identical dimpled smiles and straight jet-black hair. Out of the corner
of my eye, I saw Vee’s mom inspecting her dress, moving layers of the skirt around while Vee stood
stiff as a mannequin, her hand gripping the banister for support.
NONE OF THE ABOVE
I . W. G R EGO R IO
“Your father’s sorry he couldn’t be here,” her mom said, “but you know how busy things are this
time of the year. We bought you this to match your dress.” She handed over a blue satin purse studded with pearls and crystals, and lowered her voice. “I made sure to put in some protection. Wouldn’t
want you to be pregnant for prom.”
“Mom!” Vee hissed.
I stifled my grin. Obviously, Vee’s mom didn’t know that she’d gotten the birth control shot
earlier that month. Vee had convinced me to get one, too.
“But I haven’t gotten my period in years,” I’d protested, which was a lie, because even before I’d
started hard-core training when I was thirteen, I’d never gotten my period. Ever.
The three limos pulled up with the boys. Even though I thought it was totally over the top, Vee
had insisted that we get separate cars. When I asked her why, she’d just raised her eyebrows at me
until I blushed. The limos lined up along the Richardsons’ driveway in a row of gleaming black, and a
morbid part of me couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a funeral procession.
I got one more tight hug from my dad, who whispered in my ear, “Have fun, and be safe,” which
was the most disorienting thing that happened to me all night, if it meant what I thought it meant.
My dad never really talked to me about Sam—he left that stuff to Aunt Carla, for better or worse. In
fact, one of the reasons I’d never let Sam get past third base was my terror at the thought of my dad
ever finding out.
But did he accept it? Maybe even expect it?
It was hard to get the thought off my mind in the limo while making out with Sam, who’d
already had half of a Sprite bottle filled with champagne. He looked like a different person in his
tux. Distinguished, almost. He’d put some gel in his light-brown hair, and I caught the whiff of a new
cologne.
“You look killer in this dress,” he said, one hand trailing down my arm and making my skin tingle.
“Better than a tank top and a sports bra, huh?” I took a sip of champagne and leaned into him
again, running my hands beneath his tux until I could feel the muscles underneath his dress shirt. His
fingers moved up my thigh, warm and strong. Before, I’d always put on the brakes at this point. But
that night, I pushed closer into him and he reached beneath my underwear.
Abruptly, his hand stopped. “Holy shit, did you go to Brazil?”
“Yeah,” I lied. It had bothered me for years that I’d never grown hair down there, but when my
teammates noticed it I’d always just pretended that I’d gotten waxed.
Sam grinned his GQ grin, and leaned in for another kiss.
When we got to the dance, I spent a minute straightening out my hair and dress. Just as I was
about to get out of the car, Sam reached out to stop me.
“Wait—I forgot your flowers.” He fumbled in a side compartment and brought out a green orchid wrist corsage. “I thought it matched your eyes.” The shyness in his voice made me feel strangely
protective.
NONE OF THE ABOVE
I . W. G R EGO R IO
“It’s beautiful.”
“And one more thing . . .” He pulled a little velvet bag from his pocket and handed it to me.
“Madison helped me pick it out.”
I smiled. Some people would find it funny imagining a three-sport athlete asking his twelveyear-old sister for gift advice. Then again, most people didn’t know that the twelve-year-old in question had her big brother wrapped around her little finger. I gasped as the contents of the bag sparkle-slid into my hand: a ring, two hands clasping a crowned heart studded with emeralds.
“Sam. It’s gorgeous.”
“You sure you like it? It’s called a claddagh ring or something.”
“I love it.” I gave him a kiss to prove it.
They’d decorated the entrance to the American Legion with white Christmas lights and votive
candles, and I felt truly aglow as I walked in to the strains of Harry Connick Jr. crooning about love
being here to stay.
Inside, we set up at a cocktail table strewn with rose petals and found a chair for Vee. Before
long, she was holding court. I couldn’t keep track of everyone who kept clustering around our table—members of the Events Committee, class officers, and random underclassmen looking to get
brownie points. I caught sight of one of my track teammates and peeled off to say hello, then slipped
over to the finger-food table. Reaching for the cheese spread, my arm bumped against someone’s
elbow, sending a pile of wheat crackers flying.
“Sorry!” someone said, as he fell to the floor to pick up the broken crackers. I wasn’t sure if I
could lean over in my dress, but I managed to bend my knees and get down low enough to pick up
a few crumbs with a cocktail napkin. Our fingers touched, and when I looked up to see who it was, I
grinned.
“Hey, Darren!” I said when we stood up again. I looked up at him—he was one of the tallest
guys in our class, but barely filled out his rented tux.
Darren Kowalski’s face flushed when he recognized me, and he ran his hands sheepishly
through his brown mop of hair. “What’s up?”
I pointed at his plateful of cheese. “I hope that’s not your dinner. Your mom would have a heart
attack. Is she still trying to feed you alfalfa-hummus sandwiches?”
Darren’s mom and my dad had dated when we were in seventh grade, about a year after my
mom died. I was sort of sad when it didn’t work out, because Darren’s mom was an amazing cook
who ran a healthy-eating catering business. We hadn’t really kept in touch for the past few years,
what with the awkwardness of our parents being broken up, but he was a distance runner, so I usually saw him a bit more during track season.
“Nah, Mom moved on to quinoa earlier this year,” Darren said.
“Keen-what?”
“Exactly. Like anyone in Utica gives a crap about how much protein is in their grain if they don’t
know how to pronounce it.” He flicked his head to get his hair out of his eyes, and scuffed the
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I . W. G R EGO R IO
hardwood floor with his shoe.
“I like your tux,” I offered. “It’s sharp.”
Darren shrugged. “I feel like a stuffed penguin. But you look awesome. I totally voted for you.”
For Homecoming Court. “Aww, thanks.” Vee had been saying that Faith and I would get Duchess
spots, at least. I had to admit, it’d be nice to be up there with my friends. “Who are you here with?” I
asked.
“Jessica Riley’s sister, Becky.”
Jessica had helped out with the HPV-vaccine campaign I’d organized last year. She was into
drama and was a glee club star. But before I could ask about her, a hand snaked across my shoulder.
“Hello, lovely lady,” Sam murmured. He grabbed my hand, pretending to smell my corsage, and
kissed it. I mouthed a silent good-bye to Darren as Sam pulled me away.
“Everyone was wondering where you were,” he said. I could barely hear him above the music.
He dragged me onto the dance floor to join Faith and her boyfriend, Matt. Vee sat things out, of
course, listening to a sophomore chatter on about something or other while her boyfriend, Bruce,
stared into the crowd. After a while the DJ switched it up with some Madonna, and a flood of my
track teammates pulled me over to do the Vogue with them. Then the strobe lights went off, the disco ball started turning, and they played a slow dance—a cover of that Beatles song “In My Life.” Bruce
actually carried Vee out to the dance floor without her crutches, and they swayed together. Sam and I
found a spot on the dance floor next to them. I laid my cheek on the smooth satin of his lapel, feeling
the beat of his heart.
I pressed close against him and his hands started inching downward. “Later,” I said, feeling eyes
on us. But I kissed him to let him know it was a promise, not a brush-off. If tonight wasn’t going to be
the night—one week after my eighteenth birthday, with a limo to ourselves and no curfew—when
was?
Before I knew it, the music stopped and Principal McCafferty got up behind a microphone to
announce the Homecoming Court. Faith and I brought Sam and Matt over to where Vee was sitting
again, and we each took one of her hands. Her back was ramrod straight as she watched Principal
McCafferty.
“The two Duchesses of the Court are Faith Wu and Jessica Riley.”
I whooped and gave Faith a huge hug, surprised to find that I was just the slightest bit disappointed. Princess usually went to a junior—that’s what Vee had been last year. So I didn’t make Court.
I almost wished that people hadn’t mentioned voting for me, because as Aunt Carla always said, low
expectations were the key to a happy life.
But I didn’t have much time to think about it all, because suddenly Principal McCafferty announced the Dukes. And one of them was Bruce.
WTF?
Vee’s hand squeezed mine in a death grip as Bruce went up to collect his sash. I looked over at
her in the disco-ball light, and saw her face freeze. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “King and Queen aren’t
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always a couple.” Even though Bruce was QB1, most people thought he was kind of a jerk. I never
quite understood what Vee saw in him.
As expected, Prince and Princess were both juniors. As they went up to be crowned, they
seemed so happy I felt a little catch in my throat. I leaned into Sam, who pressed a kiss into the top of
my head.
“You’re up next,” I whispered to Vee, and the side of her mouth went up a fraction of an inch. I
noticed a tiny little bit of her hairdo coming out, and I reached up to tuck a strand back into place. So
I actually felt her freeze when Principal McCafferty announced in a delighted, booming, voice:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to announce your Homecoming King and Queen: Mr. Samuel Wilmington and Ms. Kristin Lattimer!”
My first thought was: Did she read her index card wrong?
But then my track teammates all went crazy, yelling, “Go, Krissy! Go, Krissy!” As Sam pulled me
up to the stage, I looked out at the sea of smiling and cheering people, and felt awesome and like I
wanted to puke all at once, kind of like the high I get at the end of a race when I know I’ve won my
heat and I’m still flying inside.
Then there was a special song for the Court only, and as I watched Bruce dance stiffly with a
bemused Jessica Riley, I glanced back to our table, where Vee sat wearing a stuck-on smile that was
sadder than any tears.
“Do you think they only elected me because Vee broke her leg?” I mumbled into Sam’s neck as
we danced.
“No way. They voted for you because you’re awesome. And you actually act like other people
exist when you’re walking down the hallway. Why are you friends with her again?”
“Sam!” I gave him a little elbow. In some ways, Sam couldn’t really understand. He hadn’t
moved to our school district until high school, and never saw the way people walked on eggshells
around me after my mom’s diagnosis. Vee and Faith had been the only ones who made me feel
normal. “This isn’t right. I should abdicate.” The initial high was fading, and I was starting to feel the
wrongness of the moment, like the little aches and pains that settle in after a race is finished.
“What, you think she’s going to feel better about it if you give her that tiara out of pity?”
He was right. When Faith came over after the Royal Dance, I burrowed my face into her neck,
not wanting to come up for air. “We’d better go see Vee.”
As we made a beeline back to our table, I lagged behind, not sure what to say. Faith, however,
was the sympathy queen. “Oh, Vee. It’s so unfair. Why couldn’t they just have had the vote last week?”
Vee’s stuck-on smile was back, or maybe it had never left. “Don’t make such a big deal,” she said.
“I mean, it’s not like it’s prom or anything.”
“You should be wearing this tiara, not me,” I said.
“Don’t be silly.” She laughed, and it sounded canned. “I’m just happy for you. It’s not like you get
to dress up very often.”
Bruce came over with a sour look on his face. He yanked his sash over his head and left it in a
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crumple on the table. “All right, we got that crap done with. When can we go get the real party started?” Our school had set up a dry post-Homecoming bash in the gym, but the real fun would happen
at Andy Sullivan’s house. Rumor had it he’d gotten four kegs and the keys to his parents’ liquor stash.
The rest of the dance was a blur of congratulations and sweaty dance numbers. When Sam and
I stepped out just before midnight, the cool night air felt like heaven. Sam flipped his phone to find
Andy Sullivan’s address, but I put my hand on his arm. I didn’t want to face Vee. Or the people who
had voted for me. “Can we wait to go to the party?”
I didn’t have to ask him twice.
We had another glass of champagne in the limo, and then Sam convinced the driver to park at
the golf course.
“Alone at last,” he said, when the privacy window went up. A few seconds later, the door
slammed and we heard the driver outside, talking on his cell phone.
“I wonder if he does this a lot,” I said, momentarily self-conscious.
“What?” Sam murmured, and then his lips brushed against my ear and the world contracted.
“Never mind,” I whispered.
Sam nuzzled my neck and his boutonniere brushed up against my nose. I took in a deep breath
to smell the rose, but it was the kind bred for looks and shelf life, and all I got was a mix of booze and
aftershave.
Sam fumbled with the zipper on my dress, only getting it halfway down before it stuck. He
pushed his hands up the bottom instead, and I had a burst of anxiety that he would rip my mom’s
dress.
“Careful,” I said. My hands shook as I helped him.
“You’re cold,” he said, draping his suit coat over my shoulders.
I let the coat drop to the floor and leaned into his chest, sighing at his warmth. “No,” I said. “Not
anymore.” The memory of Vee and her mannequin’s smile faded as I felt Sam’s chest rise and fall.
The first time Sam and I ever spoke, I looked like I’d just gotten in a fight with an alley cat. It was
sophomore year, and I was on a high after winning my first race ever. My teammates had celebrated by dumping blue Powerade over me, and I hadn’t even had time to dry off completely before I
ran my second race, where I clipped a hurdle and ended up crashing into the infield. But there’s no
crying in track, so I brushed myself off and went with my friends to watch the men’s 4x100 relay with
bruised, bloody knees.
There was this new boy running anchor, a guy with a stride so effortless it looked like silk. After
he broke the tape—of course he came in first—a couple of my teammates went to scope him out
and get the story. Was he a transfer? I hung back, watching him as he brushed his sweaty hair out of
summer-blue eyes, and when my friends finished congratulating him he looked up and gave me a
smile that made me shiver even as I felt a blush creep over my cheeks.
“Nice job,” I said shyly. I might have given a little wave, or something.
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“You, too,” he said, holding out his hand. “You’re Kristin, right? Hundred-meter hurdles? I’m
Sam.”
I was too stunned that he knew who I was to answer. But I reached out my hand anyway, and
he shook it. For days all I could think about was the comforting strength of his grip, and the way his
smile made me feel like a goddess even when I looked like a bedraggled rat.
We didn’t start dating until more than a year later. By Homecoming, it’d been five months. We
hadn’t gone all the way yet, but in the limo, with two glasses of champagne bubbling through my
system, I couldn’t remember why not. I guess I had been scared. Concerned about STDs or something.
Whatever it was I was nervous about, it didn’t exist in the limo. Blanketed by darkness, protected by tinted windows, the only sound besides our breathing was the soft piped-in jazz. Sam traced
his finger up down my neck before letting his hand stop just under my shoulder blade. He kept it
there for a long time, and for the first time all day I relaxed. As soon as we started kissing I felt the
need tingling down my spine, making the jumbled-up mess of thoughts about my accidental tiara
evaporate. I reached for Sam hungrily. This time, I wanted more.
“You sure?” Sam whispered. I nodded, afraid that if I spoke my voice would shake. Sam untangled himself to get a condom, and when he came back the feel of him on top of me was headier than
any champagne.
And then, oh my God. Pain.
It felt like someone had taken an electric drill to my insides. I gritted my teeth and tried to power past it, but it was too much. Sam shifted, trying to go deeper, and I whimpered.
His weight lifted. “You okay?”
I nodded, and tried to blink away the tears. I was an athlete. I was used to pushing through
pain. “Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
“Want me to try to . . . help get you ready?”
