how it started
W
hen Katelyn Ogden blew up in third period pre-calc, the janitor probably figured he’d only have to scrub guts off one
whiteboard this year. Makes sense. In the past, kids didn’t randomly explode. Not in pre-calc, not at prom, not even in chem lab, where explosions aren’t exactly unheard of. Not one kid. Not one explosion. Ah, the good old days. Katelyn Ogden was a lot of things, but she wasn’t particularly explosive, in any sense of the word. She was wispy, with a pixie cut and a breathy voice. She was a sundress of a person—cute, airy, inoffensive. I didn’t know her well, but I knew her well enough to curse her adorable existence on more than one occasion. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. Doesn’t mean I wanted her to go out the way she did, or that I wanted her to go out at all, for that matter. Our thoughts aren’t always our feelings; and when they are, they rarely last.
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On the morning that Katelyn, well, went out, I was sitting two seats behind her. It was September, the first full week of school, an absolute stunner of a day. The windows were open and the faraway drone of a John Deere mixed with the nearby drone of Mr. Mellick philosophizing on factorials. Worried I had coffee breath, I was bent over in my seat, digging through my purse for mints. My POV was therefore limited, and the only parts of Katelyn I saw explode were her legs. Actually, it’s hard to say what I saw. Her legs were there and then they weren’t. Wa-bam! The classroom quaked and my face was suddenly warm and wet. It’s a disgusting way to say it, but it’s the simplest way to say it: Katelyn was a balloon full of fleshy bits. And she popped. You can’t feel much of anything in a moment like that. You certainly can’t analyze the situation. At least not while it’s happening. Later, the image will play over and over in your head, like some demon GIF, like some creeper who slips into your bed every single night, taps you on the shoulder, and says, “Remember me, the worst fucking moment of your life up to this point?” Later, you’ll feel and do a lot of things, but when it’s actually happening, all you can feel is confusion and all you do is react. I bolted upright and my head hit my desk. Mr. Mellick dove behind his chair like a soldier into the trenches. My red-faced classmates sat there in shock for a few moments. Blood dripped down the windows and walls. Then came the screaming and the obligatory rush for the door. The next hour was insane. Hunched running, hands up, sirens blaring, kids in the parking lot hugging. News trucks, helicopters,
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SWAT teams, cars skidding out in the grass because the roads were clogged. No one even realized what had happened. “Bomb! Blood! Run for the fucking hills!” That was the extent of it. There was no literal smoke, but when the figurative stuff cleared, we could be sure of only two things. Katelyn Ogden blew up. Everyone else was fine. Except we weren’t. Not by a long shot.
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let’s be clear
T
his is not about Katelyn Ogden. She was important—all of them were—but she was also a signpost, a starting point
on a path of self-discovery. I realize how corny and conceited that sounds, but the focus of this should be on me and what you ultimately think of me. Do you like me? Do you trust me? Will you still be interested in me after I say what I have to say? Yes, yes. I know, I know. “It’s not important what people think of you, it’s who you are that counts.” Well, don’t buy into that crap. Perception trumps reality. Always and forever. Simply consider what people thought of Katelyn. Mr. Mellick once told Katelyn that she “would make an excellent anchorwoman,” which was a coded way of saying that she spoke well and, though it wasn’t clear if she was part black or part Asian or part Hispanic, she was pretty in a nonthreatening, vaguely ethnic way. In reality, Katelyn Ogden was Turkish. Not part anything. Plain old Turkish. Her family’s original name was Özden, but they
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changed it somewhere along the line. Her dad was born right here in New Jersey, and so was her mom, but they both had full Turkish blood that went back to the early Ottoman Empire, which, as far as empires go, was a pretty badass one. Their armies were among the first to employ guns and cannons, so they knew a thing or two about things that go boom. Katelyn’s dad was an engineer and her mom was a lawyer and they drove a Tahoe with one of those stick-figure-family stickers on the back window. Two parents, one kid, two dogs. I’m not entirely sure what the etiquette is, but I guess you keep the kid sticker on your window even . . . after. The Ogdens did, in any case. I learned all the familial details at the memorial service, which was closed casket, for obvious reasons, and which was held in State Street Theater, also for obvious reasons. Everyone in school had to attend. It wasn’t required by law, but absences would be noted. Not by the authorities necessarily, but by the kids who were quick to label their peers misogynistic assholes or heartless bitches. I know because I was one of those label-happy kids. Again, I’m not necessarily proud of that fact, but I certainly can’t deny it. The memorial service was quite a production, considering that it was put together in only a few days. Katelyn’s friend Skye Sanchez projected a slideshow whose sole purpose was to remind us how ridiculously effervescent Katelyn was. There was a loving eulogy delivered by a choked-up aunt. A choir sang Katelyn’s favorite song, which is a gorgeous song. The lyrics were a bit sexy for the occasion, but who cares, right? It was her favorite and if they can’t play your favorite song at your memorial service then when the hell can they play it? Plus, it was all about saying good-bye at the
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wrong moment, and at least that was appropriate for the occasion. There’s a line in it that goes, “your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm . . .” Katelyn’s hair was short and dark, the furthest thing from sleepy and golden, but that didn’t matter to Jed Hayes, who had a crush on her going all the way back to middle school. That hair-upon-the-pillow line made him blubber so loud that everyone in the balcony felt obligated to nod condolences at the poor guy. His empathy seemed off the charts, but if we’re being honest with ourselves—and we really should be—then we have to accept that Jed wasn’t crying because he truly loved Katelyn. It was because her storm of hair never hit his pillow. Sure, it’s a selfish thing to cry about, but we all cry about selfish things at funerals. We all cry about “if only.” • If only Katelyn had made it through to next year, then she would have gone to Brown. She was going to apply early decision and was guaranteed to get in. No question that’s partly why her SAT tutor, Mrs. Carbone, was sobbing. All those hours, all those vocab flash cards, and for what? Mrs. Carbone still couldn’t claim an Ivy Leaguer as a past student. • If only Katelyn had scammed a bit more cash off her parents, then she would have bought more weed. It was well-known among us seniors that Katelyn usually had a few joints hidden in emptied-out mascara tubes that she stashed in the glove box of her Volvo. It was also well-known that she was quickly becoming
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the drug-dealing Dalton twins’ best customer. Such a loss was surely why the Daltons were a bit weepy. Capitalism isn’t an emotionless endeavor. • If only Katelyn had the chance to accept his invitation to the prom, then she would have ended up with her hair upon Jed Hayes’s pillow. It was within the realm of possibility. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy and she was open-minded. You couldn’t begrudge the kid his tears. That’s merely the beginning of the list. The theater was jampacked with selfish people wallowing in “if only.” Meanwhile, outside the theater, other selfish people had moved on and were already wallowing in “but why?” As you might guess, when a girl blows up in pre-calc and that girl is Turkish, “but why?” is fraught with certain preconceived notions. It can’t be “just one of those things.” It has to be a “terrorist thing.” That was what the cable-news folks were harrumphing, and the long-fingernailed women working the checkout at Target were gabbing, and the potbellied picketers standing outside the theater were hollering. Never mind the fact that no one else was hurt when Katelyn exploded. We were all examined. Blood was taken. Questions were asked. Mr. Mellick’s class was considered healthy, if not in mind, then in body. We were considered innocent. Never mind the fact that there wasn’t a trace of anything remotely explosive found in the classroom. The police did a full
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sweep of it, the school, Katelyn’s house, the nearest park, and a halal restaurant two towns over. They didn’t find a thing. FBI was there too, swabbing everything with Q-tips. Collective shrugs all around. Never mind “if only.” A girl with so much potential doesn’t suicide-bomb it all away. She just doesn’t. Sure, she smoked weed, and if the rumors were true, she was slacking off in pre-calc and fighting with her mom, but that’s not because senior year was her year to blow things up. It was her year to blow things off, perhaps her last chance in life to say fuck it. It was a lot of people’s last chance to say fuck it, as it turned out.
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how you feel
T
o describe how you feel after a girl explodes in your pre-calc class is a tad tricky. I imagine it’s similar to how you feel when
any tragedy comes hurtling into your life. You’re scared. You’re fragile. You flinch. All the time. You may have never even thought about what holds life together. Until, of course, it comes apart. Same with our bodies. You can imagine cancer and other horrible things wreaking havoc on our doughy shells, but you don’t ever expect our doughy shells to, quite literally, disintegrate. So when the unimaginable happens, when the cosmos tears into your very notion of what’s possible, it’s not that you become jaded; it’s that you become unsure. Unsure that you’ll ever be sure about anything ever again. You get what I’m saying, right? No? Well, you will. For now, maybe it’s easier to speak about practicalities, to describe what exactly happens after a girl explodes in your pre-calc class. You get the rest of the day off from school, and the rest of
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the week too. You talk to the cops on three separate occasions, and Sheriff Tibble looks at you weird when you don’t whimper as much as the guy they interviewed before you. You are asked to attend private therapy sessions with a velvet-voiced woman named Linda and, if you want, group therapy sessions with a leather-voiced man named Vince and some of the other kids who witnessed the spontaneous combustion. That’s what they were calling it in the first few weeks: spontaneous combustion. I had never heard of such a thing, but there was a precedent for it—for people catching fire, or exploding, with little-to-no explanation. Now, unless you’ve been living in the jungles of New Guinea for the last year, you already know all this, but if you want a refresher on the history of spontaneous combustion, head on over to Wikipedia. Skip the section on “The Covington Curse” if you want the rest of this story to be spoiler-free. From Linda, I learned that it was normal to feel completely lost when a girl spontaneously combusts in your pre-calc class. Because in those first few weeks I’d find myself crying all of sudden, and then making really inappropriate jokes the next moment, and then going about the rest of the day like it was all no big deal. “When something traumatic happens, you fire your entire emotional arsenal,” Linda told me. “A war is going on inside of you, and I’m here to help you reload and make more targeted attacks. I’m here to help the good guys win.” At the group sessions, Vince didn’t peddle battlefront metaphors. He hardly spoke at all. He simply repeated his mantra: “Talk it out, kids. Talk it out.” So that’s what we did. Half of us “kids” from third period
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pre-calc met in the media room every Tuesday and Thursday at four, and we shared our stories of insomnia and chasing away bloody visions with food and booze and all sorts of stuff that therapists can’t say shit about to your parents because they have a legal obligation to keep secrets. Nutty as she was, Linda helped. So did Vince. So did the rest of my blood-obsessed peers, even the ones who occasionally called me insensitive on account of my sense of humor. “Sorry, but my cell is blowing . . . spontaneously combusting,” I announced during a Thursday session when my phone kept vibrating with texts. It had been only six weeks since we’d all worn Katelyn on our lapels. In other words, too soon. “I realize that jokes are a form of coping,” Claire Hanlon hissed at me. “But tweet them or something. We don’t need to hear them here.” “Sorry but I don’t tweet,” I told her. That said, I did fancy myself a writer. Long form, though. I had even started a novel that summer. I titled it All the Feels. I think it was young adult fiction, what some might call paranormal romance. I didn’t care, as long as I could sell the movie rights. Which didn’t seem like an impossibility. The story was definitely relatable. It was about a teenage boy who was afraid of his own emotions. In my experience, that summed up not only teenage boys, but teenagers in general. Case in point: “This is a healing space and that makes it a joke-free zone,” Claire went on. “I don’t want to relive that moment and you’re liable to give me a flashback.” “I like Mara’s jokes,” Brian Chen responded. “They help me
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remember it’s okay to smile. I don’t know if I’d still be coming to these things if it wasn’t for Mara.” “Thank you, Bri,” I said, and at that point I began to realize that we were a bit of a cliché. Stories about troubled teenagers often feature support groups where smart-ass comments fly and feelings get hurt, where friends and enemies are forged over oneliners and tears. But here’s the thing. Even if we were a bit of a cliché, we were only a cliché for a bit. Because almost immediately after announcing his dedication to my humor, Brian Chen blew up.
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sorry
I
did that on purpose. I didn’t give you much of a chance to know Brian and then I was all, like, “Oh yeah, side note, that dude ex-
ploded too.” I understand your frustrations. Because he seemed like a nice guy, right? He was. Undoubtedly. One of the nicest guys around. He didn’t deserve his fate. That’s the thing. When awful fates snatch people away, sometimes it happens to someone you know a little and sometimes it happens to someone you know a lot, and in order to shield yourself from the emotional shrapnel, it’s better to know those someones a little. So I was trying to do you a solid, by getting the gory details out of the way from the get-go. Unfortunately, you won’t always have that luxury. Because to understand my story, you’re going to have to get to know at least a few people, including a few who blow up. A bit about Brian, because he deserves a bit. He was half Korean and half Chinese. I’m not sure which half was which,
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which is racist I guess. I don’t doubt that Brian knew that Carlyle is an English name while McNulty is an Irish name, but all these months later and I still can’t be bothered to find out if Chen is Korean or Chinese in origin. I know. I’m a total dick. As I said, I’m not necessarily proud of it. Thing is, I liked Brian. I even kissed him once. On the eighth grade trip to Washington, DC, we were in the back of the bus and he rested his head on my shoulder. We weren’t good friends or anything, but it was one of those moments. Hot bus. Long drive. All of us tired and woozy. When no one was looking, I kissed him on the lips. No tongue, but I held it for a couple of seconds. It was more than a peck. I did it because I thought it would feel nice. His lips seemed so soft. And it did feel nice. And soft. But Brian pretended to be asleep, even though it was obvious he was awake. My elbow was touching his chest and I felt his heart speed up. So I also pretended to be asleep, because that’s what you do when you kiss a guy and he pretends to be asleep. You follow suit, or you end up embarrassing yourself even more. We went on with our lives after that. Went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Washington Monument, the Pentagon. Then we went home. We didn’t talk about what I did. Which was fine by me. Brian didn’t spread rumors or try to take advantage of the situation. Like I said, one of the nicest guys around. He still smiled at me in the hall, used my name when he saw me. “Good to see you, Mara.” “How’d that bio test turn out, Mara?” “Can I offer you a baby carrot, Mara?”
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Brian liked baby carrots. Loved them, actually. Ate them all the time. Raw. Unadorned. No dip or peanut butter or anything to make them taste less carroty. He kept a bag of them in his backpack and munched his way through life. I don’t know if it was an addiction or a discipline, but either way you kind of had to respect it. What you didn’t have to respect was that he wore the same pair of filthy neon-blue sneakers everywhere, even to dances and Katelyn’s memorial service. He called them his “laser loafers,” a term that didn’t catch on, as he’d obviously hoped it would. He’d gone viral once and figured he could harness that magic again. It doesn’t work that way, though. Viral, you ask? The boy went viral? In a manner of speaking, yes. Because Brian Chen was the proud creator of Covington High’s favorite catchphrase: “Wrap it up, short stuff!” It was dumb luck, really. He had first said it during a group presentation in English class when the five-foot-two-inch Will Duncan kept blabbing on and on about how sad it was that Sylvia Plath “offed herself by sticking her head in the oven because she was actually pretty hot, in addition to being crazy talented.” “Wrap it up, short stuff!” Brian blurted out to shut his pal up and everybody lost their shit. By the end of the week, “Wrap it up, short stuff!” was something we said to long-winded people. Then we started hollering it at my parents’ deli to the guys who literally wrapped up the sandwiches. Then we started using it as shorthand for “please use a condom or else you’re gonna end up with a baby or a disease, basically something that will ruin your life.” I know. Wrap it up, short stuff.
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So, yeah, Brian Chen was a nice guy. A carroty guy with soft lips, filthy sneakers, and a catchphrase. Now you know him, and I hope you understand that when I make jokes about him and the other people who were here and gone in an instant, it’s because of a billion things that are wrong with me. But it’s not because they deserve it.
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what was wrong with us
H
ere’s what happens when a guy blows up during your group therapy session that’s supposed to make you feel better about
people blowing up. The group therapy session is officially canceled. You do not feel better. What also happens is all nine remaining members of the group therapy session are escorted to the police station in an armored vehicle. With Katelyn, they let us shower before the cops got involved, but no such luck with Brian. It was too much of a coincidence. Same group of people, same wa-bam. This wasn’t terrorism. Or, to be more accurate, Brian wasn’t a suicide bomber. Around here, nobody thinks an East Asian person would be a terrorist. Which is silly, really, because East Asia has plenty of terrorists. Back in the nineties, there were a bunch of Japanese terrorists who filled a subway station with poison gas and killed a shit-ton of people. No Turk has pulled off something
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that audacious, as far as I know. It’s definitely racist to think that Katelyn was a terrorist and Brian wasn’t. But that’s what people thought. Or they thought someone else in our class was behind both incidents. So the cops shuffled us precalc, group-therapy saps into a conference room where we sat, bloody and stunned, under awful fluorescent bulbs that flickered every few seconds. “Gahhh!” Becky Groves screamed as soon as the cops left us alone. They had gathered in the hall to talk to some FBI agents. To strategize, I guess. “Let ’em cool their heels a bit,” they were probably saying as they blew on their coffee. “Get their stories straight and then, blammo, we’ll work the old McKenzie Doubleback on these perps.” Yes, yes, I know, I know. There’s no such thing as the “McKenzie Doubleback,” but I’m sure they have names for their interrogation techniques. Anyway, once Becky Groves was done screaming—which was a few seconds later because she’s Becky Groves and she has the lungs of a water buffalo—Claire Hanlon said, “So who did it?” “Really?” I replied. “Really!” Claire snapped. “The police know this can’t be a coincidence . . . and I know this can’t be a coincidence . . . and I know I didn’t do it . . . and so it has to be one of you.” An aneurysm seemed imminent the way Claire was panting out the words. “How?” Malik Deely asked. “However . . . people like you . . . do these sorts of things,” Claire said. You don’t use the term “people like you” around people like
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Malik (that is, black people), but he had a cool-enough head to let logic beat out emotion. “Seriously?” he said. “Seriously? There was no bomb. The guy’s chair was completely intact. Becky was sitting right next to him and she’s fine.” “Gahhh!” Becky screamed again, this time with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands clawing at her frizzy red hair. “Physically fine, I mean,” Malik said. “We all are. Something inside these kids just . . . went off.” Greyson Hobbs, Maria Hermanez, Gabe Carlton, Yuki Dolan, and Chris Welch were all in the room too, but they weren’t saying anything. Their perplexed eyes kept darting back and forth as we spoke. It was like they were foreign tourists who’d stumbled into a courtroom. They weren’t trying to figure out who was innocent or guilty. All they wanted to know was “How the hell did we end up in this place? Which way is the way back to Disney World?” When the door opened, those perplexed eyes all darted to Special Agent Carla Rosetti of the FBI. I would learn later that she wasn’t necessarily the best and brightest, but at that moment, compared to our schlumpy local boys-in-blue, she looked like the real goddamn deal. She stood in the doorway decked out in a white shirt, dark blazer, dark pants, and dark pumps. Standard FBI attire, I assumed, though a bit baggier than what the chicks on TV rocked. The clothes were obviously chain-store bought, but from a nice chain store. Ann Taylor or something. Even without the outfit, her name was Carla Rosetti and how could she not be an ass-kicking federal agent with a name like that?
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“Your parents are here to collect you,” Special Agent Carla Rosetti said as she stepped into the room. “But first you will be surrendering your clothing. There are showers and sweat suits. You’ll wash down, dress up, and go home. You’ll be hearing from us tomorrow morning.” “No. You will be hearing from my lawyer. Tonight,” Claire said. “I have rights, you know?” “I never said you didn’t,” Special Agent Carla Rosetti remarked. “I simply asked you to give me my evidence, evidence I obtained a warrant to collect. The alternative is to walk out the door and face some serious criminal charges, which I’m sure will delight your parents, especially after you’ve covered the interiors of their Audis with bloodstains. Kids have been getting changed for gym class for time immemorial. This is no more a violation of your rights than that. I’ll blow a whistle and force you to play dodgeball if that’ll make you feel more comfortable, though I’m not constitutionally obliged to.” Special Agent Carla Fucking Rosetti.
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in case you were wondering
S
howers in police stations can burn the sun off a sunbeam, and sweat suits from police stations have pit stains the size of
pancakes, but you don’t complain about those things, considering that you’ve lived through two spontaneous combustions. You simply go home washed and dressed in gray cotton and when your parents ask you what you need, you tell them you need to be alone, and they respect that, for the time being. Then you flop down on your bed with your laptop and you see the story invading every corner of the internet. another explosion rocks school more terror at covington high we rank the top ten spontaneous combustions in history So you close your laptop and turn to your phone, which is blowing . . . spontaneously combusting. There are a ton from your
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friend Tess, but the last text that comes in is from a number you don’t recognize. It says: You were there for both of them. That must have been invigorating. Not scary. Not sad. Not difficult. Invigorating. You should be creeped out, but you’re not. Because it’s the first time that someone gets it right. Both explosions were exactly that. Invigorating. A terrible thing to admit, but it’s in those moments of admitting and accepting your own terribleness that you realize other people can be terrible too. And if they can be terrible too, then maybe they can be vulnerable too, caring too, and all the things that you are and hope to be. You fall in love, which is the stupidest thing you can ever do.