I nodded again, my eyes closed. A second later, my hips jerked. “Aaagh.”
Sam swore. “I’m so sorry. I barely . . . Usually—” He broke off.
I froze, wondering how many other girls Sam had done this with. He must have felt me shrink
away, because he got up and sat on the seat, pulling his coat over his crotch.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, already feeling cold. I took a deep breath in, and let it out slowly. He’d
been so patient. “I’m fine.”
So we tried again. He’d barely started before I made him stop. Sam wouldn’t try a third time.
After we’d cleaned up, Sam just held me for a little while, stroking my arm over and over.
“It’ll be better next time,” he promised.
I nodded, because that’s what I wanted to believe.
FO R T H E R ECO R D
C H A R LOT T E H U A N G
Chapter One
As far as stupid mistakes go, failing to get to the stage when your band is making a major announcement probably ranks pretty high. But I was lost in the fog of an unlikely makeout session in the
bathroom of the Roxy when I heard Pem take the mike. “We want to say a big thank-you to everyone
for coming out tonight. Come on up here, guys. Thanks to everyone at Pacific for supporting us and
believing in our record. And thanks to the folks at AEA, we have some exciting news.”
Oh, crap. I tore my lips away from Lucas Rivers in a total panic. “I have to go.” I slammed out of
the stall, fixing my shirt as I went.
“Um, anyone seen Chelsea? Okay, she’ll get up here in a minute. Anyway--” Pem stalled, waiting
for me to get my butt onstage.
“I’ll call you,” Lucas drawled to my back.
I checked the mirror to make sure I didn’t have lipstick smeared all over my face, then turned
to look at him. He shot me his trademark smile, eyes bright with mischief. God, that face. No wonder
it was plastered on every billboard and bus shelter in the country. “You don’t have my number,” I said
and banged out of the bathroom.
In my rush, I plowed right into a wall. Only it wasn’t a wall. It was a mountain wearing a black
double-breasted blazer over a T-shirt, with sunglasses perched on his head even though it was nighttime. “Excuse me.” I checked my irritation. It wasn’t his fault that I missed my cue.
He didn’t acknowledge me but reached behind me and used one of his tree-like arms to prop
open the door. “Yo!” he said into the bathroom.
“Yeah, coming,” Lucas called back as I ran off.
Sneaking onstage at the Roxy in front of five hundred people was idiotic but I had no choice. I
dodged spotlights, acting like my late entrance was planned. When I reached Pem’s side, he covered
his mike with his hand. “Nice of you to join us,” he muttered, eyes flashing so hard they could have lit
my head on fire.
Malcolm and Beckett avoided looking at me, not wanting any part of the trouble I was in.
Pem turned back to the crowd. “We’re completely stoked for our tour this summer. Come out
and see us!”
Malcolm grabbed the mike, interrupting the applause. “We’re hitting thirty cities! Coming soon
to a club near you!” He pointed dramatically at the audience, then dropped the mike and walked
offstage. Pem suppressed a laugh. For reasons I hadn’t figured out yet, Malcolm could get away with
things that Beckett and I couldn’t.
We followed Malcolm up to the dressing room where we collapsed on sunken couches. The
place was shabby, with stains on the carpet, fluorescent lighting and walls covered in band stickers.
Half-eaten pizzas sat congealing on the foldout table. This was rock and roll, all right.
Sam, Melbourne’s manager, came into the room. He looked harried but was trying to pull it
together. An evening of hanging around music industry execs will rattle even the heartiest of men.
Text copyright © 2015 by Charlotte Huang. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random
House Children's Books, a division of Random House L.L.C., a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
“Good job, guys. And Chelsea. That was a killer set. If you can bring it like that on tour, we’re gonna be
all good.” I clung to Sam’s praise like it was a life raft, relieved that I hadn’t disappointed.
Pem reached up and high-fived Sam before fixing his glare on me. “Where the hell were you?” I
should have known he wasn’t going to let it slide.
“Yeah, Chelsea. You gotta make to the stage on time,” Sam said.
I guessed the praise portion of the evening was over. That was short-lived. “Sorry. I thought we
were supposed to socialize.”
“Is that what you kids are calling it these days? She disappeared with that douche bag.” Malcolm grinned and winked at me. “Guess I won’t be the only ‘Ho’ on tour.”
My face burned but the others smirked at Malcolm’s clever pun. “Ho” was his last name and
from what I gathered, he certainly lived up to it. With his sparkling brown eyes, warm, tawny skin and
easy smile, it wasn’t hard to see why girls went for him. Plus, speaking from my years of experience
on the other side of the stage, rock groupies seemed to have it bad for drummers. But then I watched
Malcolm reach for pizza that had been sitting out for hours and thought maybe the girls should think
twice.
“What was Lucas Rivers doing at our record release?” Beckett’s tone was curious, not judgmental.
Sam shrugged. “He’s a Melbourne fan. AEA put him on their list.” Artists and Entertainers Agency, which represented us, also represented Lucas Rivers.
Pem grimaced, shaking his head. “That guy. His movies are unwatchable.” As a bona fide Lucas
Rivers fan, I couldn’t have disagreed more but I wasn’t dumb enough to say so.
“I read he makes twenty million a movie,” Malcolm said.
I was dying for them to stop talking about this. I hadn’t begun to process that less than half an
hour ago, I’d been mashing lips with the hottest teen star in Hollywood. It just figured that the first
time I kissed a guy in almost two years, I got in trouble for it.
After our set, I’d lingered by the bar, chatting up our publicist and radio promo staff as instructed, when Lucas slid onto the stool next to me and bought me a drink. Not that I’d asked for one, and
not that either of us was legal. But that didn’t seem to faze anyone involved in the transaction.
Here’s the first thing I noticed: when Lucas Rivers wanted your attention, he got it. Beyond his
well-documented physical attributes, he had a way of locking in, so that I felt like I was the only person in the club. As soon as our eyes met, everyone else slowly blurred out of my vision.
“I wasn’t sure how I’d like Melbourne with a new singer but you’re perfect,” Lucas said as an
introduction.
I tried not to look overly grateful. “Thank you.”
A lot of people thought Hollis Carter was Melbourne so I knew there was a good chance that in
taking her job, I was setting myself up for a blog-verse of hate. Whatever. I loved the band, plus it fulfilled my contract with Pacific Records and got me out of another mind-numbing summer in Lydon,
Michigan. It was the job of a lifetime.
My life had taken such a surreal detour in the past several months that initially I didn’t even
question why Lucas Rivers would suddenly materialize in front of me. Or why he’d down his drink,
then hold out his hand and lead me to the front of the club. I thought maybe he wanted to go outside so we wouldn’t have to shout over the music, but he guided me into the dingy vestibule in front
of the bathrooms.
“So did you get your complimentary copy of Barn Burning?” I sounded like the tongue-tied
dork that I was.
“I already had it. My agent sent it over,” Lucas said.
“And you like it?”
“Very much. I like how you bring more power to the vocals. I’m a sucker for girls with beautiful
voices.”
I’m pretty sure I kissed him then. It could have been the drink (though I didn’t remember actually drinking any of it). Or maybe I was finally cracking from the absurd amount of stress I’d been
under. But seriously, who wouldn’t want to kiss Lucas Rivers?
The next thing I knew, we were in a bathroom stall, all over each other. It was probably good
that Pem summoned me back to earth before I did anything really stupid. Just because I’d watched
Lucas’s movies a million times didn’t mean I actually knew the guy.
Now Sam finished running down the logistics for the start of our tour. I snapped to attention
when I realized that all eyes were on me. “What?” I asked. “I’ll be fine.” I mean, they acted like I hadn’t I
delivered on everything they’d asked of me.
Sam looked down at the ground, tense. “I know you’ll be busy finishing up school but you have
to keep your voice in shape. Five shows a week is no joke. And living out of a bus, eating crap food
every night, takes a toll. Drink a lot of water, get good sleep and it wouldn’t hurt to get some exercise.”
Great. Yet another not-so-subtle comment about my weight. I was hardly plus-sized; I was
curvy in all the right places and, fine, a couple of the wrong ones. But Lucas Rivers hadn’t seemed
to mind. Next to the manorexic members of Melbourne, though, I’m sure I seemed out of place. Not
like perfectly waify Hollis Carter. “I’ll make sure to fit some in,” I lied. I didn’t play sports and hated any
kind of mindless physical exertion. My exercise routine could easily have been mistaken for dancing
around my room in front of a pretend audience.
“Your parents want to know if they can come up,” Sam said.
I took a quick scan of my bandmates’ faces. They didn’t seem to be in the mood for company,
let alone my parents. “I’ll go out,” I said, standing.
“One more thing,” Pem said. “I’m actually glad the douche bag incident happened because it
reminded me to raise this point: There will be absolutely no hooking up between members of the
band and crew.” We all stared at Pem. “Am I speaking Arabic or something?”
“It’s just, if you were going for subtlety, I think you missed the mark,” Beckett said. He flicked a
guitar pick he’d been holding across the room and it hit the wall with a satisfying thwack!
I cleared my throat. “Was that for my benefit?” I mean, they were gorgeous and everything, but
still, wasn’t he being a little presumptuous?
“Does cuddling count?” Malcolm asked. “‘Cause I like to cuddle. Ask Beckett.” Beckett searched
for another guitar pick to flick.
Pem ignored them both. “I’m mostly talking to you, but I want to make the boundaries clear for
everyone.” His gaze was disconcerting.
Maybe he was worried that he might lose control and jump my bones, because the other two
had shown me about as much welcome as they would a Hot Pocket. Maybe not quite that much welcome. Besides, I wasn’t here to be anyone’s girlfriend.
“Well, I’m obviously sad we won’t be sharing any special moments but I understand,” I said. “Can
I go now?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “See you in Pittsburgh on the twenty-first.”
The house lights were on, exposing the club’s grubbiness. It was empty except for a few stragglers, including Brian and Linda Ford, my parents. My stout, gray-haired, dress-shirt-wearing father
couldn’t have looked more out of place, but that didn’t stop him from searching to see if there was
anyone left to talk to. I was emotionally fried but tried to muster some enthusiasm when I saw their
shining faces.
“Honey, you were sensational!” my mother squealed, giving me a hug. When I pulled back, she
reached over to brush hair out of my eyes. Her heavy, gold bangle clanked against my forehead. My
mom’s efforts to be maternal were always fraught with peril.
“Thanks. Can we go order room service?” We had an obnoxiously early flight back home. “The
guys are exhausted but send hugs and kisses and said they can’t wait to see you in Detroit.”
My mother looked concerned. “Are you sure? We should at least say goodbye.”
My parents often flat-out refused to take the hint. I started toward the exit but couldn’t help
glancing around on the off chance Lucas Rivers had decided to wait. He hadn’t, of course. As I passed
the bathroom, I said a silent goodbye to that special stall. I avoided annoying my bandmates as a
general rule but I have to say, five minutes in bathroom heaven with Lucas Rivers might have been
worth it.
C IT Y O F S A V A G E S
L E E K E L LY
PART ONE.
“We’re just lost migrants at the city’s mercy, survivors scavenging for a second chance.”
– From “March 20 Entry,” Property of Sarah Walker Miller
PHEE
1.
Through our wall of windows, I watch dawn stand up and take on the city. It throws a thick,
molten net over the skyscrapers, sets the river on fire, and makes me restless to be outside. It’s our
last day downtown, and I want to enjoy every second of it.
I untangle myself from the piles of blankets and clothes Sky and I share to keep warm this late
in autumn, trying not to wake her. I take a peek around our apartment but can’t find Mom. She
must be up and already on the hunt for breakfast, and since there’s no food left in our rooftop garden, she’s got to be by the river. I press my nose against the floor-to-ceiling glass and pretend to fly
for a minute, look down five stories to the small tuft of grass that hugs the water, but I don’t see Mom
anywhere.
After pulling on my boots and one of the coats we’ve scavenged, I rush out the door and practically sprint down the hallway to the dusty EXIT sign. But I take my time going down the internal
stairs – a tunnel of darkness, but the only way out. Even though I know every chip on the railing and
every groove on the stairs, I know I can’t be too careful. Besides, there’re far cooler ways to die in this
world than tripping on a set of steps. When I reach the empty lobby, I crawl through the hole Mom
bashed out of the glass door frame, maneuver around the Dumpster that hides it, and greet the
morning.
The day is breaking open like an egg, the river runny with orange, red, and gold. I walk to the
water’s edge and look out at the statue Mom calls Lady Liberty, a green, rusted woman floating in a
sea swamped with shrapnel and debris.
Even though I’m pumped to go back to Central Park for the winter, I’m really going to miss
this place. I guess if I called anywhere home, it’d have to be this corner of the city – the glass towers
bordering Battery Park, the Hudson River slapping the remains of the docks. But now it’s October,
smack in the middle of the month, and like on all my birthdays, it’s time to join Rolladin in the Park
for the POW census.
I hear a snap of a twig behind me and turn, in time to catch Mom taking down a couple of
baby peacocks with two quick shots from her BB gun. The peahen and the rest of her chicks scream
and scatter in a rage of feathers and tiny limbs.
Text copyright © 2015 Lee Kelly. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt used with permission from Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
L E E K E L LY
“I couldn’t see you from the window,” I say.
“Good.” Mom smiles. “Means I’ve still got my edge.” She carefully finishes off the chicks with
Sky’s knife, removes the round pellets from the birds’ flesh, and cleans them off for another day. She
places the birds in her satchel.
“I don’t know about that, old lady,” I tease, ‘cause it doesn’t mean anything – Mom looks like
she’s only a few years older than Sky. Mom’s tall with even features and long, tight limbs, as if underneath her skin there’s nothing but steel and coiled rope.
“Speaking of getting old . . .” Mom throws her arm around my shoulders as we walk back towards the apartment complex. “Happy birthday, Phee.”
“I was wondering if you remembered.”
“Are you kidding? I could never forget this day, Phoenix-of-mine.” She pulls me into her and
pats her satchel, reminding me of the carcasses inside. “You ready for your birthday breakfast?”
“That’s all I get? A couple of dead peachicks?”
“No, this day’s going to be full of surprises.” I can’t tell if Mom sounds excited, or… nervous.
Scared, even. “We need to hit the road, though. We don’t want to miss check-in, and your gift means
a stop.” She takes a deep breath. “An important stop.”
We round the Dumpster and Mom climbs back through the opening of shattered glass. “I’ve
been debating with myself whether it’s time to show you girls,” she adds. “Whether we’re ready.”
I’m not really following whatever she’s talking about, but one thing’s for sure, I want the gift. So
I say, “Come on, I was born ready,” as I scramble through the opening after her.
And even though I’m clearly joking, Mom doesn’t smile, and her eyes drift, like they do when
she’s thinking about her world of long ago. But this is how it is with her. You never know what’s going to send her away, back into the past.
“That’s very true,” is all she gives me, and we walk in silence towards the stairwell.