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Chapter 1 “IT ABSOLUTELY SUCKS,” AVERY SAYS, BEATING OUT JEFFREY
Dahmer for the understatement of the century. (His, after his arrest, was “I really messed up this time.”) Ave jams an impossible amount of textbooks into her backpack. She’s the only one in the whole hallway who cares that the bell is ringing. It’s kind of her personal brand. She continues, “It one hundred and fifty percent sucks. But—God, Scarlett, you look awful.” My eyes are puffy, and my throat’s so sore from crying that I can barely tell her “No shit.” I stayed up all night with the rest of the heartbroken Lycanthrope community, trying to strategize a way to get it back on the air. The first stage is denial, right? That’s half of us, writing passionate letters to the network. The other half—people I used to see on Tumblr every day—are blackballing the show and moving on. 3
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ANNA BRESLAW
Not only was I one of the more popular fic writers on the board, but I’d livetweet the show every week at eight, amassing a pretty damn big following for a non-famous teenage girl who wasn’t posting butt selfies. Every Monday from eight to nine p.m., I actually mattered. That was like my real life—all the stuff around it was just temporary, unfortunate background noise. The worst part is, the sixth season finale didn’t wrap anything up—it was some dumb monster-of-the-week about Greg’s robot stepmom. We don’t even know who ends up with whom. Even if John St. Clair tells us at some convention, which is what show runners generally do, it’s not the same. He made the characters so real that it’s simply unfair just to cut us off like this. “I know you’re bummed, but this means, maybe, just hear me out, that you can . . . invest in real people, not fictional people”—Avery sees what I am about to say and cuts me off— “and not a bunch of randos on a message board who are probably all sketchy old men.” “You really need to stop DVRing To Catch a Predator.” Ave should be more supportive, considering we first became friends when she sat behind me in AP English. I worked on Lycanthrope fanfics in my notebook and caught her reading over my shoulder. She reads for fun a lot; she’s maybe the only person at school who does that as much as I do. But other than the architectural skill she displays by managing to fit every math textbook ever written in her book bag, Avery isn’t at all artsy 4
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S CA R L E T T E P S T E I N H AT E S I T H E R E
or creative. I think that’s why we get along. Combined, we’d be Supergirl. Ave is the only reason I can sit at the lunch table with the Girl Geniuses, a small clique of overachievers who run on Adderall and fear and have gears you can always see turning. No wonder they’re maladjusted; it’s uncomfortable seeing people try that hard, you know? Like, we don’t want to see your gears. Put them away. It’s their parents’ fault for flogging them like the workhorse in Black Beauty. Take the shivering mess of Jessicarose Fallon, for instance. This summer her parents sent her on a “volunteer” trip to Argentina for a cool $5K so she could write a heart-wrenching college essay about how she ran out of Luna bars on day three. They also named her Jessicarose, so it’s hard to fault her for having the eyes of a crazy person. In fact, a lot of the Girl Geniuses have a mash-up of two names, like Tanya-Lynn Gordonov. Perhaps their parents were on Adderall when they named them. If you were wondering, I have a shining 2.9 GPA out of . . . I guess 4.0? Infinity? Whatever Jessicarose Fallon has. “Okay, fine,” Ave relents. “But have you considered maybe they’re all just your Tyler Durden?” I’m about to shoot back some sassy answer when Ave jerks her head in a quick spasm toward the end of the hall, where Gideon Maclaine is leaning against a locker and messing with his iPhone. He’s alone, as usual. “Look! A flesh-and-blood human,” Ave says pointedly. “Oh, please.” 5
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“You’ve been obsessed with him since the second grade!” She grins. “Maybe he can replace Lycanthro—” “Don’t say it. I can’t even hear the title right now; it’s too hard.” While the other girls at school threw themselves into boyfriends, I threw myself into shows. I started with the ones that are Taken Very Seriously, starring conflicted antiheroes who cheat on their wives and curse a lot, occasionally at the same time. But the problem was, I never really watched an episode and thought: I want to mess around with these characters, bend their world, go inside their heads. I usually just thought: Sure. I get it. Men do coke and/or have sex with their twentysomething brunette mistresses but still love their kids or whatever. I don’t need to do a deep dive into that guy’s head. I’m not someone that show thinks about. Then I found Lycanthrope High, and everything totally changed. That sounds melodramatic, because I still have arms and legs, but everything else totally changed. It’s about a boarding school called Pembrooke Academy where the student body is not-so-secretly 50 percent werewolves, and a scholarship student named Gillian finds out she’s a loup-orateur, the only girl in her generation who can settle the war between werewolves and humans. There’s a diverse cast of wisecracking misfits and love triangles and saving the world and all that good stuff. Most of all, though, it’s obvious—not just on the show, but in interviews and podcasts and at conventions—that John St. Clair thinks about me. Or, you know, girls like me. Amazingly, a straight white dude is designing his show specifically for 6
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bored, sexually frustrated high school girls (and some guys) who get straight Cs because their pointlessly large imaginations are uncontrollable tsunamis that wipe out any structure in their paths. For once, we don’t have to adjust our expectations to wedge ourselves into an audience. We are the target audience. I love Lycanthrope and the characters down to my bones, in a way I can’t even articulate, the way you love your family or your best friend. Avery sat through one episode, one time, and thinks she gets the appeal but it’s “not her style.” Meanwhile, she made me and my mom, Dawn, sit through all thirteen episodes of Cosmos, and we were bored to tears, but on the bright side, we agreed on something for once. Dawn—a person who named her daughter after Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, a person who watches reruns of Sex and the City so religiously that when I was little I used to confuse the theme for the eleven o’clock news—thinks Lycanthrope High is lame. “I’m just trying to get you to look on the bright side!” “Did you hit your head? We live in New Jersey. There is no bright side. If you want to use that expression here, you have to say, ‘Look on the smog.’” Melville, New Jersey, is the perfect place to have a pretty mediocre life for, like, seventy years and then die. In fact, that might be on the welcome to melville sign you see when you get off the turnpike at Exit 6A, right above population: 5,500 empty funyuns bags, 1 bored jewish girl. As for Melville High School, where Ave and I go—it’s 7
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pretty much the opposite of magic. The English language isn’t innovative enough to have a word for that, really, other than some four-letter ones I’m not going to deploy because I’m a ~*~LaDy~*~*. MHS is all guys with neck tattoos and girls who post Kim Kardashian quotes on Instagram, and the 60 percent of us who actually graduate end up working at Target or the gas station or something. No thanks to Mr. Barnhill, our guidance counselor, whose soaring, inspirational college admissions advice is to “be realistic.” (Some real Chariots of Fire stuff right there.) When Mr. Barnhill asked me how my extracurriculars were, I didn’t say anything, because as far as school is concerned, I’m the president of the Misanthrope Society. Also the only member. He told me to consider community college, and I left with a pamphlet about identifying herpes. You know the kind of person who rolls his or her eyes at a TV show or a book and goes, “That would never happen”? I’m the opposite: I walk around all day waiting for a reason to suspend my disbelief. There’s a ghost in the girls’ locker room? Great; let’s find out if she’s a murdered former prom queen out for revenge. The entire town of Melville, New Jersey, is directly over the Eighth Circle of Hell? Awesome. I shotty the crossbow.
When school lets out, I race back home to check my permanently open Lycanthrope tabs. As I’d feared, the boards have been swarmed with the worst kind of invasive awfulness: TV critics 8
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looking to interview “heartbroken cult fans” for articles. (No thanks—I’ve never seen fandom portrayed in any mainstream place as anything other than a weird cult, and fangirls as brainless idiots.) There are also countless culture bloggers shamelessly spamming the board with links to their immediately-churnedout “Best Lycanthrope High Episodes” roundups. Here and there, I do see some fix-its—fanfiction revisions of the end of the series—but none by my friends. My best friends in the Lycanthrope fandom community are called the BNFs (Big Name Fans), and they’re fic writers too: xLoupxGaroux, DavidaTheDeadly, and WillianShipper2000. Fandom is weird like that, especially on Tumblr. You don’t have to know anyone’s first name, but you’ll be as sad for them when their mom dies as you’d be sad for someone IRL. I gravitated to them through their super-high-quality fics. They were the top-read Lycanthrope fic writers on the board; their most popular fics had around 10,000 views. xLoupxGaroux appeals to the smart, snarky gay demo who dies for William/ Connor slash with only occasional glimmers of sentimentality. DavidaTheDeadly writes uplifting inner monologues from each character’s perspective, which gives people a break from the frequent super-darkness of the show. And Willian, a high school freshman in Kansas, excels at maybe the toughest and most oversaturated fanfic domain: your typical OTP (one true pairing) hetero romance. She splits her time between Lycanthrope and One Direction fandom, and she sometimes comes off totally basic, but her swoonworthy lines get Tumblr-ed to death. Some 9
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Lycanthrope fans can be judgy about mainstream fandoms like 1-D, but I’m not: Anything that could get a sixteen-year-old girl from some shitty town a six-figure book deal is something I’d scream proudly about from the rooftops. xLoupxGaroux: Where have you BEEN. Scarface: I’m sorry!!
I start crying. I’m not quite sure why. I think I’m afraid this is the last time we’ll all talk or something. Nevertheless, I manage to type: Scarface: I’m crying, hahaha! xLoupxGaroux: you are not literally crying. DavidaTheDeadly: we don’t all have hearts of stone like you, Loup Scarface: Yes WillianShipper2000: awwwww! DavidaTheDeadly: last week I cried every day. moaning myrtle of the ladies’ bathroom at work basically.
Davida and Loup are both older than me and have office jobs, which means they can—and do—Gchat all day but have to be careful with the open browsers.
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DavidaTheDeadly: the thing is though . . . we didn’t know it was ending, and we don’t have source material for fics about the final episodes. oh brb boss is coming xLoupxGaroux: What is it today? “Ride of the Valkyries”? DavidaTheDeadly: “Single Ladies.”
Whenever the editor in chief at Davida’s magazine job approaches someone’s cube, Davida hums loudly to warn them to X out of anything inappropriate. DavidaTheDeadly: haha btw scarface, pls thank your mom for e-mailing her confession and let her know it’ll be in the april issue
The delightful nugget to which she is referring: “I wrote a text to my ex-boyfriend: ‘I’ll pick up some condoms with the bread bowls.’ But I actually sent it to my daughter! Oops! —Dawn E., 35.” Scarface: I can’t believe we don’t even know if Gillian ends up with William or Connor. WillianShipper2000: Uhh Willian is obvs the OTP!
Willian’s ride-or-die for that pairing. Her Tumblr background is a shot of the two of them with “Now you have all of me”
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written on it in cursive, from that episode where William and Gillian had a big fight because he wouldn’t take her to prom. He wanted her to have a nice, normal teenage experience. She started crying and said he was letting the wolf part—the part that didn’t like responsibility—take over. The next day he showed up at her front door with a gift, a German shepherd puppy. “You were right,” he said. “But now you have all of me.” (Of course, Gillian realizes later on, when William leaves town after prom, that it was the guy part of him that decided to do it, not the wolf part. And the dog, Nina, dies bravely saving Marissa from a possessed frat house in the fourth season finale. I cried for a week straight.) Scarface: Have you guys read any of the fix-its? xLoupxGaroux: Some—none are particularly satisfying.
We agree that none of us want to give up writing Lycanthrope fic and that even though the finale sucked, moving forward we’ll stick with the canon storyline. We all promise to think on it, and nobody will jump ship until we’ve got some ideas.
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Chapter 2 “MY CHILDREN,” I BEGIN SOLEMNLY AT THE HEAD OF THE
Parkers’ dinner table. The first time I had dinner at Avery’s house, in sixth grade, her parents asked me to say grace in earnest. But after I fumbled secularly through it, the BS “grace” became a recurring joke. I clear my throat. “I dreamed I was walking on the beach side by side with the Lord. When I looked back, there were two sets of footprints, but other times there was just one.” Ashley, Avery’s sister and the bane of my existence, rolls her eyes. I ignore her. “I asked the Lord why this would be. He replied, ‘During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I drop-kicked you.’” The tops of Avery’s parents bowed heads shake with silent laughter. 13
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“Carried you. Carried you, is what I meant. Amen.” “Amen,” Avery and her parents say. Ave’s mom looks at Ashley expectantly, and she reluctantly mutters it too. Ashley’s a popular senior at MHS. She and her friends have spent the last nine years making fun of me for wearing thriftstore clothes (they weren’t cool yet), bringing weird wholesale Sam’s Club chocolate milk to lunch unlike everybody else’s normal Nesquiks, and the million other tiny indicators kids can sniff out poorness with. The most glaring example of this was in second grade, when all the popular girls had Double Stuf and I had some cheaper fake-Oreo brand; I’d scrape all the cream off one cookie and put it in another, then throw out the dry, empty cookie and eat the homemade Double Stuf one. One day, Natalia and Ashley sat across from me and stared as Ashley whispered unnecessary narration into Natalia’s ear like I was a nature documentary. Look, then she scrapes the cream off, then she puts it in the other cookie, then she throws the first cookie out, then . . . Since I became friends with Avery and close with her parents, the teasing has been like a long game of chicken: Was I going to rat on her, or was she going to stop siccing her Uggbooted henchwomen on me? So far, neither has happened. Ave just stays out of it. Even after nine years of torture, though, Ashley’s prettiness still stuns me like a manta ray. She looks like a Disney princess, pale with fiery red hair and a perfect ski jump nose, and stops just short of being too beautiful, as if God designed her to provide a believable photo for catfishing people. Ave is pretty 14
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too, but she’s like a wilted version of Ashley with braces and slightly duller hair. If they had been fetal twins, Ashley definitely would’ve consumed Avery for nutrients, and all that’d be left of Ave would be a tumor with a few teeth in it. Ave’s mom gets up with some plates. “Salmon, anybody?” She explains to me, “We’re doing the Grain Brain diet, but I think I have some spelt crackers in the cupboard if you want.” “Thanks, I’m okay.” “Have you read about that? Wheat, carbs, and sugar destroy brain cells. Even quinoa,” she says, glancing at Avery’s dad quickly to make sure she recited it correctly. Professor Parker teaches a graduate class on nutrition at Princeton. The only noise at the table is the oppressive clinking of silverware. They’re the total opposite of me and Dawn—we’re either screaming at each other or laughing hysterically, big emotions that ricochet off the walls of our apartment. “Little late for me, I think,” I reply. “Scarlett, you know you’re very bright,” Professor Parker says brusquely, which is how he says most things, even compliments. Ashley lets out a sharp breath of air from her nose, a mean, soundless laugh. Her mom gives her a warning glare. “Listen, I understand that you don’t care about doing well in school right now, but there are a handful of colleges known especially for their exemplary creative-writing programs. Just get that GPA up, and your writing will speak for itself. You’re very talented,” he continues. I feel my face burning, especially considering I haven’t really 15
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written since the show went off the air. The Parkers make everything sound so purposeful, as if I set out To Write, or to Be a Writer. Writing is just the only thing that makes me feel like a real person, not the tap-dancing reflection of myself that I am around other people. Until Lycanthrope High ended, I’d find ways to write all day at school, like on the backs of handouts in class or hidden in the stacks of the school library between american history (a– p) and american history (p –z). It didn’t seem odd or unique to me that by the time sophomore year was over, I’d written a novel-length fic. Besides the BNFs, Avery was the only person I told, and she talked me into letting her read it. Of course she told Professor Parker, and then he read it, and I was super-embarrassed and mad at Ave because it had all kinds of teenage hedonism in it and what have you. And when he finished, he called Dawn and told her that I had an immense talent and there were creative arts high schools specifically for students like me and he’d send over some pamphlets. Dawn was so pissed—she said he was trying to give me “champagne taste on a beer budget.” The truth is, part of why I started writing is that it’s one of the few activities that doesn’t require any expensive helmets or gear or pay-by-the-hour instructors. And Dawn’s right, we can’t afford any of those schools Professor Parker mentioned, but I can’t say stuff like that to the Parkers, because underneath this conversation, they know it, and they know I know it, and articulating it would just make things weird. I already think sometimes that I perform for them a little too much, constantly 16
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trying to be funny and charming, like I’m singing for my supper or something. Instead, I try to stop blushing and shrug like zero shits given. “Frankly, I think MHS is a bad fit for both of you,” says Mrs. Parker, and she gives Avery a pointed look. Freshman year, Avery’s parents made her go to a fancy, expensive boarding school in Massachusetts. She hated it there, but they refused to let her come home until she resorted to drastic measures: A few days before summer break, she tagged along with some girls in her hall to get their belly buttons pierced. One not-so-accidental crop top later, Avery was matriculated at MHS for sophomore year. As Ave’s parents start grilling her about SAT prep, Ashley’s phone chimes with a text, and she snatches it off the table. Kevin Rice, Avery mouths at me. That would be Ashley’s latest conquest, who graduated MHS last year but eschewed college in favor of landing a record deal with his screamo band. I forget the name. It’s like Burgermaggot, or Juicewater, or some other two-word gibberish that sounds like you’re having a stroke when you say it. Ashley beams as she reads the text message. You can practically hear the cartoon bluebirds chirping around her head. He wears eyeliner, for God’s sake. “Light of my life. Fire of my loins,” I say quietly, and watch Avery snort gratifyingly into her salmon. Professor Parker stifles a laugh, but Ashley sees his eyes are squinty and smiling. “Dad, you’re being annoying.” He straightens himself out. 17
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“It’s not even him anyway,” says Ashley, then a little quieter: “You assholes.” “Language, Ashley Nicole,” Mrs. Parker says on autopilot. “Buttholes,” she says, then gets up and storms to her room. If Kevin’s out, that means she has someone else in rotation. Ashley, as everyone at MHS knows, has a pattern. She goes out with a different guy every other week, and every time it ends, it’s The Most Dramatic Thing That’s Ever Happened. She winds up in the girls’ bathroom crying, smoking a wrinkled Virginia Slim she stole from her mom’s purse, then covering it up by spraying enough Gap Dream to choke livestock. Ave once went in right after her, and she almost had an asthma attack. Ashley, Avery says, then swears to Never Love Again (she’s one of those every-first-letter-capitalized kinds of feelingshavers) and Focus on School and Cheerleading and How Hashtag-Blessed She Is until some other boy who has a car asks her if she wants to “chill.” Then they make out in the back row of The Even Faster & Even Furiouser and she comes home with her shirt on inside out, In Love Again. After Avery and I help clear the table, we go to her room so she can “tutor me in math,” otherwise known as “read Rookie and play F-Marry-Kill while drinking seven hundred Diet Cokes from the mini-fridge.” As we pass Ashley’s closed door, we hear a pealing laugh. Even her laugh is perfect. “Who’s the new dude?” I ask.
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“I have no idea, Scarlett,” Ave informs me in the sweetly patient tone she always uses when I’m looking for Ashley intel, like how you might talk to a three-year-old. “I’m not on whatever review board she presents her biweekly meat to.” “You know who your sister reminds me of?” Ave nods, waiting. “Patience. Hot, popular valedictorian. Secretly a threethousand-year-old demon bent on world destruction.” That’s one of the things I liked most about the Lycanthrope universe: Everyone who is beloved here, you can bet they’re evil there. That works in reverse too. John took trope-y archetypes and turned them upside down; nobody’s ever what you’d expect them to be. Ave humors me. “What happens to her?” “She gets beheaded by a giant pair of ancient scissors.” “Uh, really?” “Yeah, they’re the only thing that can—just forget it, okay?” As close as Ave and I are in some ways, there’s a layer of our friendship way underneath where we split apart. She lives inside rules, angles she can draw with a protractor or determine with her graphing calculator. Sometimes I miss having a best friend who totally gets me.
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One
In Which Megan Learns Why It’s Called a Sucker Punch DOWN A GOAL IN INJURY TIME LACHELLE BEGAN A
buildup inside midfield, passing it down to Mariah, who fed Lindsay in the right corner. Lindsay beat her girl to the end line, then fired a low cross toward the goal mouth. Cat streaked in, carried her defender and the goalie’s attention, and then dummied it—let the ball go through her legs untouched. It was beautifully done, a play we had worked on endlessly. I was now just eight yards out; the wide-open net yawned. All I had to do was ease it home. But overeager, with visions of my highlight reel playing in my head, I hammered it. The extra oomph lifted the ball—and it caromed off the crossbar and out of bounds. The crowd groaned and I stood there—gutted. I had just missed a gimme that would have tied our first conference game. Well done, Megan, I thought. Well done. A minute later the whistle blew. University of Oklahoma 2, Southern Methodist University 1.
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I kicked over the watercooler, and was working my way through the sideline chairs when Coach Nash found me. “Hey, stop that!” she yelled. She frowned, and her disappointment washed over me. “What’s the lesson?” “Don’t be a freaking moron?” I asked. “Composure,” she said to me for the nine hundredth time in the past year. “No matter the moment, you have to keep your head, execute under pressure. Consistently good is far better than occasionally brilliant.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not interested in your apology.” Ouch. “I let everybody down,” I said, hanging my head. “Yes. You did.” Ouch again. But now she lifted my head and looked directly in my eyes. “Now listen—you are going to score a ton of goals for us this year.” Her tone softened as she moved easily from Marine Corps drill sergeant to mother hen. “It’s going to all come together, okay?” “Okay.” I nodded again and she gave me a hug. “Short memory—and get that looked at.” She motioned at the gash on my shin. “Uh-huh,” I replied, still feeling like someone had shot my dog. “I’ll see you on Monday.” Now Cat shuffled over. Catalina Esmerelda Graciela “Cat” Martinez was my best friend on the team, my wingman, and the only one brave enough to approach me under the circumstances. We had known each other since we were twelve and had played Club Soccer together for the DeSoto 2 o
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Bobcats—now we were Ponies. I went to her quinceañera and famously destroyed her piñata with my first whack. They found candy all the way down the street. “Come on, choker,” she said, putting her arm around me. I laughed. As always it was just the right thing to say. “You go. I want to sulk.” Now she laughed. “All right. You need a hankie or something?” “Nah—I got my sleeve.” “We’re on for Tuesday night, yeah?” Tuesday was TV night, sacred friend time. “Of course,” I said as she walked toward the locker room. “Text me later!” she called out over her shoulder. With everyone gone I sat down and examined my shin. Blood oozed along the entire ridge of welted skin. Another scar—and so little to show for it. In soccer, real scoring chances are rare, and my job as a striker was to make good on them. My failure today cost us a very valuable point. I picked some grass out of the cut, squinted over the edge of Westcott Field into the late August sun, and wondered how things could get any worse. I wasn’t kept waiting long. “Hey.” I looked up to see my sister, Julia. She was taller and prettier than me, with blonde hair, startling light blue eyes, and creamy, blemish-free skin. Few would guess that we were twins—the clear result of two eggs, not one. “You see the game?” She nodded, but stayed several feet away. “Hate to pile The SEASON O
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on, but I thought you might want to see this.” Julia handed me her phone, the browser open to The Dallas Morning News. Bluebonnet Club Announces 2016 Debutantes, the headline read. I scrolled through the article. Blah blah blah proud to announce Ashley Harriet Abernathy, Lauren Eloise Battle, Ashley Diann Kohlberg, Margaret Abigail Lucas, Julia Scott McKnight, Megan Lucille McKnight, Sydney Jane Pennybacker . . . Wait, Megan Lucille McKnight?! There must be some mistake, because that was ME! “Did—did Mom call you?” I asked. “Nope.” “Text?” Julia shook her head. I wanted to splutter in disbelief. To scream, to rage, to protest violently. But my mother was thirty miles away at the ranch. I read on. At the bottom were the pictures. Seven toothy, varnished girls soon to take their anointed places in the pantheon of Bluebonnet debutantes, that rare and coveted role in a tradition that dated all the way back to 1882, as Mom had so often reminded us. My picture was a real doozy, taken as an olive branch to her after she complained for years that the only photos she had showed me posing on one knee beside a soccer ball. For this timeless memento she’d spared no expense. She had hired a stylist, bullied me into a low-cut Stella McCartney, and chosen a photographer who insisted on shooting in the gloaming, down amongst the crepe myrtles 4 o
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along Turtle Creek. Resting my hand oh-so-casually on a branch, smiling at a hundred miles an hour, I looked like a hick who’d lucked into a makeover coupon. Never in my worst nightmares had I imagined it would pop up a year later in the city’s most widely read newspaper, beneath an announcement for a virgin auction. “Maybe it’s a mistake?” I said hopefully, handing back her phone. Julia kept silent. She had passed AP calculus as a sophomore in high school and was majoring in structural engineering. Like a lot of really smart girls, she learned early that silence was often a wise tactic. “All right,” I said. “I’ll shower and we’ll go see what she has to say for herself.” Julia smiled, a tad too brightly. “I’ll make popcorn,” she said.