When we get back to the apartment, my older sister’s already laid all her favorite things across our
bed. Sky sighs as she strokes all this totally impractical clothing, lace and feathers and sparkles and
gems, biting her nails like what she packs has life-or-death importance. This is my sister – everything
means more than it should for Sky. She cries over chopped-down trees, and she can’t sleep the days
we find a dead animal.
“Just pick some stuff and throw it in your backpack,” I tell her, as I shove my own few things into
my satchel – long underwear, boots, extra hoodie and pants. “It’ll all be here when we get back. Or
at least it should be. You can wear those practical miniskirts next summer while we hunt for squirrels.”
Sky smiles as she studies her clothes. “You know only one of us can get away with a year-round
sweatpants uniform.”
I grab one of the hats she lifted a few years ago from what’s left of Bloomingdale’s, this big, stupid, floppy thing that makes her look like a sunflower, and throw it on. Then I use my high-pitched
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girly Sky-voice: “I’m thinking sequins for picking corn. No, no, the suede—”
She laughs and lunges for me. “God, don’t touch the brim – look at your hands!”
“Come on, guys. Pick up the pace,” Mom calls from the kitchenette. “We’ve got a long day
ahead of us.”
After a quick breakfast of peachicks roasted over the kindling fire Mom built in the fireplace, Sky
gives me my birthday gift, a hand-woven necklace of grass. It’s beautiful, and something I could never make: I don’t have the eye or the patience. I thank her and put it on carefully. Then we gather up
our coats and things and leave the apartment unlocked, just like Mom found it years ago.
We’ve spent summers in this apartment for basically my whole life. But like most stuff, Sky and
I know only half the story of why. Mom’s mentioned in bits and pieces that she remembered the
shiny skyscraper from “before.” Something about visiting her Wall Street friends during “lunch hour,”
and being impressed with the “amenities.” So we set up summer camp in the building’s model unit
after the Red Allies slackened their Park mandate. Mom said it was as good a place as any.
“Why are we heading east?” Sky says now.
“For Phee’s gift.” Mom checks the watch she’s had since we were kids. “We need to get moving,
it’s already nine. You know we can’t be late for check-in.”
Rolladin has all these strict rules on timing – on everything, really. Sure, it bugs me as much
as the next prisoner; but being on time’s a small price to pay for front-row spots at the POW census
festivities.
“Where’s this present of mine again?” I ask.
“That’s part of the surprise.” Mom shakes her head, her eyes already watering from the cold.
“It’s better this way, trust me.”
We brace ourselves against the chill and walk past townhomes with their windows blown out,
through rows of mutilated storefronts. The corpses of the monsters Mom says once moved, she calls
them cars, litter the streets and avenues.
“I’m freezing already,” Sky says.
“That’s ‘cause you’ve got nothing on. Look at that coat.” I fluff the wide collar of her flimsy
leather jacket. “You know, one day those fancy-pants outfits are going to land you in Rolladin’s den.”
I wiggle my eyebrows. “Our little Sky shacking up with the warden.”
Sky fake gags as she pulls my parka over my face. “You’re obnoxious.”
“And you’re asking for it.”
“Guys!” Mom hates it when we joke about these things – about anything to do with Rolladin,
really.
I laugh and nudge her. “Come on, we’re kidding.”
As the sun climbs up the sky, we reach the ratty mess of streets once known as Chinatown, hike
a wide circle around where Broome had greeted Bowery, trek all the way to the East River to get into
the Lower East Side. The tear in the earth we circle is blocks wide, and it adds about an hour to our
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to our trip.
Mom never lets us come up this way, even though there’re no tunnels over here and the bombing stopped over a decade ago. But it’s still far too dangerous, she always says, so whatever gift she
has for me must be good. And I’m excited for it, really, but I’m also anxious to get to the Park, settle
in at the Carlyle, and get prime spots for the 65th Street fighting. When I’m about to point out that
this is taking all morning, Mom finally says, “This is it.”
She stops in front of an ordinary row home. A pile of bricks, maybe four stories high. In fact,
the only thing half-interesting about it is that it’s still in one piece, what with being so close to the
bomb crater.
Sky and I look at each other, confused.
“What’s my gift doing in there?” I ask.
Mom’s eyes are lost again. “This was my old home, with your father. This is where Sky was
born.”
Old home? I wasn’t expecting this. Mom’s never mentioned this place. Or much of anything,
really, about her life Before. I don’t know what to do with this information.
“So we lived here before the war?” Sky cranes her neck to look up at the wall of brick and dusty
glass. She snaps her head back to Mom. “Before the Red Allies attacked?”
But Mom’s focus is on the front door, jiggling it open with a key I’d always thought was a necklace. “Only for a little while.”
“Was I born here too?”
Mom shakes her head at me. “Just Sky.”
The door sighs and clicks open. We walk into a musty stench so thick you can cut it, climb two
sets of stairs, and stop in front of 3B. Mom stands in front of the bloodred door, waiting. Waiting for
what, I don’t know. Sky’s trembling next to me like some cloud before a storm, so excited I think she’s
going to burst.
“It’s getting late, Mom,” I say, as patiently as I can.
“Right.” Mom breathes deeply, and clicks the golden key into the hole, and the apartment door
opens.
It’s weird. Mom’s old place looks nothing like the glass box we live in near Wall Street, with
its slate tiles, grays and whites. This apartment’s stuffed and soft. Pillows and blankets thrown over
worn-cushioned couches, books tucked into corners and teeming from tall shelves. Yellow walls and
dusty junk. Dust everywhere. And pictures. We can’t see a tabletop, there’re so many pictures.
“Is this Dad?” Sky clutches a large photo. A man has his arms wrapped around Mom. She’s
smiling, and younger around the eyes. “And is this me?” Sky shows me another one of a chubby
baby.
My mom walks over to us carefully, slowly, like she might need to lie down any minute.
“That’s you, Skyler,” she finally says. “And yes that’s – Tom. That was, is, your father.”
I can’t take my eyes off him. “He’s got my hair.”
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“A wild crop of blond, just like yours.” Mom ruffles my wavy mane. “And Skyler’s eyes.”
“They are mine, right?”
“Definitely. Green eyes that were always probing, always questioning, just like you. Your curiosity and Phee’s mouth. A brutal combination.”
I look at Mom: she’s trying her best to smile, and joke, but this all feels wrong. Hollow or something. It just reminds me that I don’t know this guy, that we’ve never even seen a picture of him.
That the most we’ve ever gotten when we’ve asked what happened to him are vague answers or
Mom’s knee-jerk, bogus mantra, Sometimes the past should stay in the past.
I look back at the picture. Tom Miller. Husband. Father. I try to match these names with his
face, but I can’t shake the disappointing feeling –in my mind, he’s played by someone different.
Someone a little older and heavier, maybe, and with a beard.
I stare at him longer, hoping for something to register that this is the guy who made me, who
willed me into the world. But he’s just some stranger – there’s no connection – and the sharp truth of
it pricks my eyes.
“Why haven’t you brought us here before?” Sky’s bottom lip starts quivering before I can say
anything first. “All the times we’ve asked you for something, anything, from before…”
“She wanted to keep it to herself,” I answer.
“Phee—”
“Please, Mom, don’t ‘Phee’ me.”
I try not to get as worked up as Sky does, over all the holes in the past that Mom refuses to fill,
but still, my own lip’s quivering. I walk towards the tiny kitchenette before either of them can tell.
“The Lower East Side was off-limits for years,” Mom starts slowly. “After the bombing stopped,
the Red Allies quarantined the area. Even if I wanted to show you, Rolladin –”
“Oh, please.” Like Mom follows every order of Rolladin’s. “You could’ve brought us here sooner.
You know it, and we know it.”
Mom shakes her head. “You’re right.”
She sits down on the ratty green couch for a minute and runs her fingers through her hair. “I
know you two won’t understand this, but I brought you here when I could. I wasn’t ready to make
these memories real. I’m still not ready. It hurts just to be in here, to see it frozen in time.” She looks
at us with glistening eyes. “God forbid, one day you two might understand what it’s like to lose everything. To have to face it again, afterwards – that might be the worst part.” She stands and turns to
the window. “Sometimes the past should stay in the past.”
Mom stays there for a while, looking out to an empty street through dusty glass. I know what
she’s doing. She’s centering herself, closing herself off before we can figure out another way inside
her.
“We’re running out of time.” Mom turns towards the bedroom, her eyes on the matted carpet.
“Let’s not forget why we’re here. Phee’s birthday present, remember?”
“So that’s it?” I call after her. “End of conversation?”
L E E K E L LY
No answer.
Sky and I exchange a look. This is how Mom is. A closed book. It’s useless to try and open her.
“This gift better be good, is all I’m saying,” I finally whisper to Sky, and we follow Mom into her
old bedroom.
Mom’s sandwiched herself in between the nearby wall and a bed that nearly devours the room.
She takes a blurry black-and-white photo off the wall to reveal a small steel door.
“What is that?” Sky asks.
“A safe. Your dad installed it when we moved here.” Mom takes her time, twisting a knob on
the safe’s face round and round. Right, left, right, and the safe door clicks open.
“What’s it for?”
“It does what it says. Keeps important things safe.”
“Like what?” I try to peer around her but she blocks me.
“Like… our passports, Sky’s birth certificate—”
“A birth certificate?” I say. Some things from Before are just so dumb. “A certificate that says
you were born? Isn’t the fact that you’re here proof enough?”
Mom gives a little laugh, continues fishing through a pile of things I can’t see. God, I really,
really hope my gift is not some lame piece of paper.
Finally she pulls something shiny and silver from the safe, and my heart skips. It’s—
A gun.
A real one, not a BB like my mom’s. And the gun’s painted red, just like the whorelords’ few
weapons in the Park. The ones sanctioned by the Red Allies.
“How’d you get that?” Sky whispers.
“It’s not important.” Mom opens the chamber, and I count four bullets, real bullets, fat silver
fish that beg to be shot.
“Is it for me?” I ask.
Mom looks at Sky, and I can tell she’s trying to get a sense from my sister whether she thinks
this is a terrible idea. I’m sure Sky thinks it is. But Mom knows I’m old enough now to protect myself,
from holdouts during the summer, or from any trouble in the Park. You’ve got to be tough on this
island, or else you don’t have a leg to stand on. But Sky’s never really understood this. She’s never
wanted to.
“So Phee gets the gun?” Sky just shakes her head. “You didn’t think this would be a good gift,
say, a year ago? When I turned sixteen?”
“Sky, come on,” Mom says. “Don’t make this difficult. This is Phee’s day. I gave you what I
thought made sense at the time.”
“You’re a lousy shot, Sky, everyone knows that,” I try to help, thinking back to the first and last
time she entered the census celebration’s junior archery competition. But when I look up, Sky’s face
is all mashed up, like she’s going to cry again. Damn it, I hate it when my words just slip out and cut
her. “I mean, your knife is more your style. A more personal weapon. If you ever had the guts to use
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it, of course.”
My sister shoots me a look more lethal than any knife.
“Phee,” Sky says, “I really can’t stand you sometimes.”
She stomps off to the bedroom’s bathroom, edging her way around her old crib. She slams the
door behind her.
“Why do you say things like that to her?”
“I was trying to help.”
“I’m serious, Phee,” Mom pushes. “Try to walk in her shoes. If you two don’t have each other,
you don’t have anything.”
I look down at the worn carpet, and a warm wave of shame flushes my cheeks. I hate feeling
like this, so I try to ignore it. “Come on, can’t I hold the gun?”
Mom sighs. “This isn’t a toy. I was debating even giving it to you.” She fiddles with it, opens its
chamber. So much power, potential, in her palms. “I thought Sky would be more careful with it,” she
says. “But I knew if you ever needed to use it, I mean really use it—”
“I’d be able to pull the trigger,” I finish her sentence. I don’t have to add that Sky would not. We
both know. We all know.
“I can’t protect you forever. This gift is a sign of trust. That you’ll keep it hidden and only use it
if you and Sky are in trouble. That you’ll respect it. Do you understand that?”
I nod, but my heart and mind are racing. I want to be outside, firing this thing. Pow. One pull
of a trigger and lightning comes out of my hand. Pow.
“Are you listening to me?” Mom’s blue eyes bore into mine.
“Yes. I’m listening.” And then I hug her, for the gun and for the trust, and take the gift out of
her shaking hand. The shiny revolver fits into mine like a puzzle piece. Like it was made for me to
hold it.
“Can I try it?”
Mom takes the weapon again, then digs back through the contents of the safe. She pulls out a
small red box, torn around the edges, and shoves it into her pocket. “You get one shot. One blank. I
don’t want to make too much commotion before we travel uptown.”
She pushes back the little lip of the gun. “That’s the safety. Always keep it on.” She fumbles
with the chamber again, opening it. “And always keep the bullets separate from the gun.”
She dumps the pile into my hand. “Keep them safe. It’s not like my BB. This is all the ammo I
have. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Do you understand?”
I nod, totally fixated on the weapon.
“Come on, let’s make sure it still works.”
I follow Mom to the window, a nervous energy creeping up my spine. She opens the glass
pane that hasn’t been touched in over a decade, and we step out onto the fire escape.
Z E R O B OX E R
FO N D A L E E
ONE
Carr Luka woke from a nap three hours before his fight. He ate two hardboiled eggs, a handful of raw
almonds, and a bran muffin, then drank a bottle of water and spent twenty minutes stretching on the
floor of his single-room apartment in the inner ring of Valtego Station.
The Moon’s desolate, pock-marked dark side loomed large across the upper right corner of his
wallscreen. Beyond it, the sunlit blue and white marble of Earth hung suspended in the vast black
infinity of space. It wasn’t a real view of course—probably not even a live feed, just an old recording.
The real views belonged to the expensive premium suites, reserved for Valtego’s high rollers. They
were betting 3:1 against him, as of yesterday.
He didn’t usually follow odds, but Uncle Polly had fake-casually dropped that tidbit on him,
angling to amp him up, get the I’ll show those bastards juice flowing. It had worked all right—not
because he cared that some bettors thought he might be a flame-out, but because he hated to think
that, after the disaster of his most recent match, Uncle Polly might secretly agree with them. Other
promising young fighters had been broken by an early loss; he certainly wouldn’t be the first.
Carr stood, shaking out his limbs and reaching for his warm-up clothes. He didn’t need to be
reminded of the stakes. He’d been on the city space station for a year and a half. This sixth and final
fight in his contract would determine whether he landed a new deal or found himself on the next
flight back to Earth, relegated to fighting in orbital dives reeking of pot, where the vacuum plumbing
regularly gave out and big bubbles of pee floated in the bathrooms.
He made a face; not about to happen. He was no planet rat.
Carr tapped the cuff-link display on his forearm to play something high energy—the neo-urban skid music that was popular earthside these days—as he packed his bag. Gripper gloves and
shoes, cup, mouth guard, fight shorts, a towel, a change of clothes for the press conference and after-party. He zipped up the bag and slung it over his shoulder. After a final look around to make sure
he hadn’t forgotten anything, he stepped out of his room and navigated the halls of the apartment
complex up to the main thoroughfare and into Valtego traffic.