V Julia drove so I could elevate my leg. No stitches required, but the trainers rinsed it liberally with hydrogen peroxide, squirted some Neosporin in, and applied a gauze bandage, telling me to keep it up for a while to stem the bleeding. So on the half-hour drive from Dallas to the ranch, I propped my leg on the dashboard and multitasked by staring out the window and fretting about why my mother would want to ruin my life. Julia, still in the throes of her breakup from her longtime boyfriend Tyler, chose Tame Impala for the gloomy soundtrack. The only thing missing was rain. The SEASON O
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that all daughters eventually conclude their mothers are insane, and though I had long heard the rattle of loose nuts and screws in Lucy McKnight’s head, even for her this challenged belief. I simply wasn’t debutante material. Not even close. And I’m not being modest. I wore faded Wranglers, old T-shirts, and Ropers, except when I mixed it up with baggy nylon shorts and flip-flops. I bought Hanes sports bras and cotton panties in saver packs. I had freckles and a farmer’s tan, and my hair, best described as “brown,” was forever in a ponytail, except during practice and games when I added an Alex Morgan headband crafted from pink trainer’s tape. My lips were permanently chapped, as I lived in a state of semi-dehydration, and my nails were ragged and dirty. My muscular legs were a war zone, and my upper body was lean as a stewing chicken from thousands of hours running in the Texas sun. “She’s finally gone full-on, bat-shit crazy,” I said to Julia, who pursed her lips, maintained her silence, and kept her eyes on the road. Now Julia as a debutante, that made some sense. She was delicate as a Japanese sliding door, and boys fell for her like leaves in the fall—by the thousands. Frankly she was precisely the kind of girl I might have sneered at and despised—a Pi Phi, well-dressed, well-mannered, a successful student, and so good at all those girlie things I could never master, like batting her eyelashes, applying makeup, and flirting. But as she was my only sister and my womb mate, I loved her 6 o
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intensely, and woe to those who threatened her. She took Exit 47, the only exit on South I-35 we ever took, and turned left onto FM 89. Another mile and we would be at the ranch. When I saw the edge of the buck’n’rail fence that marked the western boundary of the Aberdeen, I set my leg down gently and prepared for battle.
V “MOM!” I thundered. “MOMMMM!” No answer. I stood in the front hallway of the main house. She’s hiding, I thought, afraid to show herself. Coward. Julia, purse hooked over her arm, came in behind me. She was clearly entertained, like a kid watching floats at an Independence Day parade. I scowled and went around the staircase, down the hallway, and through Dad’s closed study door like the Germans through Belgium. When the door hit the wall he bolted upright. “Hey,” he said, blinking. A college football game played on the TV. Bless his heart, he had been napping on the couch. His dusty boots were under the coffee table. “Something you’d like to tell me, Dad?” I demanded. “No,” he said, slowly. Julia, content to drift in my wake, wandered in behind me. “You know, when you offer your daughter up for sale, the polite thing to do is to tell her.” Ahh, now he remembered. He ran his hand through his hair, bought a moment. At forty-six, he had hair that was still tawny and full, with just a swatch of gray at the temples. The SEASON O
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A lifetime of squinting in the sun had seared in creases around his hazel eyes, but he was still boyish and handsome. Fit too—the daily grind of cutting cattle on horseback kept him rangy and tough as a fence post. Angus McKnight III looked like exactly what he was—a working cowboy. “Honey, you are not being offered up for sale, and I was as surprised as you were about the announcement.” “I doubt that,” I said, giving no ground. Dad tried his most sympathetic look on Julia, hoping for support. “Of course we were going to tell you—” Footsteps in the hallway. Dad looked over my shoulder. Could it be the cavalry? Indeed. My mother, Lucy McKnight, strolled into the study, pulling off her cloth gardening gloves. An inch taller than me at five foot eight, she was still striking, if a little soft around the edges. She was just at that age when women consider the benefits of plastic surgery, and I knew her thinking ran to sooner rather than later, for two reasons. First, you should take your car to the mechanic the minute you hear the engine knock, and second, if done right you might just pass it off on a change in diet and a new personal trainer. Mom oozed style, and today she managed in that magical, mysterious way only some women can to make jeans, a blue cotton shirt, and a sun hat seem like an ensemble from the Neiman Marcus spring catalog. “Is that a new purse, Julia?” Mom asked. “Megan was just asking about—” 8 o
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“I know why she’s here, Angus,” she said, then turned back to me. “I apologize for you finding out this way. Of course we were planning to tell you this weekend; I had no idea it would run in the paper today. Still, no matter—it’s done and settled.” “But I told you just last week I didn’t want to debut. Ever. Remember?” “I took your view into account,” she said mildly, “but I don’t think you understand that this is truly a once-in-alifetime opportunity you simply cannot pass up.” “Not sure if you’ve noticed, but with school, practice, and games, my plate is full.” “I considered that, but making a debut is draining both physically and emotionally, and you need to be at your best. I suggest you take the fall off from soccer.” Good Lord, this was worse than I thought. I tried to stem the molten anger gurgling inside on its way to full volcanic expression. “Mom, if you think I would take off soccer to waltz and have high tea, you’re more than mistaken—you’re demented.” “I understand your feelings—” “No, you don’t,” I snapped. “I am asking for one season out of what, twenty?” “You’re asking for one year out of four of college eligibility. And any chance I have at making the national team.” Her pitying look said it all, but she banged the nail home anyway. The SEASON O
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“Sweetie, you’re twenty years old. I think that ship has sailed.” “I was invited to the regional camp last year!” I had gone to Kansas City for three weeks the previous summer to audition for the Under-20 Women’s National Team, along with about two hundred other girls. Suffice it to say that it was a humbling experience and a quick trip home. “I know that, current feelings excepted, you will learn so much, grow so much, and make memories you’ll cherish for the rest of your life.” “Cherish?” I said. “Learning to match my shoes with my purse? To use divine in a sentence?” “There’s far more to it than fashion and manners,” she said carefully, “though it will be a great advantage to you to work on both.” “No. It won’t. Because I’m not doing it. You want to send me out dressed like a poodle to parties with cash prizes for ‘Best Idle Chatter’ and ‘Most Vacant Smile.’ Where I’ll be forced to dance with boys I don’t like and be nice to a whole slew of people I don’t know. And you want me to give up a year of soccer for the privilege?” I paused, took a deep breath. “Clearly decades of coloring your hair and chugging SlimFast have taken a toll,” I said. Silence. A step over the line, I realized, as her eyes narrowed and her jaw clenched and her face turned a dark crimson. “Nobody likes a smart-ass, Megan.” 10 o
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“I do,” I said cavalierly. “I love smart-asses.” I held out fierce hope that one day I would meet a boy who liked them too—or else I was screwed. Mom, a savvy fighter, ignored my jab and closed the space between us. We were now chin to chin. “Let’s just—” Dad broke in, but Mom stymied him. “You agreed, Angus.” Dad threw his hands up, and she turned back to me. “Thanks to a good deal of effort on my part, both you and Julia have been invited to debut this year. It’s practically unheard of for two sisters, and—” “I don’t care who you bribed.” “Enough!” she shouted. I gave her the icy, defiant stare, but she held her ground. “I love you dearly, but you are headstrong to a fault and quite sure you know all you need to about everyone and everything. Trust me when I say you do not. Three generations of women in my family—your great-grandmother, your grandmother, your aunt, and I—all made our Bluebonnet debuts. Your cousin Abby and your sister, Julia, will make their debuts this year, and while you may not realize what this means, I do. One day very soon your soccer career will end and you will find yourself in a much larger and more complicated world than the one you now inhabit, and it is my job to make sure you are prepared for that. So let me be perfectly clear—this is not a request.” “This is so unfair, Mom.” “Is it?” she said. “Is it really?” The SEASON O
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The question hung there, and then Mom held the side of her head, obviously in pain. Dad moved in and put his hand on her arm. “You okay?” he asked. Mom suffered from the occasional migraine, which always seemed to arrive when most useful. “I’m fine.” But she let him walk her slowly to a chair. She sat down heavily and eyed the sun beaming through the curtains like a vampire would the dawn. I was furious. Tears welled as my anger burned hotter, but I didn’t know what to say. “I-I hate you,” I finally mustered. So lame. But committed, I spun and stomped away. “Honey—” my father started. “Let her go,” Mom said as I slammed the door for good measure. In the hallway I sobbed and heard her offer the old chestnut “She’ll come around—just let her get used to the idea.” Not fucking likely.
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Two
In Which Megan Ekes Out a Pyrrhic Victory THERE IS NOTHING MORE COMFORTING THAN THE
warm scent of a horse, especially your own horse, one that loves you unconditionally and will let you hang around his neck without complaint. As I pushed my face deeper into Banjo’s coat and inhaled deeply, my breath naturally downshifted from a heaving sob to a manageable wheeze. I highly recommend this when your life is in tatters. I had gone to the barn to hide and think. It was Saturday, so Silvio and the other ranch hands would be off, and I would be alone with my guy Banjo and the dozen other horses there. Though it burned and I would never admit it, Mom was right about the national team thing. That ship had likely sailed—if you don’t make the Under-20 team, your chances of making the Under-23 team are practically nil, and if you’re not on that team, well . . . enough said about
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ever playing with the big dogs. Worst of all, I had choked at the regional tryout and never showed the coaches my best stuff. Sure the other girls were good, but they weren’t better than me. I don’t even know what happened. It was a maelstrom of bad judgment and rookie mistakes, like the one I made today. I yearned for another shot, and Coach Nash was my lottery ticket—she was a two-time NCAA Coach of the Year and was way connected to the national team. Only if I played like a rock star this season would I maybe, just maybe, get another chance next summer. Days like today didn’t help, and now Mom wanted me to quit for a whole season? Does she know me at all? I wondered, and not for the first time. Ironically, the odds of making the actual Women’s National Team, the one that plays in the World Cup and the Olympics, were the same as being selected a Bluebonnet deb—essentially nil. Twenty-three women in the whole country are on the top national squad at any given time, and there are only seven or eight Bluebonnet debutantes a year. You can’t ask to be invited. You can’t buy your way in. You’re selected by a secret club of very rich and influential men who value tradition above all else. So if your mother debuted, it gives you a leg up. An aunt can help; a grandmother too. Julia and I were serious legacy. When Grandma Rose Alice died a few years back, the headline of her obituary in The Dallas Morning News was about her selection as a 14 o
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Bluebonnet Debutante, 1964. Everything else about her life—parents, college, husband, kids, charities, and social clubs—came after. The subject of our debut started in kindergarten, but until today’s juggernaut I’d thought we’d agreed that Julia would do it and I would skip it. Through my snuffling, I heard the tick tick of the diesel engine, the driver’s door thumping shut, then the barn latch closing. I hid behind Banjo’s neck as the quiet crunch of footsteps on straw grew closer. Long before I heard his voice I knew it was Dad. “Thought I’d go for a ride. Wanna come?” His voice was perfectly noncommittal. “I guess,” I said quietly, trying not to let on just how hard I had been crying. While Dad saddled Jasper, and I readied Banjo, there was the rustle of blankets, the creak of leather, an occasional snort, and the clop of hooves, but neither of us spoke—we just went about our business. Before we mounted up, Dad grabbed a shotgun off the rack in his truck, checked the load, and slid it in my saddle holster. This wasn’t my gun— mine was a Remington 870 Wingmaster Competition, a real beauty Dad ordered custom for my thirteenth birthday. It was a pump-action twelve-gauge with a front bead sight on a twenty-inch barrel and an eight-load magazine, weighted just a little forward for better tracking. The wood was dark cherry, the barrel and fittings black steel, and the Aberdeen brand was engraved on the stock. But Dad’s gun from the The SEASON O
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truck would do if we startled a rattler, and I was flattered he’d let me handle it. We set out from the barn, walked out beyond the corral, and loped up the first rise. Dad always stopped here to have a look, and I pulled up beside him. “Nice up here,” he said, after a moment. “Yeah.” And it was. McKnights have been ranching cattle on the Aberdeen since 1873, the year my great-great-great-grandfather Angus arrived from Scotland to make his way in America. Lanky, gap-toothed, with hair the color of a copper penny, Angus packed only guts and grit when he left Clackmannanshire, and he chose Dallas by chance while standing in the train station in St. Louis. A man he’d never met and never saw again told him he’d find good grass and steady water there. Angus liked the look of him, so he bought a ticket and arrived to little more than a rail junction beside a muddy river, but to the south were rolling hills of fine, tall hay fed by plentiful creeks, and Angus plunked down his life savings for two hundred acres, a steer, and four heifers. Those two hundred acres were four thousand now, and a thousand head, give or take, wandered through the lush grass, brush cedar, live oaks, and gurgling creeks down below us. As I looked at my dad, hand on his pommel, gaze fixed on an endless prairie dotted with cows all bearing the original AR brand, time stopped and it could have been old Angus sitting beside me. That land, the never-changing 16 o
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land, created a deep, primeval connection. For Dad and every McKnight before him, cattle ranching was not a job— it was a calling. “Hyah!” he belted, and gave Jasper his head. The horse broke into a canter, and Banjo instinctively followed, and soon we were at a gallop, the ground a blur beneath us and no reason or ability to talk above the clattering hooves. We jumped ditches and ducked under tree limbs and rumbled up and over hillocks, only stopping when we reached the far western boundary. Here the endless prairie ended. Beyond our fence lay El Dorado, a manufactured development bursting with Spanishstyle houses butted together like cans of beans on a grocery store shelf. The streets with their picturesque names— Avenida de las Flores, Lomo Alto, and El Camino Real— evoked the land’s long history as a working cattle ranch, but the main boulevard and side streets, once cobblestone, were now black asphalt as smooth as a pool table. The development had absolutely everything you needed to forget the past and embrace the future: brightly lit cement sidewalks with code-mandated fire hydrants standing guard over storm drains; power lines and fiber optic cable; playgrounds; a fitness center; a picnic area with gas grills— bring your own propane tank and just plug it right in. There was a water park with a lap pool, a wading pool, and a splash pad. And the spiderweb of dusty trails used by cows for a century was now a network of paved hike and The SEASON O
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bike trails with strategically placed benches beneath live oaks brought in from a tree farm. We watered the horses from a creek and caught our breath. A family of four biked by on the other side of the fence, the two young kids on training wheels, the entire family in shiny, sturdy helmets. “Howdy,” Dad said quietly, and tipped his hat. “Hello,” they called back. “Great day, huh?” “Sure is,” Dad replied. The children stared back at Dad like he was a rotary phone. Dad surveyed the houses across the fence. “Got another call the other day,” he said to me after they’d passed. “Yeah? Have you called him back?” I teased. “Nope,” he admitted, sheepishly. “Does Mom know?” “Not yet.” Same old, same old. “Dad,” I said, a tad more serious, “why does she want to sell?” He paused before answering. “It’s stressful and she knows we can’t compete anymore. For a decade or better we’ve been supporting the cows, and not the other way around.” This was a standing joke between my parents. As debt piled up, Dad would occasionally sell off a small piece of land to get square with the bank for a time. But he never reduced the herd, and Mom would periodically wax poetic on the idea that we would 18 o
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finally be left with only the house and a few acres—but a thousand cows. He looked over the fence. “’Sides it doesn’t take an MBA to see it’s better to ranch houses than cattle these days.” “So . . . it’s the money?” “Sort of—it’s our future, and yours and Julia’s.” He looked over at me. “She just figures if we’re gonna fold eventually, might as well do it with some chips still on the table.” “Gonna take up golf?” I said, with just a little sass. “Might take up drinking full-time.” We turned the horses toward home but let them walk. “You gonna call the guy back?” “Nope.” I took in a huge breath through my nose. Let it out. Took in another and savored. Switchgrass and bluestem mainly, but layered with swirls of dirt as rich as Swiss chocolate. I picked up hints of lemon mint, bluebells, saddle leather, and sweat. All baked together under the Texas sun, it was the spice cake of my childhood. Nothing would ever smell better. “Well, I hope we never sell,” I said. “I know.” I knew as well as Dad that the money struggles of the last twenty years were not quite what Mom signed up for when they married, and he didn’t begrudge her financial peace of mind. Rather, he honestly feared life without meaningful The SEASON O
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work. He was a cattle rancher, and it was all he knew. Sure, he might sell the Aberdeen and get a bag of money and buy a house in the right zip code, but what the hell would he do all day? Dad was country, not country club, and always would be.
V We were nearly back to the barn, and Dad still hadn’t broached the inevitable subject. I knew he hadn’t come out here just to ride, and as we got closer I wondered how he would come at me—would it be “Embrace your opportunities” or the more classic “Do as you’re told” approach? But after we’d hung the saddles and blankets and tack and fed the horses, he came at me with the one surefire, nofail approach I could never refuse. “Megan, you know how much I love you, and that I am pretty much unable to function when you’re unhappy,” he began, standing by the barn door. “And I’ve got some sympathy for the careless way all this was thrown at you. . . .” My heart sank and I braced for impact. “These last few years, since you girls left, your mother and I . . . we’ve been, well . . . let’s just say there will be no peace around here unless your mother wins this one. So I’m asking you—begging you really—as a favor to me, to do this debutante thing.” Oh God, I thought, is he going to cry? Oh please don’t cry! I suddenly realized there was more going on here, much more. 20 o
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“Is it really that important to her?” “You have no idea.” He actually kicked at the dirt with his boot. “Why?” “Try and understand,” he said. “She sees it . . . as your birthright. She worries that you’ve been cooped up out here in the country your whole life, away from society, such as it is, and you’ve missed out on . . . well, I’m not sure what. But if you don’t do this thing now, there won’t ever be another chance like it. And whether it matters to you or not, she’s invested, and . . . you can’t just throw it back in her face. It’s just not the way to handle something like this.” Frantically I searched for an exit, but none appeared. Dad’s a tough guy. I can’t remember him ever asking me for anything. And now he was begging me to do something he knew I detested as a personal favor, to take one for the family team. I realized then that he was desperate like he had never been before, and that his “there will be no peace” explanation was only the tip of some enormous iceberg of entangled negotiated settlements that likely spanned my parents’ entire married life. Resigned, I played my sole remaining card. “I won’t give up soccer, Dad. I’ve only got one more year left.” I gave him my super-earnest “You can’t ask that of me” look. “I can do both. I’ll just have to work harder.” “That seems fair,” he said, and I heard myself exhale, unaware until I did that I had been holding my breath. The SEASON O
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“I’ll offer terms to your mother.” He gave me that rueful smile I loved so much. “Good luck,” I croaked. Dad waved as he walked toward his truck, a mud-stained F-350. He put the shotgun back on the rack and then, with the door half-open, he looked back. “Hey—thanks.” Straightforward. Honest. That was Dad. I choked back tears as he drove off.
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Chapter 1 Looking back, none of this would have happened if I’d brought lip gloss the night of the Homecoming Dance. Bee Franklin was the first person to notice that my lips were all naked and indecent. We were standing outside of our school, Grove Academy. It was late October, and the night was surprisingly cool; in Pine Grove, Alabama, where I live, it’s not unheard of to have a hot Halloween. But that night felt like fall, complete with that nice smoky smell in the air. I was super relieved that it was cold, because my jacket was wool, and there was nothing more tragic than a girl sweating in wool. I was wearing the jacket over a knee-length pink sheath dress. If I was going to be crowned Homecoming Queen tonight—and that seemed like a lock—I was going to do it looking as classy as possible in my demure pink dress and pearls. “Are you nervous?” Bee asked as I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. Like me, Bee was in pink, but her dress was closer to magenta and the bodice was covered in tiny sequins that winked and shivered in the parking lot lights. Or maybe
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that was just Bee. Unlike me, she hadn’t worn a jacket.