The streets were crowded, echoing cavernously with the noise of people and music and cars.
Well-dressed couples, families, and packs of young men and women spilled onto the main concourse. When Carr looked up, past the reddish simulated evening light, through the enormous sky
windows and into the docking hub, he could see that even more ships had arrived since yesterday.
Half a dozen Earth-Mars cargo cyclers, a few private solar-sailing yachts, and plenty of commercial
passenger craft. It was one of those times when summer in Earth’s northern hemisphere coincided
with dust storm season on Mars, inciting residents of both planets to travel. Super high season on
Valtego.
He caught the city-station bus as it pulled up with a pneumatic hiss, its silver body flashing the
usual promotional banner: Valtego: It’s More Fun on the Dark SideTM. Carr didn’t bother to sit down;
he was only taking it a few stops. He stood near the door, closed his eyes, and let the burble of
Zeroboxer by Fonda Lee. Copyright © 2015 by Fonda Lee.
Used by permission from FLUX., www..uxnow.com.
Z E R O B OX E R
FO N D A L E E
voices from the other passengers float around him. He heard English in American, British, and Martian accents, Mandarin, Mars Hindi, Spanish, and German. In his mind, he turned the hum of conversation into a growing swell of cheering, a thunderous crowd calling his name.
His cuff vibrated and a rising chime played in his ear. He glanced down at the display on his
forearm, then smiled, shut off the music, and took the call. “Enzo,” he said. “Are you going to watch my
fight?”
“No, I happen to be hiding in my closet with my screen, under a blanket, for no reason. OF
COURSE I’m watching!” Enzo’s voice, transmission-delayed by a couple seconds, sounded, in Carr’s
cochlear receiver, as if the boy was shout-whispering an urgent secret. “My mom is going to go fusion
if she finds me.” He gave a wheezy, excited cough. There was a pause, and Carr winced, picturing the
boy sucking hard on his inhaler.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Carr asked.
“Whatever. School is useless. You barely went.”
“Sure I went,” he lied. “And I was tutored.” Which was true, if you could call Uncle Polly helping
him fudge through remote study modules “tutoring.” “Besides, you’ve got to make a living using your
brain someday.”
The boy gave a long sigh. “It’s so unfair.” He sounded as morose as he had when Carr had first
left for Valtego. Carr felt a pang of worry. Now wasn’t the time to question the kid, but Enzo was
small, he didn’t have many friends; who was watching out for him, spending time with him, now that
Carr was living in deep orbit on the far side of the Moon? Carr wouldn’t trade his place here for anything, but Enzo was one of the few things he missed about Earth.
The bus left behind the rows of densely packed apartment-entrance tubes provided for
Valtego’s less wealthy residents. It passed shops and restaurants catering to visitors from the planet
before turning and sliding to a stop at the gravity zone terminal. The doors opened onto a wide platform bustling with people and lined with colorful holovid ads promising the best deals on theater
tickets, spacewalks, hotels.
“I wish you could see this place,” Carr said. “It’s something else. I’m going to bring you up here
someday and show you around.” If I’m still here after today, came the unwelcome reminder.
“Would you? That would be so stellar,” Enzo whispered. “Oh shit, I think my mom is home. Okay,
I just called to say good luck! Make him float!”
“Thanks, little man.”
The connection clicked out as Carr stepped onto the terminal platform. Uncle Polly and DK
were waiting for him, looking comically mismatched standing together— old, pale, and lean, next
to young, dark, and muscled. DK clapped Carr on the back. Uncle Polly put his hands on Carr’s shoulders and broke into a slow, approving smile that made his left eye squint. “You’re a hundred percent
ready,” he said.
On fight days, Uncle Polly underwent a magical transformation. Every other day, he could chew
Carr out in practice, find fault in every detail, cuss at him if he wasn’t pushing hard enough,
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FO N D A L E E
but on fight day, he was optimism incarnate. Carr felt himself grinning, buoyed.
“Where would you rather be right now?” Uncle Polly demanded.
“Nowhere, coach.”
“What would you rather be doing?”
“Nothing, coach.”
“You ready to fly?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Get in the car.”
He strapped his duffel bag into the overhead compartment before climbing in. Once everyone
was seated, the harness straps tightened and the doors closed. The vehicle shot down the freeway
tube—one of several that connected Valtego’s rings with the central zero gravity complex like spokes
of a wheel. Carr ran an appreciative hand across the smooth tan upholstery of his seat. He took the
commuter bus to the zero-g complex every morning, but the routine trip was far more enjoyable in a
private car. Another special fight-day perk.
Streets and buildings shrank as the view of Valtego spread out around them in all its slowly
turning immensity, the bright lights and artificial gravity of the city’s habitable rings receding as the
freeway sailed the car into a breathtaking expanse of space. Carr craned his neck against the mild
g-force pressure, looking past the shadow of the Moon and catching, for a few seconds, a glimpse
of Earth—a real view, not a projection. The planet always looked smaller in real life than on the
wallscreen.
Uncle Polly ran through the game plan once more. “What are you going to do in the first
round?”
“Stay out of his grab zone. Wear him out, frustrate him.”
“He doesn’t like to climb. Make him climb. Second round?”
“Hit him from the corners. Use my fast launches and rebounds.”
“Good, good.”
“Third round, spin him hard and finish him off.”
“You got it. What’s your strength against him?”
“My space ear.”
“Always fear the better ear! You’re ready.”
Uncle Polly was not really Carr’s uncle. He wasn’t even old, maybe sixty-something, but he was
scrawny and bent-backed from a career spent on mining ships and in orbital gyms during a generation when zero gravity alleviation therapy wasn’t what it was today and so many years in space took
a heavy toll on one’s body. He had a full head of short gray hair and a permanently grizzled jaw. But
he moved and spoke with the fire of a younger man, and when he slapped his hands on his thighs,
he radiated confidence like a solar flare.
The zero gravity complex, recently renamed the Virgin Galactic Center, loomed ahead of them.
As the vehicle slowed, the familiar transition to weightlessness tugged at Carr’s stomach, pressed his
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FO N D A L E E
chest against the harness, and drew his limbs upward. They glided past a group of tourists on a beginner-level spacewalk, the suited figures cycling arms and legs slowly and awkwardly as their guide
coaxed them along with gentle bursts of his thrusters, like a shepherd leading a herd of nervous farm
animals.
The car docked in the parking hold. Carr drifted up to retrieve his bag and pushed it ahead
with one hand while unclasping his belt tether and hooking it around the hallway guide-rail with the
other. It was an irritating requirement; he could easily climb this place free-floating and blindfolded,
but there was a fine if you were caught untethered, even if you were a Valtego resident. Management
didn’t want anyone setting a bad example for the tourists and seasonal workers, who might hurt
themselves crashing into things or get stranded in the middle of a room and create extra work for
the maintenance folks who’d have to rescue them.
DK tethered himself and tilted his head to one side, listening. “You hear that?”
Already, the low thrum of a crowd was growing over the steady whoosh of vehicles docking,
one after the other. Distant loud music began pulsing through the thick walls of the parking hold.
DK smiled, showing small, brilliant white teeth against tropical bronze skin. “Full house tonight, I’ll
wager. All here to see you, kid.”
That wasn’t exactly true; the headline fight was between Danyo “Fear Factor” Fukiyama and
Jorge “Monster” Rillard, but DK had told Carr that his match had the most hype he’d ever seen for the
undercard. Of course, maybe DK was just saying that to pump him up. DK was not a large man—a
natural feathermass—and he looked slightly rodent-like with his big ears and fists, large eyes, and
small nose, but he exuded a gregarious charisma that was rare in this sport. He was also one of the
best young zeroboxers anywhere. His full name was Danilo Kabitain, but no one called him that. He
was DK to his flymates, “Captain Pain” to his opponents and the media, and a hell of a man to have in
one’s corner.
They climbed along the hallway using the evenly spaced rungs, turned right, and passed
through the athletes’ entrance. The locker room and adjoining warm-up space were empty except
for two men. One of them was seated on a bench, feet hooked under the stabilizing rod, elbows on
knees, broad shoulders hunched forward. He looked as if the universe had just ended.
“What’s the matter, Blake?” Carr asked.
“My fight’s canceled.” Blake Murphy didn’t look up. “The other guy tested positive for endurance-enhancing nanos. Bastard.”
“Damn. Sorry to hear it.”
Blake’s trainer glanced over from where he was furiously shoving his fighter’s gear into a bag.
“You’ll be up early then.” He pointed to the small wallscreen that showed the evening’s two commentators, Xeth Stone and Jeroan Culver, up on deck. Carr swiped the volume up and Xeth’s energetic
voice filled the locker room: “ … change in lineup, it won’t be long now before we see one of the
most anticipated matches of the night!”
“That’s right, Xeth,” Jeroan replied in a straight-man monotone. “Carr Luka is still something of
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FO N D A L E E
an enigma to this crowd. He burst onto the ZGFA scene last year, gained a strong following when he
racked up four impressive wins in a row, and then choked in his last fight against ‘Death’ Ray Jackson.
Now he’s going up against the third best zeroboxer in the lowmass division, and the question on
everyone’s mind is, does he stand a chance of coming back against Ferrano?”
“I think he does, Jeroan,” Xeth enthused. “I don’t think Luka is a flash-in-the-pan like some people have been saying. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I tell you, it’s been a while since I’ve seen
a guy, born on Earth no less, with the kind of instincts he’s shown in the Cube. That kid can fly. Did I
mention he’s still seventeen?”
“Sure, he can fly, but Ferrano is an expert grabber. How’s he going to do against that?”
Zeroboxing commentators liked to speak of fighters as “grabbers” or “fliers.” It was rather artificial, Carr thought, since any good zeroboxer had to be both, but there was some truth to the distinction. To inflict any bare-handed damage to a person in zero gravity, you had to establish a brace or a
point of leverage—preferably a vulnerable part of your opponent’s body—to keep them from floating away while you hurt them. Or you had to treat space itself as a weapon, using the infinite angles
of movement to strike and rebound, strike and rebound, faster and harder than the other guy.
“Luka is an ace flier,” Xeth agreed, “but his grabbing game is solid, and it’s getting better with
every match. I think we’re going to see—”
Uncle Polly slashed his hand across the front of the screen to turn it off. “You heard ’em, you’re
up early! Get changed and warmed up!”
Carr untethered himself, then stripped out of his clothes and handed them to DK, who stuck
them to the magnetic locker pegs and passed him his shorts. Uncle Polly hurried off to find the ZGFA
official, a dour bulldog of a man who inspected Carr’s gripper shoes and gloves and watched as DK
wrapped Carr’s hands. He flashed a retinal reader across Carr’s eyes, checked his vital stats off his
cuff—heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature— then gave him the go-ahead. “Forty minutes,” he
said.
“I need to take a leak,” Carr said.
“Make it fast,” Uncle Polly warned.
Carr climbed over to the stall and dug his feet under the toe bar, streaming into the vacuum
funnel for what felt like an eternity. Everyone said that for a young zeroboxer he was remarkably
composed, never visibly nervous before fights, but his bladder knew better. Maybe that was a good
sign; he hadn’t been nervous enough before the last match.
The wash dispenser squirted a bubble of soapy water onto his fingers. Blake emerged from one
of the other stalls and pulled himself over to the neighboring dispenser.
“Rotten luck,” Carr said to him, feeling obligated to put in a few more words of sympathy.
“You’re bound to get another fight soon. At least they caught him. You wouldn’t want a loss on your
record because the guy cheated.”
Blake looked up, his eyes like two pale blue gas fires. “Who says I would’ve lost?”
Carr hesitated, wiping off the water with a towel, not sure how he’d somehow given offense.
Z E R O B OX E R
FO N D A L E E
“No one. But even if you won, the guy doesn’t deserve to be in the Cube.” It made Carr angry that
some people tried to fool the system, to take shortcuts around years of time and effort. It was mentally weak.
Blake’s mouth sagged a little, his eyes cooling, losing their ferocity. You never could tell with
Blake. Most of the time, he was one of the most polite and soft-spoken guys Carr had ever met. But
in a fight … well, he wasn’t nick- named “the Destroyer” for nothing. As he turned to leave, he looked
back at Carr and said, “Good luck out there. Stay out of those corners, yeah?”
Corners. They had never been a problem for Carr, not until his last fight, when “Death” Ray Jackson had flown him hard for two rounds, then trapped him in a corner in the third and ground it out
to win in a split decision. Carr did not take losing well (who did?), especially since he was certain he
could have won and had only his own overconfidence and ill-preparedness to blame.
Uncle Polly had given him hell, and he’d deserved it. He could barely look at his coach after
the fight. For days, he’d felt so low he couldn’t bring himself to leave his apartment. Uncle Polly had
shown up on the fifth day. His face had been severe, but his voice had been kind. “It’s good for you
to know what it feels like on the other side, for once. Now you know. It’s shit. So—you planning on
whimpering back to Earth for a planet-rat job, or are you going to get off your ass?”
He’d gotten off his ass. It had taken time, though—weeks—to shake off the malaise, and he
suspected the loss would stay with him forever, like a benign cyst under the skin.
Carr clambered back out to the warm-up area, shaking his head to clear away the unpleasant
memory and refocus on the present. He had another chance—that was what mattered. DK helped
him pull on and bind his gripper shoes. Carr wiggled each of his enclosed toes and gave a thumbsup. He took off his cuff-link and handed it to his friend. Keeping a fighter’s cuff for him during a
match was an important job for the cornerman and symbolic of trust; DK put it on next to his own.
Carr’s gloves went on, over his wrapped hands, bound securely several inches up his forearm, leaving
the wrists fully mobile. Some zeroboxers opted for the heavier gloves with more wrist support, but
Carr didn’t think it was worth sacrificing climbing agility.
“Thirty minutes,” the official in the hallway called.
“Terran or Martian?” DK retorted, cheeky. Zeroboxing rounds were always measured in the fractionally longer Martian minutes, so it was an ongoing joke that zeroboxers had no sense of standard
Terran time.
“Get moving,” Uncle Polly said. “You know the drill—five times around the room, then
wall-bounces.”
Carr swung into the square warm-up room and jogged the walls, up, down, and around, exerting himself just enough to raise his heart rate. There was a lumpy target dummy secured to the
center of the room with cable wiring; he launched off a wall, somersaulted to strike the target with
both feet, and rebounded to another wall. He worked the dummy from each wall and corner, and in
the last five minutes, Uncle Polly called him back down for a brief recovery. Carr was warm now, just
beginning to feel a sweat. Uncle Polly drifted in front of him and did a final check on his gloves and
Z E R O B OX E R
FO N D A L E E
shoes. He clapped his fists down over Carr’s. “Let’s do this.”
The official’s voice called down the hallway, “Luka, you’re up!” A deep thrill of nervous energy
raced through Carr’s veins. He faced the hall, drew in a long, uneven breath, then let it hiss out slowly.
“We’re right behind you,” DK reassured him.
Carr gripped the rungs and climbed. At the stadium entrance, the rumble of the crowd suddenly faded as the music and lights dimmed and blue spotlights began sweeping back and forth.
The announcer’s bass voice bellowed, “Fighting out of the red corner, with a mass of seventy kilograms and a record of four wins, one loss, CAAARRR …‘THE RAPTOR’ … . LUKAAA!”
UNDER A PAINTED SKY
STA C EY L E E
Chapter 1
They say death aims only once and never misses, but I doubt Ty Yorkshire thought it would strike
with a scrubbing brush. Now his face wears the mask of surprise that sometimes accompanies death:
his eyes bulge, carp-like, and his mouth curves around a profanity.
Does killing a man who tried to rape me count as murder? For me, it probably does. The law in
Missouri in this year of our Lord 1849 does not sympathize with a Chinaman’s daughter.
I shake out my hand but can’t let go of the scrubbing brush. Not until I see the blood speckling
my arm. Gasping, I drop the brush. It clatters on the cold, wet tile beside the dead man’s head. An owl
cries outside, and a clock chimes nine times.
My mind wheels back to twelve hours ago, before the world turned on its head . . .
Nine o’clock this morning: I strapped on the Lady Tin-Yin’s violin case and glared at my father, who
was holding a conch shell to his ear. I thought it was pretty when I bought it from the curiosity shop
back in New York. But ever since he began listening to it every morning and every evening, just to
hear the ocean, I’ve wanted to smash it.
He put the shell down on the cutting table, then unfolded a bolt of calico. Our store, the Whistle, was already open but no one was clamoring for dry goods just yet.
The floor creaked as I swept by the sacks of coffee stamped with the word Whistle and headed
straight for the candy. Father was cutting the fabric in the measured way he did everything. Snip.
Snip.
Noisily, I stuffed a tin of peppermints into my case for the children’s lessons, then proceeded
to the door. Unlike Father, I kept my promises. If a student played his scales correctly, I rewarded him
with a peppermint. Never would I snatch the sweet out of his mouth and replace it with, say, cod-liver oil. Never.
“Sammy.”
My feet slowed at my name. “Don’t forget your shawl.” Snip.
I considered leaving without it so I wouldn’t ruin my exit. But then people would stare even
more than they usually did. I returned to our cramped living quarters in the back of the store and
snatched the woolen bundle from a basket. Underneath my shawl, Father had hidden a plate of don
tot for me to find, covered by a thin layer of parchment. I lifted off the parchment. Five custard tarts
like miniature sunflowers shone up at me. He must have woken extra early to make them because he
knew I’d still be mad.
I took the plate and the shawl and returned to the front of the shop. “You said we’d move back
to New York, not two thousand miles the other way.” New York had culture. With luck, I might even
make a living as a musician there.
His scissors paused. When he finally looked up at me, I raised my gaze by a fraction. His neatly
combed hair had more white than I remembered.
Copyright © 2015 Stacey Lee. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt used with permission from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
UNDER A PAINTED SKY
STA C EY L E E
“I said one day,” he returned evenly. “One day.” Then his tone lightened. “They say the Pacific
Ocean’s so calm, you could mistake it for the sky. We’d see so many new animals. Dolphins, whales
longer than a city block, maybe even a mermaid.” His eyes twinkled.
“I’m not a child anymore.” Only two months from sixteen.
“Just so.” He frowned and returned to his cutting. Then he cleared his throat. “I have great plans
for us. Mr. Trask and I—”
Mr. Trask again. I set the plate down on the cutting table, and one of the fragile custards broke.
Father lifted an eyebrow.
“Only men who want to pound rocks go to California,” I snapped. “It’s rocks and nothing.” “California’s not the moon.”
“It is to me.” Though I knew I shouldn’t claim the last word, I couldn’t help it. I was born in the
Year of the Snake after all, 1833. Father looked at me with sad but forgiving eyes. My anger slipped a
fraction. With a sigh, I carefully scooped the broken tart off the plate and left the shop.
Five o’clock: Keeping my chin tucked in, I hurried down the road, kicking up dust around my skirts.
The smell of smoke was especially robust tonight. Maybe the smokehouse had burned the meats
again. The boys who worked there were not particularly gifted, plus they were mean. I already knew
they would overcharge us for the salt pork we’d need for the trek west, and Father would have no
choice but to pay.
I marched past uneven blocks of mismatched buildings, longing for the orderly streets of New
York City. There were actual sidewalks there, and the air always smelled like sea brine and hot bread,
unlike St. Joe, which reeked of garbage and smoke and— I lifted my head. The sky had thickened to a
hazy gray, textured with particles . . . like ash? Something sour rose in my throat.
It was not the smokehouse meat that was burning. I ran, my violin bouncing against my back.
Oh please, God, no.
I flew past empty streets and turned onto Main, where suddenly there were too many people,
some standing like cattle, others clutching squirming children to them. Noise assaulted me from all
sides, people yelling, animals braying, and my own ragged breath.
The Whistle was a charred heap, an ugly inkblot against the dusky sky. The heat made the air
look wavy, but the bitter reek in my nose told me the scene was no mirage. Ashes fluttered like black
snowflakes all around.
“Father!” I pounded toward the remains, scanning the area for his distinctive figure. His dark
hair and small build. The worn jacket with the patches on the elbows that he wouldn’t replace because he was saving for my future. Maybe he had shed it, for surely he was hauling water along with
the rest of the men.
Smoke filled my lungs, and burned my eyes as I rubbed my grimy fingers into them.
“Out of the way!” yelled a man carrying buckets. Water sloshed onto my skirt.
I trotted beside him as he carried the buckets to another man who threw them onto the
UNDER A PAINTED SKY
STA C EY L E E
smoldering ruins. “My father—”
The man barely glanced at me. “He’s gone.” I uttered a hoarse cry. Gone?
“Lucky you weren’t there yourself or you’d have been trapped, too. Now move!” He trod on my
foot as he shoved by, but I hardly felt it.
My God, I didn’t—I should have . . .
“How?” I asked no one in particular. Was it an accident? Father was the most careful person I
knew. He always doused the stove after we used it, and strictly enforced our no smoking permitted
signage. No, if it was an accident, it couldn’t have been Father’s.
Whoever was responsible, may he pay for it in a thousand ways, go blind in both eyes, deaf in
both ears. Better yet, may he perish in hell.
I choked back a sob and tried to make sense of the fuming mess in front of me. There was
nothing but jagged piles of charred fragments. I could make out a heap of ash in the spot where we
kept our wooden safe. Though Mother’s bracelet was no longer inside, it had held other irreplaceable
treasures. A photo of Mother. Father’s immigration papers.
A wall of heat stopped me from going closer than fifteen feet from our front door, or where it
used to be. My eyes burned as I strained to find my father, still not quite believing the horror was real.
But as the heat began to cook my skin, I knew as sure as the Kingdom hadn’t come that he was gone.
My father burned alive.
I shuddered and then my chest began to rack so hard I could scarcely draw a breath. Smoke
engulfed me, thick and unyielding, but the awful truth rooted me to the spot: after I’d given my last
lesson of the day, I’d dawdled along the banks of the dirty Missouri, throwing stones instead of coming home directly. I should have been with him.
Oh, Father, I’m sorry I argued with you. I’m sorry I left with my nose in the air. Were you remembering that when the smoke robbed you of your last breath? You always said, Have patience in one
moment of anger, and you will avoid one hundred days of sorrow. My temper has cost me a lifetime
of sorrow. And now, I will never be able to ask your forgiveness, or see your kind face again.
Another man carrying buckets barreled toward me. “Move back, girl, you’re in the way!”
I stumbled toward an elm tree, and there I stood, even after the glowing hot spots had ceased
to burn, and buckets were no longer emptied.
Still the black snow fell, bits of my life flaking down on me.
UNDER A PAINTED SKY
STA C EY L E E
Chapter 2
“She’s been standing there over an hour,” a man muttered to another as they passed by.
“Place just lit up,” said a woman from behind. “Everything burned, even the Chinaman.”
“They sold the Whistle to a Chinaman?” asked another woman.
My face flushed at her commenting on this rather than on Father’s death. We were never welcome here. Why should I expect people to care now, just because Father had died? I turned to glare
at the two women, only now noticing the crowd that had gathered. The thick soup of smoke had
thinned to a veil of black.
“Six months ago. Where you been? Well, that’s the chance you take when you operate a dry
goods. Places like that are tinderboxes.” This first woman finally noticed me, my lips clamped tight
and my eyes swollen. She elbowed her friend, then they hurried away.
Fly, you crows. My father was not a spectacle. He was the greatest man I ever knew. He was my
everything.
I clutched at the elm tree before I fell over.
A child born in the Year of the Snake was lucky. But every so often, a Snake was born unlucky.
Mother died in childbirth, a clear indication that my life would be unlucky. To counteract my misfortune, a blind fortune-teller told Father never to cut my hair, or bad luck would return. In addition, she
said I should resist my Snake weaknesses, such as crying easily and needing to have the last word.
“ ’ Tis a shame about your daddy,” said a familiar voice. Our landlord, Ty Yorkshire, shook his
head. His puffed skin made him look older than my father, though they were both in their forties.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
“My best building, too,” he said in his rapid speech that caused his jowls to shake. His left eye
winked, the lashes fluttering like moth wings. “Sometimes you roll snake eyes.”
I gasped. He knew my Chinese lunar sign? It took me a moment to realize he was talking about
gambling, not me.
“I gotta meet with some company men. You need a place to stay, wash that black off you. La
Belle Hotel is one of mine. Betsy will get you a nice room.” He tipped the edge of his hat, then hailed
two men.
I blinked at his departing back. Despite his kind offer, the man always made me uneasy. Maybe it was the way his black suits hung over his too-wide hips, reminding me of a spade. Father said
spades represented greed, because the first Chinese coins bore that shape.
One of the onlookers covered her mouth and recoiled when she saw me. A man put a protective arm around her shoulders, like I was a wounded animal that might bite. I couldn’t blame him. I
was unsure of my own reactions. The anger and horror poisoning my insides made every nerve sing
in pain, made me want to scream, and weep. I was my violin bow, bent to the breaking point and on
the verge of snapping in two.
But I did not snap. Instead, I shuffled toward Main, not even sure where I was going as I picked
UNDER A PAINTED SKY
STA C EY L E E
my way around horse pies.
Did he suffocate before the flames—?
I shook my head. I couldn’t bear to think of it.
My adopted French grandfather called Father his scholar. Father could predict the weather by
listening to birdsong. Knew which plants healed and which poisoned. Spoke six languages. Tipped
his hat to everyone, even Mrs. Whitecomb, who regularly pinched buttons from us.
The moist evening air licked at my face and bare arms. Somewhere I had lost my shawl.
To my right, a line of wagons led down to the Missouri River. The town of St. Joe squatted at
the edge of the civilized world. Folks came here to jump into the great unknown, starting with a ferry
ride across the dirty Missouri.
Into the great unknown was where the grocer Mr. Trask took Mother’s jade bracelet after Father
inexplicably gave it to him. Now, nothing remained.
I pressed my violin case into my gut and stared at the river. The shimmering surface beckoned
to me. I could be with Father, instead of in this unjust world, which never threw us more than a cold
glance. With the strong undertow, death would be quick.
But Father would not want that.
Dazed, I stumbled away. My boot caught on a sandbag and this time I did fall, sending my case
skittering in front of me. “Look sharp!” yelled a young man from atop a horse. I covered my head with
my arms. His sorrel stamped its print just inches from my head. White markings extended past its
fetlocks like socks. The rider slowed.
“You okay, miss?” he asked in a soft but clear voice.
I nodded but didn’t look back. Father always said, He who gets up more than he falls, succeeds.
I scrambled to collect my violin before another horse came along and trampled it. The rider moved
on.
I found myself staring up at La Belle Hotel, whose pink walls set it apart from its drab neighbors. Up close, I noticed the dirt overlaying the paint. Father and I avoided this street because he said
the uneven surface brought bad energy. But I had nowhere else to go.
I swung open the heavy door. Behind an elaborately carved walnut counter, a woman in bright
taffeta lifted her shriveled face to me. “Yes?”
“Good evening, ma’am,” I said in a shaky voice. “I’m Samantha Young. Mr. Yorkshire said I might
find accommodation here.” “Good Lord,” she muttered, thin nose twitching like a mouse’s.
Her cane dragged along the floor as she hobbled toward me, shhh, tap, shhh, tap. She raked
a contemptuous eye across my face and down to my worn boots. After an eternal pause, she said,
“Annamae, bring Miss Young up to room 2A and scrub her down.”
IN K A N D A S H E S
V A LY N N E E . M A E TA N I
Prologue
People go to hell for what I’m about to do.
The old man glares at me, his face so close I can see the wrinkles on his forehead stretch wide
when he speaks.
“Do you know who I am?” he yells.
I choke on his stale, smoke-filled breath. A thick Japanese accent stains his words. “Do you
know who you are?”
Claire Takata. Daughter of loving parents. Devoted sister. Loyal friend.
He strikes me with the back of his hand, the force almost tipping the chair I’m tied to. The
sting sends a burning shiver down the side of my face.
“Answer me!” he demands.
I am the heiress to a legacy I wish I’d never discovered.
The cold night prickles my skin. I twist my hands, trying to escape, but the rope cuts into my
wrists. I swallow hard and try again.
All the terror he’s put me through makes anger storm inside. I want to hurt this man as much as
he has hurt me. If I were free, I could kill this man right now.
Without guilt.
Copyright © 2015 by Valynne E. Maetani. Japanese translation by Masaji Watabe.
Permission arranged with Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, Inc., New York, NY 10016.
1
I stared at my pink walls, wishing away the smell of death. Jasmine incense, used at every funeral
I had ever attended, hovered in the air. I imagined the wispy smoke snaking its way through the
narrow spaces around my closed door, the tendrils prying at tucked-away memories.
A breeze drifted through my open window, bristling the hair on my neck. My chest
wrenched tighter.
It was time.
The morning sun hadn’t found its way into the hallway yet, so I flipped on some lights and
wandered into my older brother’s room. Parker faced a wall crowded with overlapping soccer
posters. He stuck the final pin into another picture, covering the last glimpse of light blue paint. “Hey,
Claire,” he said without looking at me.
“Ready?” I said.
“I was just thinking,” Parker said, “I’m not going to be here next year.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I waited for him to crack a joke, but he didn’t. Parker turned his stocky body. “No. I
mean, I won’t be home to do the ceremony with you guys.”
Every day since school had started, he’d made sure we all knew he couldn’t wait to go to college. And I couldn’t wait to get rid of him. But somehow the sadness in his voice made the hollow
space grow larger.
Parker paused for an expectant moment, then said, “Do you remember the time he took us
fishing at Pokai Bay, and I caught five fish?” He removed his black-rimmed glasses and cleaned the
lenses with the hem of his shirt.