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Our dates, Brandon and Ryan, were off searching for a parking place. They had been annoyed that Bee and I had insisted on not showing up until the thirty minutes before the crowning, but there was no way I was going to risk getting punch spilled on me or my makeup sliding off my face (not to mention the sweatiness! See above, re: wool jacket) before I had that sparkly tiara on my head. I planned on looking fierce in the yearbook pictures. “Of course I’m not nervous,” I told Bee. And it was true, I wasn’t. Okay, maybe I was a little bit anxious . . . Bee gave an exaggerated eye roll. “Seriously? Harper Jane Price, you have not been able to successfully lie to me since the Second-Grade Barbie Incident. Admit that you’re freaking out.” She held up one hand, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. “Maybe a leeeeeetle bit?” Laughing, I caught her hand and pulled it down. “Not even a ‘leeeeeetle bit.’ It’s just Homecoming.” “Yeah, but you’re going to get all queenly tonight. I think that warrants some nerves. Or are you saving them for Cotillion?” Just the word sent all the nerves Bee could have wanted jittering through my system, but before I could admit that, her dark eyes suddenly went wide. “Omigod! Harper! Your lips!” “What?” I asked, raising a hand to them. “They’re nekkid,” she said. “You are totally gloss-less!” “Who’s ‘nekkid’?” I looked up to see the boys walking toward us. The orange lights played up the red in Ryan’s hair, and he was grinning, his 1S
hands in his pockets. I felt that same little flutter in my stomach
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back in the third grade. It had taken me six years from that day to make him my boyfriend, but looking at him now, I had to admit, it had been worth the wait. “My lips,” I said. “I must’ve wiped off all my gloss at the restaurant.” “Well, damn,” he said, throwing his arm around my shoulders. “I’d hoped for something a little more exciting. Of course, no lip gloss means I can safely do this.” He lowered his head and kissed me, albeit pretty chastely. PDA is vile, and Ryan, being my Perfect Boyfriend, knows how I feel about it. “Hope you girls are happy,” Brandon said when we broke apart. He had both of his arms wrapped around Bee from behind, his hands clasped right under her . . . um, abundant assets. Bee was so tall that Brandon’s chin barely cleared her shoulder. “We had to park way down the effing road.” Okay, I should probably mention right here that Brandon used the real word, but this is my story, so I’m cleaning it up a little. Besides, if I honestly quoted Brandon, this thing would look like a Cops transcript. “Don’t say that word!” I snapped. Brandon rolled his eyes. “What the hell, Harper, are you, like, the language police?” I pressed my lips together. “I just think that the F-word should be saved for dire occasions. And having to park a hundred yards from the gym is not a dire occasion.” “So sorry, Your Highness,” Brandon said, scowling as Bee el-
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“Easy, dude,” Ryan said, shooting Brandon a warning look. Ignoring Brandon, I turned to Bee. “Do you have any lip gloss? I completely spaced on bringing any.” “My girl forgot makeup?” Ryan asked, quirking an eyebrow. “Man, you are stressed about this Queen thing.” “No, I’m not,” I said immediately, even though, hello, I clearly was. But I didn’t like when people used the “S-word” around me. After all, a big part of my reputation at the Grove was my ability to handle anything and everything. Ryan raised his hands in apology. “Okay, okay, sorry. But, I mean, this is obviously pretty important to you, or you wouldn’t have spent over a grand on that outfit.” He smiled again, shaking his head so his hair fell over his eyes. “I really hope your tastes get cheaper if we get married.” “I hear that, man,” Brandon said, lifting his hand to high-five Ryan. “Chicks gonna break us.” Bee rolled her eyes again, but I didn’t know whether it was at the guys or the fact that my outfit was over a thousand dollars (yes, I know that’s a completely ridiculous amount for a seventeen-year-old girl to spend on a Homecoming dress, but, hey, I can wear it, like, a million times provided I don’t gain five pounds. Or at least that was how I rationalized it to my mom.) “Here.” Bee thrust a tube into my hand. I held it up to read the name on the bottom. “ ‘Salmon Fantasy’?” “That’s close to the shade you wear.” Bee’s long blond hair was 1S
woven into a fishtail braid, and she tossed it over her shoulder as
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“I wear ‘Coral Shimmer.’ That is very different.” Bee made a face that said, “I am only tolerating you because we’ve been best friends since we were five,” but I kept going, drawing myself up to my full height with mock imperiousness, “And Salmon Fantasy has to be the grossest beauty product name ever. Who has fantasies about salmon?” “People who screw fish,” Brandon offered, completely cracking himself up. Ryan didn’t laugh, but I saw the corners of his mouth twitching. “So witty, Bran,” I muttered, and this time, when Bee rolled her eyes, I had no doubt that it was at the guys. “Look,” she said to me, “it’s either Salmon Fantasy or naked lips. Your choice.” I sighed and clutched the tube of lip gloss. “Okay,” I said, “but I’m gonna have to find a bathroom.” If it had been my Coral Shimmer, I could have put it on without a mirror, but there was no way I was slapping on a new shade sight unseen. Ryan pulled open the gym door, and I ducked under his arm to walk into the gym. As soon as I did, I could hear the opening riff of “Sweet Home Alabama.” It’s not a dance until someone plays that song. The gym looked great, and my chest tightened with pride. I know everyone, even Ryan, thinks I’m crazy to do all the stuff I do at school, but I honestly love the place. I love its redbrick buildings, and the chapel bells that ring to signal class changes. I love that both my parents went here, and their parents before them. So yeah, maybe I do stretch myself a little thin, but it’s completely worth it. The Grove is a happy place to go to school,
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And it meant that when people thought of the name “Price” at Grove Academy, they’d think of all the good things I’d done for the school, and not . . . other stuff. Instead, I focused on the decorations. I’m SGA president—the first-ever junior to be elected to the position, I should add—so Homecoming activities are technically my responsibility. But tonight, I’d delegated all of the decorating to my protégée, sophomore class president, Lucy McCarroll. My only contribution had been to ban crepe streamers and balloon arches. Can you say tacky? Lucy had done a great job. The walls were covered in a silky, shimmery purple material and there were colored lights pulsating with the music. Looking over at the punch table, I saw that she’d even brought in a little fountain with several bistro tables clustered around it. I scanned the crowd until I saw Lucy, and when I caught her eye, I gave her the thumbs-up, and mouthed, “Nice!” “Harper!” I heard someone cry. I turned around to see Amanda and Abigail Foster headed my way. They were identical twins, but relatively easy to tell apart since Amanda always wore her long brown hair up, and Abigail wore hers down. Tonight, both were wearing green dresses with spaghetti straps, but Amanda’s was hunter green while Abigail’s was closer to seafoam. The twins were on the cheerleading squad with me and Bee, and Abi and I worked together on SGA. Right behind them was 1S
Mary Beth Riley, wobbling on her high heels. Next to me, Bee
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blew out a long breath before muttering, “Maybe no one will notice if she wears tennis shoes under her dress.” Despite Bee’s low tone, Mary Beth heard her. “I’m working on it,” she said, glaring at Bee. “I’ll get better by Cotillion.” Since “Riley” came right after “Price” alphabetically, Mary Beth would be following me down the giant staircase at Magnolia House, the mansion where Cotillion was held every year. So far, we’d only had two practices, but Mary Beth had tripped and nearly fallen directly on top of me both times. Which was why I’d suggested she start wearing the heels every day. “Speaking of that,” Amanda said, laying a hand on my arm. Even under her makeup, I could see the constellation of freckles arcing across her nose. That was another way to tell the twins apart; Abi’s nose was freckle free. “We got an e-mail from Miss Saylor right before we left for the dance. She wants to schedule another practice Monday afternoon.” I bit back a sigh. I had a Future Business Leaders of America meeting Monday after school, so that would have to be moved. Maybe Tuesday? No, Tuesday was cheerleading practice, and Wednesday was SGA. Still, when Saylor Stark told you there was going to be an extra Cotillion practice, you went. All the other stuff could wait. “I’m so sick of practice,” Mary Beth groaned, tipping her head back. As she did, her dark red hair fell back from her ears, revealing silver hoops that were way too big. Ugh. “It’s Cotillion. We 1S
wear a white dress. We walk down some stairs, we drink some
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punch and dance with our dads. And then we all pat ourselves on the back and pretend we did it just to raise money for charity, and that it’s not stupid and old-fashioned and totally self- indulgent.” “Mary Beth!” Amanda gasped, while Abigail glanced around like Miss Saylor was going to swoop out of the rafters. Bee’s huge eyes went even bigger, and her mouth opened and closed several times, but no sounds came out. “It is not!” I heard someone practically shriek. Then I realized it was me. I took a deep breath through my nose and did my best to make my voice calm as I continued. “I just mean . . . Mary Beth, Cotillion is a lot more than wearing a white dress and dancing with your dad. It’s tradition. It’s when we make the transition from girls to women. It’s . . . important.” Mary Beth chewed her lip and studied me for a moment. “Okay, maybe.” Then she shrugged and gave a tiny smile. “But we’ll see how you feel when I’m ‘transitioning’ into a heap at the bottom of those stairs.” “You’ll do fine,” I told her, hoping I sounded more convinced than I felt. I’d spent months preparing for my Homecoming coronation, but Cotillion? I’d been getting ready for that since I was four years old and Mom had shown me and my older sister, Leigh-Anne, her Cotillion dress. I still remembered the smooth feel of the silk under my hands. It had been her grandmother’s dress, Mom had told us, and one day, Leigh-Anne and I would wear it, too. 1S R
Two years ago, Leigh-Anne had, but for my Cotillion, I’d be wearing a dress Mom and I had bought last summer in Mobile.
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“Babe!” I heard Ryan call from behind me. As I turned to smile at him, I heard one of the girls sigh. Probably Mary Beth. And I had to admit, striding toward us, his auburn hair flopping over his forehead, shoulders back, hands in his pockets, Ryan was completely sigh-worthy. I held my hand out to him as he approached, and he slipped it easily into his own. “Ladies,” Ryan said, nodding at Amanda, Abigail, and Mary Beth. “Let me guess. Y’all are . . . plotting world domination?” Mary Beth giggled, which had the unfortunate effect of making her wobble even more. Abigail had to grab her elbow to keep her from falling over. “No,” Amanda told him, deadly serious. “We’re talking about Cotillion.” “Ah, world domination, Cotillion. Same difference,” Ryan replied with an easy grin, and this time, all three girls giggled, even Amanda. Turning his attention to me, Ryan raised his eyebrows. “So are we just going to stand around and listen to this band butcher Lynyrd Skynyrd or are we going to dance?” “Yeah,” Brandon said, coming up next to Ryan and grabbing Bee around the waist. “Let’s go turn this mother out.” He pulled her out onto the dance floor, where he immediately flopped on his belly and started doing the worm. I watched Bee dance awkwardly around him and wondered for the millionth time why she wasted her time with that goofball. My own much less goofy boyfriend took my hand and started
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up the lip gloss. “I’ll be right back!” I shouted over the music, and he nodded before heading for the refreshment table. I glanced over my shoulder as I walked into the gym lobby and was treated to the sight of Brandon and one of the other basketball players doing that weird fish-catching dance move. With each other. Since we’d gotten there so late, most everyone who was coming to the dance was already inside the gym, but there were a few stragglers coming in the main gym lobby doors. Two teachers, Mrs. Delacroix and Mr. Schmidt, were also in the lobby, undoubtedly doing “purse and pocket checks.” Grove Academy was really strict about that sort of thing now. Two years ago, a few kids smuggled in a little bottle of liquor at prom and, later that night, got into a car accident. My sister— I cut that thought off. Not tonight. It was strange to be in the school at night. The only light in the lobby came from a display case full of “participation” trophies with Ryan’s name on them. The Grove was excellent in academics, but famously crappy at sports, even against other tiny schools. I know that sounds like sacrilege in the South, but just like any other expensive private school, Grove Academy was way more invested in SAT scores than any scoreboard. We left the football championships to the giant public school across town, Lee High. I’ve been up at school at night a few times, and it’s always creepy. I guess it’s the quiet. I’m used to the halls being deafen1S
ing, so the sound of my heels clicking on the linoleum seemed
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freakishly loud. In fact, they almost echoed, making me feel like there was someone behind me. I hurried out of the lobby and turned the corner into the English hall, so I didn’t see the guy in front of me until it was too late. “Oh!” I exclaimed as we bumped shoulders. “Sorry!” Then I realized who I’d bumped into, and immediately regretted my apologetic tone. If I’d known it was David Stark, I would have tried to hit him harder, or maybe stepped on his foot with the spiky heel of my new shoes for good measure. I did my best to smile at him, though, even as I realized my stomach was jumping all over the place. He must have scared me more than I’d thought. David scowled at me over the rims of his ridiculous hipster glasses—the kind with the thick black rims. I hate those. I mean, it’s the twenty-first century. There are fashionable options for eyewear. “Watch where you’re going,” he said. Then his lips twisted in a smirk. “Or could you not see through all that mascara?” I would’ve loved nothing more than to tell him to kiss my ass, but one of the responsibilities of being a student leader at the Grove is being polite to everyone, even if they are a douchebag who wrote not one, but three incredibly unflattering articles in the school paper about what a terrible job you’re doing as SGA president. And you especially needed to be polite to said douchebag when 1S
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Pine Grove Junior League; head of the Pine Grove Betterment Society; chairwoman of the Grove Academy School Board; and, most importantly, organizer of Pine Grove’s Annual Cotillion. So I forced myself to smile even bigger at David. “Nope, just in a hurry,” I said. “Are you, uh . . . are you here for the dance?” He snorted. “Um, no. I’d rather slam my testicles in a locker door. I have some work to do for the paper.” I tried to keep my expression blank, but I have one of those faces that shows every single thing that goes through my mind. Apparently this time was no exception, because David laughed. “Don’t worry, Pres, nothing about you this time.” If ever there were a time to confront David about the mean things he’s written about me, this was it. Of course, those articles hadn’t exactly mentioned me by name. I seriously doubt Mrs. Laurent, the newspaper advisor, would let him slam me directly. But they’d basically said that the “current administration” is more concerned with dances and parades than the real issues facing the Grove’s students, and that under the “current administration,” the SGA has gotten all cliquey, leaving out the majority of the student body. To which I say, um, hello? Not my fault if people don’t attempt to get involved in their own school. And as for the “real issues” facing the Grove’s students? The kids who go here all come from super nice households that can afford to send their kids here. We’re not exactly plagued with social problems, you know? Which you’d think David would get. He’d lived in Pine Grove 1S
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Or maybe David’s issues had nothing to do with “social injustice” at the Grove and everything to do with the fact that he and I had loathed each other since kindergarten. Heck, even before that. Mom says he’s the only baby I ever bit in daycare. But before I could reply, the music stopped in the gym. I checked my watch and saw that it was a quarter till ten. Crap. David gave another one of those mean laughs. “Go ahead, Harper,” he said, sliding his messenger bag from one hip to the other. I know. A messenger bag. And those glasses. And he was wearing a stupid argyle sweater and Converse high-tops. Practically every other boy at the Grove lived in khakis and buttondowns. I wasn’t sure David Stark owned any pants other than jeans that were too small. “Only a few more minutes until your coronation,” he said, running a hand through his sandy blond hair, making it stand up even more than usual. “I’m sure you’d hate to miss everyone’s felicitations.” David had beaten me in the final round of our sixth-grade spelling bee with that word and now, all these years later, he still tried to drop it into conversation whenever he could. Counting to ten in my head, I reminded myself of what Mom always said whenever I complained about David Stark: “His parents died when he was just a little bitty thing. Saylor’s done her best with him, but still, something like that is bound to make anyone act ugly.” Since he was a tragic orphan, I made myself say “Have a nice night” through clenched teeth as I turned to head to the nearest
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He just shrugged and started walking backward down the hall, toward the computer lab. “You might wanna put some lipstick on,” he called after me. “Yeah, thanks,” I muttered, but he was already gone. God, what a jerk, I thought, pushing the bathroom door open. If my shoes had sounded loud in the gym lobby, it was nothing compared to how they sounded in the bathroom. Like the dress, they were a little ridiculous, more for their height than their cost. I’m 5'4", but I was tottering around 5'8" on those bad boys. Looking in the mirror, I saw why Bee had been so horrified by my naked lips. My skin is pale, so without lip gloss, my lips had kind of disappeared into my face. But other than that, I looked good. Great, even. The makeup lady at Dillard’s had done a fabulous job of playing up my big green eyes, easily my best feature, and my dark hair was pulled back from my face, tumbling down my back in soft waves and setting off my high cheekbones. Yeah, I know it’s vain. But being pretty is currency, not just at the Grove, but in life. Sure, I wasn’t staggeringly beautiful like my sister, Leigh-Anne, had been, but— No. Not going there. I unscrewed the tube of Salmon Fantasy, shuddered again at the name, and started applying. It wasn’t as pretty as my Coral Shimmer, but it would do. I had just slathered on the second coat when the bathroom door flew open, banging against the tile wall so loudly that I jumped. 1S R
And scrawled a line of Salmon Fantasy from the corner of my mouth nearly to my ear.