I’d forgotten about that, but now I could picture the rainbow of color dancing off the water
and the way my body rocked in rhythmic waves long after we had gotten off the boat. Sometimes
I wasn’t sure if a memory was really mine or if it was something I thought I remembered because
someone else had talked about it.
“That was a good day.” I tried to summon happy experiences to push away the bad memories
flooding my head, but I couldn’t break the good ones free. I clenched my fists and kicked at an ink
stain on the gray carpet. “Mom’s probably waiting for us.”
“Let’s get Avery,” Parker said.
He lumbered past me, and I followed him down the hallway. Pictures of all three of us kids
at different ages and events lined the walls. The oak floorboards creaked beneath our feet, and we
found our younger brother stretched on his bed, his shaggy black hair strewn across the pillow. His
walls were papered with posters of skateboarders and snowboarders, but unlike Parker’s random
clusters, Avery’s wall hangings were hung with precision.
Before Parker even opened his mouth, Avery announced, “I’m not doing it this year. It’s a
dumb tradition and doesn’t mean anything anyway.”
“He was our father,” Parker said. His plump cheeks flushed pink. My jaw started to tighten.
“Show some respect.”
Avery shivered a surrendering sigh and rose, as if getting out of bed took all the energy he
could muster.
When we got to the butsudan in the corner of the living room, Mom was already at the lacquered shrine, her hands in prayer position, palms together, held at chest level. Parker gave her hip a
gentle bump and put an arm around her, eclipsing her slight frame.
After squeezing Mom’s shoulder, Parker took a few steps forward and began the ceremony to
commemorate the anniversary of our father’s death. The familiar smoky smell overpowered me, forcing my mind to awaken with unwanted memories: the suddenness of my father’s passing just before
my seventh birthday. The invasion of people I’d never met. The weeks it took before Mom could get
out of bed.
Willing myself to follow Parker’s example, I moved toward the altar, placed my hands together,
and bowed. I pinched some ground incense, dropped it in the burner, and bowed again. Once
back in place, I bowed a final time, the twinge of my father’s absence weighing on me.
Avery repeated the ritual so quickly that he almost dropped his prayer beads. After his final
bow, he mumbled, “Until next year, Henry,” and slouched away.
I shook my head. Did he really just call our father by his first name?
Mom closed her eyes.
“You’d think he’d at least act like he cared a little more,” Parker said.
I caught Avery’s hurt expression as he started up the stairs. “Sometimes,” Mom said, “it’s the
memories we should have had that are most painful.” She chased after Avery, but I heard his door
slam before she could reach him. I didn’t remember much about my father, but Avery, even though
he was only a year younger than I was, probably remembered even less.
Parker meditated a few more moments before he left. I lingered behind, brushing my toes in
an arc along the patterns of the Oriental rug. Mom came back downstairs and announced she was
going grocery shopping. The garage door rumbled open, and then closed.
I sat at the grand piano in the far corner. Because I had quit lessons a couple of years ago, the
selection of pieces I could play from memory had become more limited, but I still had some favorites.
I settled on a nocturne by Chopin and let my mind wander along the soft and lilting phrases. By the
time I finished, my head felt less crowded.
In the distance, the sound of thunder strummed. Dad was up—his light was on in his study
across from the living room— but he never joined this ceremony. I guess he wanted to give us some
space. I walked across the cold wood floor of the hallway and made my way to my room. At the top
of the stairs, I glanced at a picture of five-year-old me, in the time before we moved here, dressed in
a lavender Hawaiian floral-print muumuu with an orchid lei around my neck. I barely remembered
that life—the life with our father.
Whether it was a picture of us with my father or stepdad, Mom never displayed pictures of our
whole family. Not on this wall, not in this house, not even in old baby albums. She had mentioned
she didn’t want to be living with a ghost in her marriage to my stepdad, but since she didn’t have
pictures of him either, I figured it was fair for both of my fathers.
While I loved the comfort of my room, the pink color of everything was overwhelming. Pink
was my mom’s version of a girl’s room, not mine. When we first moved here, I refused to decorate the
walls until they were a different color, but had never convinced her to budge. As I got old enough to
paint it myself, I still hated pink but no longer cared enough to do anything about it.
I dug behind some shoes in my closet to get to a box where I kept some of my father’s things.
The cardboard was marked with smudges, and the lid was starting to come apart at one corner.
Inside the box was a worn old notebook bound in burgundy leather. My father had journaled
in it, recording inspirational quotes and making notes.
Technically, it shouldn’t have been in my possession. When we moved to Utah, Mom had had
movers box up some of my father’s old things because she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She figured she could sort through everything when she was ready. But before she had the chance, I went
through the boxes myself. She never noticed the journal—and a few other things—was missing, and
I never mentioned I had it.
I sucked in a deep breath, the smell of old paper and leather filling my lungs. The entries about
us kids were the ones I loved the most. I flipped to one in which he had written about the time he
took me to see hula performances at the Merrie Monarch Festival. I didn’t remember that festival, but
I’m pretty sure I was his favorite child.
When I turned to a page toward the end to read another entry, I sliced my finger on a cardstock
edge that had come unglued from the back cover. I dropped the journal.
A bead of blood formed on the tip of my pointer finger. I couldn’t believe how much those tiny
things could sting. I grabbed a tissue from my desk and pressed it against the cut.
Blood hadn’t gotten on the notebook, and I hadn’t smeared anything, but there was a piece of
paper sticking out from a pocket between the unglued cardstock and the back cover. I slid my finger
into the tight opening and pulled it out. It was an envelope, addressed to George Takata, my stepdad, but it wasn’t sealed and had never been postmarked, so it must not have been sent. Inside was
a letter.
I set the letter down. The taste of blood splashed across my tongue, and I realized I had bitten
my bottom lip.
My fathers knew each other?
2
I read the names on the paper again, slower this time, to make sure. But it was definitely my father’s
handwriting, which I recognized from his journal. And, thanks to snooping in Mom’s drawer and
stumbling onto old love notes she had kept hidden, I knew he signed the H of his first name as if it
were written in one stroke.
Thoughts whirled in my head, unearthing questions that would only grow louder unless they
were answered. Why wouldn’t my parents have said something earlier? Mom must have known they
were acquainted.
Unable to read Japanese, I’d have to go to the source and do some probing.
I slid the letter into my back pocket, put the empty envelope and notebook back into the box,
and put it away. A faint nervousness hummed under my skin as I walked down the stairs and into
Dad’s study.
I slumped into a leather chair in front of the man who had been my new dad almost since mine
had passed away. Without glancing up, Dad folded the papers he held and shoved them into a file
folder, which he placed in a drawer of the cherrywood credenza behind him. He closed it and took a
key from his pocket to lock the drawer.
“What was that?” I said.
Dad shifted in his chair. The scent of his cologne, a mixture of wood and cool winter air, crossed
the room. “Don’t worry. It’s not for your birthday.”
“Good,” I said. “Because you know how I hate celebrating my birthday.”
Right after my father died, Mom forgot about my birthday. Parker’s too. Since then, birthdays
for me and Parker had become a muted affair that neither of us wanted to celebrate. Avery, however,
had no problem making sure Mom pulled out all the stops for his birthday a month later.
I eyed the locked drawer. If he was hiding something, it wouldn’t be for long. The whirlwind of
thoughts was already in full force. Whether it was a surprise for my birthday or something else, I had
to know what was in there, or the spinning would never stop—even though it was most likely insignificant. Even though I shouldn’t.
Dad nodded and gave me his full attention. “So how are you doing, princess?”
I shrugged and compelled my mind to focus. If he really knew my father but hadn’t said anything, I would have to be very careful in my approach to determine whether not telling us was an
oversight or on purpose. Depending on how he answered,
I’d have to decide if I wanted to show him the letter I’d found.
“I’m fine,” I said, “considering what day it is.”
He combed his fingers through his dark hair. “It’s still hard, isn’t it?” His voice fell at the end as if
it was more of a statement than a question.
My heart fluttered faster. I stared at the grain in the dark wood of his desk. “It’s been ten years.
A long time since it happened. I’m fine.”
He nodded.
“I mean, I don’t even think about him anymore,” I said. “Not much. But I think you really would
have liked him.” I glanced up to get a good read of his expression.
“I know I would have.” Dad’s voice was soft, his face unchanged.
“He was such a good person.” I kept my eyes trained on his. He cleared his throat. “I’ve heard he
was one of the best.” “And seriously I’m fine, but you know, every now and then I miss him,” I said. “A
lot.”
Dad nodded and removed his glasses, rubbing both eyes as if tired, then placed them back on
the bridge of his nose.
I hadn’t sensed anything unusual yet from his body language, so I decided to push further. “Did
you happen to know my father?” I asked. “I mean, since you were both in Hawaii?”
Dad shrugged, but I couldn’t detect any discomfort or surprise cross his face. Not even the tiny
wrinkles at the corners of his eyes or the small sunspot above his left brow shifted.
“I did know of him,” he said, “but a lot of people knew who your father was because he was a
judge.” He folded his arms, and his leather chair creaked as he leaned back. “I’m sure if he were here,
he would love watching you play soccer. You have a big game this week, don’t you?”
I smiled. “Yeah. We’re playing Haven High. They beat us last year.”
He brought his chair forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “I know you’ve been practicing
hard, and the team is looking pretty strong. If I were Haven, I’d be nervous.”
My team had been practicing hard, and I had to admit we looked good on the field. “Yeah,” I
said. “Haven should definitely be scared.”
“I know it’s been a tough morning, but I have to run some errands.” He jumped to his feet. “Do
you need me to pick up some more energy bars while I’m out, or do you have enough?”
“I’m good.”
Before he dashed out the door, he kissed my forehead. Uneasiness thrummed through me. I
tapped my fingers on the arm of the chair and tried to replay our discussion. I wasn’t sure if I had any
more answers than when I first sat down, and I realized I’d never seen my dad in such a hurry on a
weekend.
At some point, Dad had read an article on how one of the best ways to prevents sports injuries
was by cross-training. We had all played soccer from a young age and didn’t have a lot of time to fit
in another sport, so Dad came up with the idea of spending some time on Saturdays learning martial
arts and self-defense from him, since he’d grown up practicing karate and jujitsu.
Even if he had other things to do, he always made sure we practiced for an hour or two. But
today, he seemed to have completely forgotten. Why would he have offered to pick up energy bars
when Mom was at the grocery store anyway?
Outside, the wind howled, the high-pitched whistle sending a flutter down my spine, but I
stayed seated, waiting to hear the finality of the garage door rumbling closed. If my phone hadn’t
vibrated, I would’ve already been rummaging through Dad’s desk. I had a text from my best friend,
Forrest Langford.
Forrest: Hey, I remembered what day it was. Are you ok?
Me: I’m fine.
Forrest: Really?
Me: Would I lie to you?
Forrest: Yes. I’ll be there soon.
I smiled and returned the phone to my pocket. Then I eyed the corner of a crumpled piece of
paper, sticking out of the side of the drawer he had just locked. Without hesitation, I grabbed two
paper clips and went to work behind his desk.
Over the past few years I had taught myself how to pick any lock that wasn’t electronic. In the
sixth grade, Parker locked me out of my own bathroom so I would be late for school. Out of frustration, I shoved a metal skewer in the little round hole, and the door popped open. The euphoria of
besting him motivated me to learn how to pick all kinds of locks with all kinds of tools. I had even
made my own tension wrench by grinding down an Allen wrench in shop class. Learning the art
wasn’t easy, and it took a lot of practice to get a feel for tension range and the different pressure that
needed to be applied, but the more I practiced, the more I found interesting information no one
wanted me to know, so I kept at it.
I shaped the paper clips, placed them in the lock, and started to turn. I’d practiced on this lock
many times when I was first starting to learn—all I had to do was apply enough tension and listen
for the pins. The lock turned, and I was in. The folder Dad had been holding only minutes earlier
stood up a bit from the rest. In my previous searches, I’d never come across it before. I yanked it out,
placed it on the desk, and plopped in his high-backed chair.
Even though I’d done this many times, I worked to slow my pulse. Dad had caught me going
through some papers on his desk a few years ago, looking for a consent form for a biology field trip
to Red Butte Gardens. He told me I should have asked and anything in his office was none of my business. The consent form was a legitimate excuse. Dad would kill me if he knew I was snooping again,
this time in a locked drawer.
But if he never found out, it wouldn’t hurt him. I opened the file, expecting to find the receipt
for a birthday gift he had ordered online or the guest list for a surprise party.
All I found was an envelope with Funeral written across the front, containing several photographs. I pulled them out and stared at the picture on top. I didn’t know how to make any sense of
seeing the two men together, but it was my father, Henry, and my stepdad, George, both of them
much younger.
I looked closer at the picture. I replayed the conversation I’d just had with my dad and studied the picture again, but it was both of them, side by side, arms around each other. Dad’s face was
fuller, his muscles more toned.
My fathers seemed to have known each other a long time, which meant keeping this information from us couldn’t have been an oversight. I tried to quiet the sting pinching at my heart, but I still
felt like I had been slapped. As the title on the envelope suggested, the next picture was from my father’s funeral. Parker and Avery stood at the Buddhist temple doors in their little black suits. I spread
the small stack of photos on the floor and took a quick picture of each with my phone. Then I shoved
the photos back into the envelope and placed it in the folder, making sure everything appeared as
Dad had left it, before relocking the drawer behind me.
After I tidied up, I broke into a sprint up the stairs, passing Avery’s room first. “Get into Parker’s
room,” I said. “I need to show you guys something.”
EVERYTHING THAT MAKES YOU
M O R IA H M C STAY
There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.
—Ernest Hemingway
FEBRUARY 27
It was cold—too cold for the zoo. Still, the Doyles were here, looking at the cheetahs and deciding
what to do next.
Ryan wanted popcorn.
Fiona wanted the pandas.
Copyright © 2015 by Moriah McStay. All rights reserved.
Excerpt used with permission from Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
M O R IA H M C STAY
ELEVENTH GRADE
FEBRUARY
Fiona
Fiona scooted low in her chair. Damn Mr. Phillips and his English project. Why did he have to assign
Trent McKinnon, of all people, as her partner?
Half the class reshuffled, and screeching chairs fractured the room’s quiet. Books smacked onto
reassigned tables. Trent started in her direction, and Fiona pulled her bangs as far forward as they’d
go.
She’d loved this boy from afar since fourth grade, although they’d never said more than two
words to each other at any one time. Now he was going to sit less than twelve inches away. God, and
she woke up with an enormous red zit on the right side of her nose.
Lucy would be thrilled. Even now, her best friend was turning in her chair and mouthing Oh.
My. God. behind Trent’s back. Fiona ignored her. Still, she couldn’t help notice how nicely he filled out
his Union High School Lacrosse T-shirt.
He sat down on her right—damn it, she should have switched chairs, so he’d have to sit on her
left. She slouched lower in her chair. From this angle, a pimple was the least of her problems.
“You do the reading?” Trent kicked his legs straight in front of him, ankles crossed. He gave a
friendly, lazy kind of smile, like the earth wasn’t shifting directly underneath them.
When she remembered how to breathe, Fiona craned her face too far around to answer. She
probably looked like an owl. “Yeah.”
Trent McKinnon’s eyes made a brief sweep over her face, hairline to chin. It was so quick and
subtle someone not looking for it wouldn’t notice.
Fiona noticed.
She pinched her arm under the table. Get over it, Doyle.
“Good thing you’re my partner,” Trent continued, like he hadn’t been caught ogling. “I need all
the smart I can get.”
Fiona stared at him a few seconds longer than socially acceptable. Trent McKinnon actually
seemed happy to be her partner. And—and—he knew something about her. Just the “smart” bit, but
hey, it was something.
So why on earth did she say, “How’s the dumb jock thing working out?”
“So far, so good,” he said, with a little laugh.
“Well, rein it in. I have goals.” What are you doing? Shut up, you idiot!
This time, Trent glanced at her face—then gazed at her steadily. His eyes weren’t the pure blue
she’d fantasized about for years, more a periwinkle with intermittent specks of green. A cowlick near
his hairline made a faint, spiral pattern over his right temple.
M O R IA H M C STAY
She struggled not to faint.
Mr. Phillips handed out paper topics, interrupting the most awkward moment ever. Trent
flipped through the packet before pushing it over. “You pick. Doesn’t matter to me.” He gave her another quick, heart-stopping look. “But I guess you knew that already.”
She took the handout. At some point, they would need to set a time to meet—she’d need his
phone number, his email—but she wouldn’t mention it now. She didn’t trust her mouth from going
traitor.
It felt like she’d been snapping at people all day—Ryan for running late, her dad for his corny
joke this morning. If Trent McKinnon couldn’t restore her usual easygoing mood, the rest of the day
was hopeless.
The bell rang, Trent gave a cool nod, and their paths diverged at the door.
Immediately after, Lucy grabbed Fiona’s left arm and hissed, “What’d he say? What’d you talk
about?”
“Nothing. The project.” I insulted him for no reason. He hates me.
Fiona couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for her usual, exhaustive analysis of All Things Trent
McKinnon. Lucy, herself not a fan of boys in the romantic sense, usually tolerated these in-depth
breakdowns for only a few minutes. Eventually, she’d cut Fiona off with something like, “Good Lord,
enough already!”
Anyway, besides her awful behavior, the only part of the conversation that really stuck with her
was that subtle—it was subtle, wasn’t it?—sweep of his eyes over her face.
“Well, it’s about time, I say,” Lucy told her as they walked down the hall. “You have to talk to
him, now.”
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
“You’re such a chicken.”
Fiona rolled her eyes, but only her left eyebrow lifted from the gesture. The right never went
anywhere.
Lucy rolled her eyes right back. “I know what you’re thinking.” She gestured vaguely to Fiona’s
right cheek. “But you make a bigger deal about those scars than anyone else.”
“I do not.” She blew it off most of the time—things like the new kid doing a double take in biology, or the coffee shop guy repeating her order loud and slow, like she was mentally challenged.
“What’s keeping you from Trent McKinnon, then?” Lucy asked. “You’re smarter, funnier, and
prettier than nearly every other girl in this school.”
“I’ll be sure to share that theory with all the boys waiting to date me.” Now at her locker, she
looked over both shoulders. “Oh, wait. There are no boys waiting to date me.”
“I’m not talking about your ridiculous hang-ups anymore today. Trent McKinnon. Specifics.”
Fiona didn’t want to play. Lucy didn’t seem to care. She kept throwing out questions—“When
are you going to meet?” and “Did your elbows touch?” Fiona was ready to snap, firmly not in the
mood, when Lucy asked, “What’s he smell like?”
“You did not just ask me what he smelled like,” she snorted.
M O R IA H M C STAY
“I thought that mattered.”
“Yeah, if he’s unwashed. Otherwise, what am I supposed to say? He smells like cantaloupe?”
“Who smells like cantaloupe?” said another voice. Fiona’s brother, Ryan, showed up, nudging
her right shoulder. He was the only person she didn’t mind standing on that side.
“Trent McKinnon,” Lucy answered.
“He does not smell like cantaloupe,” Fiona snapped. “I don’t even think that’s possible.”
“My grandfather totally smells like cantaloupe,” said Lucy.
“Is that the orange one or the green one?” Ryan asked.
“Orange,” Fiona said.
“Oh, never mind. He smells like the green one. What’s that called?”
“Honeydew,” Fiona said. “Now that we’ve established the various melons, and the men they do
and do not smell like, can we move on?”
“Why were you smelling Trent McKinnon?” Ryan asked.
“He’s her new English-paper partner.”
Ryan whistled, rocking back on his heels. “Maybe it’s your lucky day, after all.”
When Fiona and Ryan got home, their mother was standing at the kitchen counter, sliding flowers
into a vase. “Did you two have a good day?” she asked.
As usual, she looked ready for an impromptu dinner party—shiny leather flats, sweater set,
classic pearl earrings. Even the apron was ironed.
Ryan gave a generic grunt from inside the refrigerator. When he emerged, folded salami slices
were hanging from his mouth. But it didn’t matter; their mother always focused on Fiona.
“Sweetheart, please make a haircut appointment,” her mother said to her. “It looks terrible.”
Anger, irritation, and—God, self-pity—surged through her like hot tar, filling up all her crevices. “Fits the rest of me then, right?” she snapped. Ryan stopped mid-chew, a limp piece of salami
dangling from his fingers.
“Fiona,” her mom said.
The stare-down went a few long seconds. Their golden-brown eyes would look identical, if it
weren’t for the thick ridge of scars bordering Fiona’s right one. Maybe that’s why her mother always
won these little staring wars. She didn’t have a ridge of inflexible flesh always tugging at her muscles.
Fiona stormed up the stairs and took her frustration out on her bedroom door. Luckily, the
Doyles lived in an old house. Not only was her door solid enough to be slammed, it made a satisfying
bang that would be heard downstairs.
“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” she mumbled, staring at her bed.
A pile of preppy pink waited for her—the same designer-y stuff her mother always bought,
even though Fiona lived in old T-shirts. Pushing it all to the floor, she flung herself onto the bed, facefirst. She had the urge to cry, but she hated crying. Instead, she took off her shoes and hurled them
across the room.
There was a knock. “What?” she snapped, her head buried under her pillow.
M O R IA H M C STAY
The door opened with a slow creak. She looked up to see the top of Ryan’s head as he peeked
in. With the same hair and eyes, they were constantly mistaken for twins. And both had fair, creamy
skin, though Ryan had it all over his face, not just on the left side.
Ryan’s eyes darted around the room, as if looking for objects that might be launched at him.
“You okay?”
“Go away.”
He came in anyway. “That’s a lot of pink,” he said, looking at the pile of clothes on the floor.
“Clearly, she understands me.” She pointed to her navy Cat Power T-shirt and the black jeans
she’d worn three days straight.
Ryan nudged her over on the bed, sliding next to her. They lay side by side, staring at the ceiling. “Bad day?” he asked.
“What tipped you off?” she snorted.
“The calendar.”
“I’m not having my period, Ryan.”
“Ew. Gross. That’s not what I meant.” He moved away—but then scooched back, so their shoulders touched. “You’re always cranky today.”
“What are you talking about?”
“February twenty-seventh.”
“What’s February twenty-seventh?”
“The day, you know. The zoo,” he said. “Your accident.”
It felt like a sandbag dropped on her chest. That couldn’t be right, could it?
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“I saw it a few years ago,” he said. “On Mom’s calendar, with the birthdays.”
The. Woman. Was. Obsessed. It might even be funny—if it weren’t so infuriating.
“Why are you just now telling me?” she asked. Their heads shared the pillow, leaving only a few
inches between their faces. The angle was awkward, and the muscles under her scars pulled.
“I thought you knew.”
Uh, no. “That I’m cranky on the anniversary of an accident I hardly remember?”
“I remember it.”
“You do?”
“I mean, not well. I was”—Ryan lifted his hands in the air, counting on his fingers—“what, six?
But I remember going to that snack bar. It was empty, I think—just us. The guy at the popcorn cart,
he looked like a grandfather, kept trying to pat our heads whenever we ran past him.”
Fiona tried to picture it, but had no idea if the details coming to mind were memory or imagination.
“I remember the crash . . .” Ryan paused. His voice came out quieter when he spoke again. “Your
scream. Mom trying to wipe the oil off with her scarf, and how your skin—” He cleared his throat.
“Them tearing us out of there. How loud you yelled in the car. Nana buying me a milk shake in the
hospital cafeteria.” He turned to Fiona again, looking guilty. “I was really psyched about that milk
M O R IA H M C STAY
shake. Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven.” She even smiled.
He didn’t smile back. “I feel bad. About all of it.”
“It is what it is.” Fiona hated talking about stuff like this, so she reached across Ryan and lifted her guitar from its place at the foot of her bed. Sitting cross-legged, she strummed some easy
chords—the calming, predictable ones. C. E. G.
Was she really this pathetic every February 27? She hated drama, and here she was wallowing
in it. You’d think the scars were suffering enough.
“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck,” he said.
“I’m fine. It’s just today, apparently. Which is ridiculous.”
“Nah. This way, you get all the pissed-offedness out on one day.”
She snapped her capo on the guitar’s neck, at the fourth fret. “I don’t have . . . that’s not a word.”
“I’d be pissed.”
“Waste of energy. I can’t change anything.” She grabbed a Moleskine notebook off her bedside
table. She’d been keeping these notebooks since seventh grade, around the same time her mom
finally let her quit piano for guitar lessons. They weren’t diaries, or songbooks strictly. Most of the
back pages were covered in rhymes. She’d pick a word, make syllable count columns, and see what
matched with it. Pride. Divide. Bona Fide. Jekyll and Hyde.
She flipped pages until she found a blank spot, jotting down some more words to add to the
rhymes and lyrics scrawled everywhere—not to mention her goofy hearts and Trent McKinnon’s
name.
“I can’t change that I’m short,” Ryan said. “It still annoys the hell out of me.”
Fiona moved between guitar and notebook, playing through chords and writing them down
next to the words. “You’ll grow. Dad’s six two.”
“But I’m short now. Most girls want to be taller than their dates.” Ryan leaned over, trying to get
a look at her writing. “When are you going to let me hear one?”
Fiona’s pen stilled against the paper. She stared at the words she’d written—raw, aching phrases that explained her to herself, unfinished songs about unrequited love with Trent McKinnon. They
told about her fears, which were many, and her hopes, which were unlikely. The words laid out her
insecurities, her self-disgust, and, inexplicably, her pride.
Simply put, they were True. No way was she sharing them with anyone.
“Nothing to hear yet. Just scribbles, really.” She changed the subject back to Ryan. “Dad said
he didn’t have his growth spurt until college. Freshman year he was five seven. By that summer, he’d
grown five inches.”
“I didn’t come in here for you to solve my problems.”
“Your problem has a solution.”
“Yours might,” he said quietly.
She swallowed down the lump in her throat. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said, mimicking
the many stodgy doctors she’d seen over the years.
M O R IA H M C STAY
“Things change. Science changes. That’s what Dr. Connelly keeps saying.”
“He’s been saying that since I was five, Ryan.”
“You never know.”
She switched chord shape—A minor, C, E minor—wanting the notes off-center, like her. “Well,
barring a miracle, this is who I am. Growth spurts and pink dresses won’t fix me.”
“You’re not broken, Ona,” he said, using the nickname only he used.
Tell that to Trent McKinnon, who will never love me.
He nudged her with his foot. “You’re not broken,” he repeated.
“I know. You’re right,” she said, knowing if she agreed, he’d let the subject drop.
She scratched out some lines and penciled yet another version on top of them:
I want love and skin.
I want to begin again.
W H E N R E A SO N B R E A K S
C IN DY L . R O D R IG U E Z
Chapter 1: “When One has given up One’s life”
March 7
She lies on the hard ground, breathes deeply, and waits for death to come. She isn’t afraid, but
anxiety gnaws at her. Will this take long? Is it going to hurt? What’s on the other side? Anything? Will
anyone miss me? Or will they be relieved the miserable girl who screwed everything up is gone? She
takes another deep breath and exhales. I was broken beyond repair, and they were tired of trying to
fix me. They’ll definitely be relieved. Her body starts to relax. Everything will slow down and eventually stop.
Her life doesn’t flash before her eyes, like she expected. All she thinks about is this morning.
She retraces her steps to make sure everything was executed as she had planned.
She sat in the oversize chair in front of her window, hugging her knees to her chest. The sun
gradually broke the darkness and cast its light everywhere. This would be her last sunrise. Wanting
to capture it, she closed her eyes and held them for a moment, like she was taking a mental picture,
before rising from her chair to get ready.
Like a burglar in her own home, she walked around her room with careful steps and measured
movements to retrieve what she needed from closets and drawers. She didn’t want to wake or talk
to anyone before leaving. She wouldn’t have the guts to look her family in the face, lie, and continue
with her plan.
Once dressed, she slipped through her partially open bedroom door, with her boots in hand.
She stopped in the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and dropped the bottle of sleeping pills
into one of her boots.
She paused at the top of the stairs and whispered to those still sleeping behind bedroom
doors, “I love you. I’m sorry.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She swallowed hard, shook her head to stop the tears from
coming, and picked up her pace. She practically slid down the stairs and shuffled into the kitchen.
After slipping on her boots and coat, she tucked the bottle of pills, the manila envelope, and a bottle
of water into her coat pockets. Her note on the white-board that hangs on the refrigerator door read:
Mom, I went to school. –E.
She kept her hood up and eyes lowered on the long walk from home to the high school. Outside the building, she checked her watch as students and staff started to arrive for Saturday detention and other weekend events. She had to get in and out quickly. She needed enough time to reach
the clearing without getting stopped by anyone.
Hood still up, she entered the school and removed the manila envelope from her coat pocket.
She pulled the letter out of the envelope, but left the journal inside it. When she reached Ms. Diaz’s
classroom, she slid both under the door and continued walking. She whispered, “Thanks, Ms. D. You
tried.”
Once outside, she lowered her hood and took a deep breath. I’m almost there. She raised her
hood again and ran full speed across the field to the nearby woods.
Copyright @ 2015 by Cindy L. Rodriguez. All Rights Reserved.
Published in February 2015 by Bloomsbury Children's Books.
Now she waits. Her limbs grow heavy and sink into the earth. Her body is downshifting, but
her mind is racing. This is the right thing to do, isn’t it? Everything was so screwed up and it was all
my fault. The only way to clean up the mess was for me to disappear. And how else can that happen?
There was no other way, right?
But then images of her family and friends flip through her thoughts—stupid stuff—like cosmic
bowling and making angels in fresh snow. She pounds the sides of her legs with her fists. “No. No.
No,” she whispers to herself. She chokes back tears and orders herself, “Do not rethink this.” After all,
there are far more things she won’t miss, like the guilt or the pain. And then she laughs a little, because, really, what could she do now, even if she wanted this to stop?
As her eyelids grow heavy, she blinks hard and forces them open. She squirms on the ground
and says, “Don’t panic. It’s going to be okay,” but she can’t stop her tears and the choking feeling in
her throat. She breathes deeply and, to still her mind, she stares at the sky. Bare branches bump into
prickly evergreens as they all sway in the cool wind. They look like they’re tickling the blue sky’s belly.
The sun shines bright and continues its ascent. The moon is visible, but fading. Squirrels race through
trees, deftly leaping from branch to branch, and a large black bird, with wings outstretched, glides
overhead.
She pounds her fists on the ground and kicks her legs out hard, like she’s fighting someone.
She rocks her body from side to side and tries to sit up, but fatigue pushes her down. She arches her
back and screams and then lies flat. Wanting to hold on to something, she digs her nails into the dirt.
Tears slide down the sides of her face as she closes her eyes.
Not far away, Ms. Diaz reads a note slipped under her classroom door, drops everything, and
runs as fast as her legs and heart allow. Her legs pump. Her heart pounds. Her arms instinctively clear
away branches that threaten to slow her down. A few of the trees’ extended branches scratch her
cheeks and forehead.
But, she won’t stop. Her legs and heart pump—fast, faster, go faster, she begs them, until she
reaches the clearing.
She pauses for a second, then races to the girl. She bends over her, lifts her body, repeats the
word, “No,” first softly, then louder until she’s screaming. She forces herself to focus, to stop screaming and draw a deep breath. She places her mouth over the girl’s and pushes the air in hard, trying
desperately to breathe life into her and bring her back.
Chapter 2: “Adrift! A little boat adrift!”
Eight months earlier, July
By 8:30 a.m., Elizabeth figured it was time to get out of bed. She had been up for a while anyway
after another restless night. Sleep had been teasing her for about a year, jolting her awake every two
hours until she stopped trying, which was usually around 6 a.m. It had definitely affected her sunny
disposition, or so she’d been told.
She rolled out of bed and shuffled across the hardwood floor to her dresser, where she raked
a brush through her jet-black hair. With a section of hair down the front of her face, she resembled
the creepy, pale girl from an old horror movie she saw once. Elizabeth tilted her head in a sinister
way and snarled. Then, she grabbed a pair of nearby scissors and, with one slice, gave herself slightly
uneven bangs.
After a scalding hot shower, she dressed and pulled her hair into a tight ponytail, her newly-cut
bangs hanging right above her eyebrows. She hastily applied red lipstick and black eyeliner before
heading downstairs for breakfast.
Her eleven-year-old sister Lily sat at the kitchen table, watching cartoons and messily eating
Cocoa Puffs with a huge spoon. Her mom leaned against a counter, gripping a coffee mug and staring into the space in front of her. Mom was always petite and pretty, but the small lines around her
eyes were new. So were the dark circles under her eyes that showed despite layers of cover-up. They
had that in common.
“Good morning,” said Elizabeth.
“Morning,” Lily mumbled through slurps of cereal. She glanced at Elizabeth and then did a double-take. “Nice hair,” she said and returned to her breakfast and the television. Elizabeth scrunched
her eyebrows in response. A compliment? Was she serious or being sarcastic? If it was a joke, she
probably would’ve gone further, saying something silly like, “Nice hair…if you were a gerbil.” A genuine compliment? Wow, she wasn’t expecting that.
“Morning, sweetie,” Mom said absently. Elizabeth stared at her mom, but her gaze went unnoticed. Hello? Anybody home? Notice anything different, Mom?
After a few seconds, her mom snapped out of her daze and into action.
“What time is it?”
“Almost nine,” Elizabeth said and walked to the refrigerator. As Elizabeth approached, her mom
moved away. She tossed a fistful of pills into her mouth and swallowed them with a gulp of coffee
before dumping the cup into the sink.
“I hope those are vitamins,” said Elizabeth. Mom didn’t respond.
“Lily, baby, we need to go. Finish your cereal. We can’t be late for camp. I have a job interview
this morning, and I want to be on time. No, I want to be early, so there’s no chance I’ll be late.”
Mom was frenzied, clearing dishes, washing her hands, checking her purse for the essentials,
and studying herself in the mirror to see if she appeared job-worthy.
“Why do you have an interview?” Lily asked. “You already have a job.”
“I know,” Mom said as she scanned the room for anything else she needed. “I might get a second job. We need the money.”
“Are we really that broke?” asked Elizabeth.
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to talk about it,” she replied.
“O-kay,” Elizabeth said, pronouncing each syllable with sarcastic emphasis.
She waited for a reaction, but didn’t get one. Mom turned toward Lily, who was still watching
TV and slurping her cereal casually.
“Let’s go. Let’s go. TV off.” She hit the power button with one hand and swiped Lily’s bowl with
the other.
“Mom,” Lily whined. “I wasn’t done.”
“Well, you’re done now.”
“Why do I have to go to summer camp, anyway? I’m almost twelve.”
“Right. In a year.”
“I could go to Nana’s again.”
“You’ve been going to Nana’s since school got out. She deserves a break.”
“Then, I could stay with Elizabeth and you’ll save money.”
“Julia doesn’t trust me,” Elizabeth said.
Mom was quiet for a second and then said, “We need to go.”
As her mother added the bowl to the pile of dishes, Lily inched her way toward the TV.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Mom stepped between Lily and the television. “I want to get to the interview early, I told you. If we leave in a few minutes, then I won’t have to race around like a crazy person. I want to arrive calm and collected. I don’t want to look or feel frazzled.”
Elizabeth and Lily caught each other’s eyes and stifled laughter. Mom always looked and felt
frazzled, no matter how much time she had in the day. While she spun through the room like a hurricane, Elizabeth ate a cold Pop-Tart and washed it down with three gulps of orange juice.
Her mom finally stopped and paid attention to her.
“You should eat a better breakfast,” she said.
Elizabeth shrugged.
“Did you get a haircut?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Recently.”
They stared at each other for a few seconds. Say something. Go ahead, I dare you.
Mom turned away. Elizabeth watched her cross the room and usher Lily toward the door.
“Later, Lillian Grace,” Elizabeth said. Her sister peeked over her shoulder, half smiled, and stuck
out her tongue.
“Later, Emily Elizabeth,” she responded. “Don’t forget to walk your big red dog,” she added with
a laugh. Elizabeth smiled. Nice one.
Her mom and sister walked out and slammed the front door.
“Good luck, Mom,” she said out loud to no one.
H E L LO , I LO V E YO U
K AT IE M . STO U T
Chapter 1
Big Brother,
I want you to know something: It wasn’t your fault, not any of it. And I’m so sorry. Sorry for
ditching the family and for shipping off to the other side of the world.
But, mostly, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when it mattered. I should have told someone before it got bad. It’s just that you’re my big brother; you’ve always been the strong one. And I miss that.
You’re probably laughing hysterically right now, imagining me—the foreign language–challenged child—bumbling my way through the airport, a lonesome little white girl with a Southern
accent and too much hair spray. Just know that with every step I take farther from home, the more I
miss you.
Maybe this trip will give me time to figure things out. I certainly hope it does, anyway.
I could end this letter with “from Korea, with love” like that James Bond movie in Russia, but the
plane hasn’t landed yet, so I’ll just leave you with . . .
Almost in Korea, with love,
Grace
The subway doors open, and a flood of boarding passengers sweeps me and my two giant
suitcases onto the train. Elbows jab into my sides, and the wheels on my bags run over toes as a
thousand of my closest Korean friends pack into the tiny metro car. Half an hour inside the Republic
of Korea, and I’ve already been thrown into the life of a national.
All the seats are full, so I park my bags in front of an elderly woman, her eyes half-obscured by
folds of wrinkled skin, holding a plastic sack full of something gray and . . . slithering. Octopus, maybe? I straddle one of my suitcases and sit, letting myself sway with the rocking of the train and giving
my jet-lagged body a rest. Like I haven’t just been sitting on a plane for fourteen hours.
The man beside me plays the music on his MP3 player so loud I can hear the singer wailing
through the headphones, and he stares at me like I’m an alien. I avert my gaze, letting it roam the
rest of the car. I’m one of two Westerners leaving the airport station, and basically everyone besides
me is on their phone. Except for that couple a few feet away, who manage to canoodle in the microscopic-size standing room, whispering to each other in Korean.
South Korea. It still hasn’t registered yet—that I left everything, everyone back in Nashville and
set up camp in the “Far East.” I’m standing on a Korean train rattling through Korean tunnels toward
my new Korean school.
I am insane.
For possibly the millionth time since my plane took off from
Atlanta, I ask myself what I’m doing. Sweat moistens my palms, and I have to close my eyes, my
breathing bordering on hyper- ventilation.
Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Beryllium. Boron. Carbon.
I go through the entire periodic table of elements three times, the repetition numbing my
Copyright © 2015 by Katie M. Stout. All rights reserved.
Excerpt used with permission from Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
K AT IE M . STO U T
brain and slowing my pulse, emptying my mind of any anxiety. My AP chemistry teacher taught me
the trick, told me it helped him calm down. I discovered this summer that it works for me, too.
The train stops at the next station, and we lose a few passengers but gain even more. The
crowd shifts, pushing and pulling me against the tide of bodies, and I curse myself for not being willing to wait twenty minutes for the express train, which has assigned seating. Waiting longer would
beat getting assaulted every time a new passenger boards the commuter train.
I glance down at the scrap of notebook paper I stashed inside the pocket of my jean shorts
earlier, double-checking the name of my stop a dozen times.
The automated female voice announces the name of the next station, which thankfully sounds
a lot like what I’ve written phonetically on my paper—Gimpo. The train lurches to a stop, and I grab
the handles of my bags, forcing my way through a mass of humanity thicker than Momma’s grits.
I stagger onto the platform just as the doors close, and, mustering as much gumption as I have,
pancake any stray Koreans as I force my way through the crowd fighting to board the train. Once I
climb the escalator and maneuver through the automated gate, I emerge into the surprisingly thick
humidity of a Korean summer.
My grip on my suitcases tightens as I make my way to the line of taxis on the street. I ford
through the throng of tourists with their own luggage.
The metro can’t take me all the way to the Korean School of Foreign Studies from Incheon
International Airport. Normally, I could take the subway to this stop, then get on a public bus—as the
representative from the school suggested to me via video chat last week—but when I planned this
trip, I knew I wouldn’t want to venture that with my luggage and zero knowledge of the area.
I stand by the curb and scan the line of taxis until I spot one of the drivers holding a sign that
reads Grace Wilde. I throw him a frantic wave, and he meets me halfway to the van. He helps me lift
my bags into the back, and I collapse into a seat in the middle row.
He peers at me in the rearview mirror, obviously waiting for some kind of direction. I guess his
superiors didn’t inform him of our destination. Biting my lip, I flip through my Korean phrase book
searching for the right words.
“Ahn nyeong ha se yo!” Hello. “Umm . . . ” I stare at the Romanized translations, the multitude
of consonants and letter combinations I’ve never seen—let alone pronounced—mixing inside my
travel-weary brain like a blender on high.
“Where you go?” the man asks.
“High school!” I sigh, thanking God this man speaks at least a little English. “Korean School of
Foreign Studies. On Ganghwa Island.”
“Oh, I know, I know.” He shifts out of park, and we merge into traffic.
I sink lower and let my head rest on the seatback. The long hours of traveling are beginning to
catch up with me. I was so hyped on adrenaline when we landed in Seattle and again in Incheon that
I didn’t think about the fact that I hadn’t slept even a minute on either of my flights. But now a dull
ache pounds just behind my eyebrows, and sleep seductively whispers to lull me out of consciousness.
K AT IE M . STO U T
Sunlight glares off the cars in front of us. We drive farther away from the city, away from
Incheon—and away from Seoul, South Korea’s capital, which sits only about an hour by train from
the airport. Fast food restaurants and digital billboards are quickly replaced by a long bridge that
shoots us across the narrow channel of water separating the island from the mainland.
As the van bumps down off the bridge and onto island soil, I watch buildings pop up around
us. Not a city, really, but a town. It reminds me of a beach town I visited with my family back in middle school, one of those with hole-in-the-wall restaurants on every corner serving local fishermen’s
latest catches, where the population doubles during tourist season and all the shops close at six in
the evening. But instead of a diversity of people—white, black, Latino, Indian—I see only Asian. Dark
hair. Dark eyes.
I finger my own blond curls, which flattened along the journey but still hang down to my
elbows. Momma likes to call my hair my “crowning glory,” a gift from her side of the family. I’ve always
loved it; it matches perfectly with what my sister, Jane, calls my “hipster look,” but I now realize it
makes me stick out here like a goth at a country concert.
And trust me when I tell you, that’s pretty obvious. I’ve been to my fair share of concerts, both
country and otherwise. When your dad is one of the biggest record producers in the country music
business and your brother has topped the country charts five years in a row, you start to learn your
way around the Mecca of the music lover.
I’m tempted to reach into my purse and pull out my iPod. I can think of at least ten songs that
would fit this moment perfectly, my own background music to this new life I’ve started. But I resist
the urge, wanting to make sure the cab driver has my full attention in case we need to communicate
in broken English again.
It only takes us a few minutes to pass through the entirety of the town, and then the cab’s
climbing up a hill into the mountains, which tower over the coastline. We drive up and up, until a thin
layer of fog hovers over the road, and we emerge at the crest of the hill. To the right is an overlook of
the town we just drove through, then the channel, and in the distance, Incheon, though I can’t see it.
On the left side of the street, though, is a giant arch that stretches across the entrance to a plaza-like
area, gold Korean characters glittering in the fading sunlight.
My new home.
We stop just in front of the arch, and I step out of the cab. But once I’ve pulled in a breath of
campus air, my stomach clenches. The cabbie lifts my suitcases out of the van, and I fumble with my
wallet, examining each bill carefully before handing him the money.
The taxi pulls away, and I turn my back on the gorgeous coastal view to stare up at the white
stone building directly across the plaza, its gigantic staircase leading up to what I assume are classrooms and offices.
I can’t help but wonder how different life would be if I’d done what my parents wanted—
stayed at the same elite prep school for senior year. I would have kept all the same friends, gone to
all the same parties, been hit on by every aspiring musician trying to get to my dad, and watched my
ex-boyfriend date every other girl in school like the douche he is.
K AT IE M . STO U T
But instead of a stuffy prep school in Nashville, I’m here. Completely alone in a foreign country,
searching the grounds for the administration offices and the school rep who said he would help me
get settled in.
Magnesium. Aluminum. Silicon. Moving here was my idea. Phosphorous. Sulfur.
I can do this.
Chlorine.
I can do this.
Argon.
I can.
Do.
This.

Chapter 1 - The Class of 2K15

Transcription

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