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“Oh, dammit!” I cried, stamping my foot. “Brandon, what—” I don’t know why I thought it must be Brandon. Probably because it seemed like the sort of moron thing he’d do, trying to scare me. But it wasn’t Brandon. It was Mr. Hall, one of the school janitors. He stood in the doorway for a second, staring at me like he didn’t know who—or what—I was. “Oh my God, Mr. Hall,” I said, pressing a hand to my chest. “You scared me to death!” He just stared at me with this wild look in his eyes before turning around and slamming the bathroom door shut. And then I heard a sound that made my stomach drop. It was the loud click of a dead bolt being thrown. Mr. Hall, the tubby janitor, had just locked us in the bathroom.
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Chapter 2 Okay. Okay, I can handle this, I thought, even as panic started clawing through my chest. “Mr. Hall,” I started, my voice high and shaky. He just waved his hand at me and pressed his ear to the door. I don’t know what he heard, but whatever it was made him turn and sag against the wall. And that’s when I noticed the blood dripping on his shoes. “Mr. Hall!” I cried, running toward him. My heels slid on the slick tile floor, so I kicked them off. I got to Mr. Hall just as he slumped to the ground. His face was pale, and it looked all weird and waxy, like he was a dummy instead of a person. I could see beads of sweat on his forehead and under his nose. His breath was coming out in short gasps, and there was a dark red stain spreading across his expansive belly. There was no doubt in my mind that he was dying. I knelt down next to him, my blood rushing loudly in my ears. “It’s gonna be okay, Mr. Hall, I’ll go get someone, everything is 1S
gonna be fine.”
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But just as I reached for the dead bolt, he reached out and grabbed my ankle, pulling me down so hard that I landed on my butt with a shriek. Mr. Hall was shaking his head frantically. “Don’t,” he gurgled. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose, like he was trying to calm down. “Don’t,” he said again, and this time, his voice was a little stronger. “Don’t open that door, okay. Just . . . just help me get to my feet.” I looked down at him. Mr. Hall was pretty substantial, and I didn’t think there was any way I was lifting him off that floor. But somehow, by slipping my arms under his and bracing myself against the wall, I got him up and propped against the door of one of the bathroom stalls. Once he was up, I said, “Look, Mr. Hall, I really think I should get help. I don’t even have a cell phone with me, and you”—I looked down at the sticky red circle on his stomach—“you look really hurt, and I think we should call 911, and—” But he wasn’t listening to me. Instead, he opened his shirt. I braced myself for a wound on his stomach, but I wasn’t prepared to see what looked like a bloodstained pillow. With a grunt, Mr. Hall tugged at something on his back, and the pillow slid from his stomach to land soundlessly on the floor. Now I could see the gash, and it was just as bad as I’d thought it would be, but my brain was still reeling from the whole “Mr. Hall isn’t fat, he just wears a fake belly” thing. Why would Mr. Hall pretend to be fat? Was it a disguise? Why would a janitor 1S
need a disguise?
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But before I could ask him any of this, Mr. Hall groaned and slid to the floor again, his eyes fluttering closed. I sank with him, my arm still behind his back. “Mr. Hall!” I cried. When he didn’t respond, I reached out with my free hand and slapped his cheek with enough force to make his head rock to the side. He opened his eyes, but it was like he couldn’t see me. “Mr. Hall, what is going on?” I asked, the acoustics of the bathroom turning my question into an echoing shriek. I was shaking, and suddenly realized how cold I was. I remembered from Anatomy and Physiology that this was what going into shock felt like, and I had to fight against the blackness that was creeping over my eyes. I couldn’t faint. I wouldn’t faint. Mr. Hall turned his head and looked at me, then really looked at me. Blood was still pulsing out of the gash that curved from under his khaki slacks around to his navel, but not as much now. Most of it seemed to be in a big puddle under him. “What . . . what’s . . . your name?” he asked in a series of soft gasps. “Harper,” I answered, tears pooling in my eyes, and bile rushing up my throat. “Harper Price.” He nodded and smiled a little. I’d never really looked at Mr. Hall before. He was younger than I’d thought he was, and his eyes were dark brown. They were beautiful, actually. “Harper Price. You . . . run this place. Kids talk. Protect . . .” Mr. Hall trailed off and his eyes closed. I slapped him again, and his eyes sprang open. He smiled that weird little smile 1S
again.
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“You’re a tough one,” he murmured.
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“Mr. Hall, please,” I said, shifting to get my arm free. “What happened to you? Why can’t we open the door?” “Look after him, okay?” he said, his eyes looking glazed again. “Make sure he’s . . . he’s safe.” “Who?” I asked, but I wasn’t even sure he was actually talking to me. I’ve heard that when people are dying, their brains fire off all sorts of weird things. He could have been talking to his mom, or his wife, if he had one. Suddenly there was a loud rattle at the door. I gave a thin scream, and Mr. Hall grabbed at the stall door like he was trying to pull himself up. “He’s coming,” Mr. Hall gasped. “Who?” I yelled. I felt like I had stepped into a nightmare. Five minutes ago my main concern had been whether Salmon Fantasy would clash with my pink dress. Now I was cradling a dying man on the bathroom floor while some crazy person pounded on the door. Mr. Hall managed to get himself into a sitting position, and for one second, I thought we might actually be okay. Like, maybe the wound that had soaked through that pillow wasn’t so bad. Or maybe this whole thing was an elaborate prank. But Mr. Hall wasn’t going to be okay. There was a white line all around his lips, which were starting to look blue, and his breaths were getting shallower and shorter. He swung his head to look at me, and there was such sadness in his eyes that the tears finally spilled over my cheeks. “I’m so sorry for this, Harper,” he said, his voice the strongest it had
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sounded since he’d run into the bathroom.
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I thought he meant he was sorry for dying and leaving me at the mercy of whatever was on the other side of that door. But then he took a really deep breath, lurched forward, grabbed my face, and covered my lips with his. My hands reached up to pry his fingers from my cheeks, but for a guy who had barely been able to talk a few seconds ago, his grip was surprisingly strong. And it hurt. I was making these muffled shrieks because I was afraid to open my mouth to scream. Then I felt something cold—so cold that it brought even more tears to my eyes—flow into my mouth and down my throat, and I went very still. He wasn’t trying to kiss me; it was like he was blowing something into me, this icy air that made my lungs sting like jogging in January. Tears were streaming down my face, and I let go of his hands, my arms falling to my sides. By now, my chest was burning like I’d been underwater for too long, and that gray fog was hovering around the edge of my vision again. As the gray spread, I thought of my sister, Leigh-Anne, and how hard it was going to be on my parents if I died, too. I don’t know if it was that thought, or the fact that being found dead in the bathroom underneath a janitor was not how I wanted people at the Grove to remember me, but suddenly I felt this surge of strength. The gray disappeared as adrenaline shot through my system, and I wrapped my fingers around Mr. Hall’s 1S
wrists and yanked with everything I had.
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And just like that, he was off me. I took a deep breath. Never had I felt so happy to breathe in slightly stinky bathroom air. For a long time, I just sat there against the stall door, shaking and gasping. I could still hear whatever was on the other side rattling, but it seemed far away for some reason, like it wasn’t even connected to me. I guess it only took about thirty seconds for me to catch my breath, but it felt like forever. I looked down at Mr. Hall. Lying on his back, his eyes staring at nothing, it was pretty clear that he was dead. Just as I was taking that in, the rattling at the door stopped. The burn in my chest had faded to a tingle, and there was this jumping feeling inside my stomach, like I’d swallowed a whole bunch of Pop Rocks. My arms and legs felt heavy, and my head was all spinny. Slowly, I stood up, careful to keep my feet out of the puddle of blood that continued to spread under Mr. Hall. I glanced down at my legs and saw that my panty hose were surprisingly run-free, despite everything that had just happened. What had just happened? I forced myself to look at Mr. Hall again. The gash in his stomach was horrible, and big, and sure, it looked like a wound from some sort of medieval sword or something, but that was impossible, right? He probably just hurt himself on some scary janitor equipment. I mean, the floor waxer didn’t look like it could slice 1S
somebody open, but it’s not like I’d ever inspected it for danger.
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The more I thought about it, the more comforting the idea seemed. It was certainly better than thinking there was a swordwielding maniac on the other side of the door. It had just been a rogue piece of machinery. A blade or a belt or something had snapped and cut Mr. Hall open, and that had been the rattling at the door. He hadn’t had time to unplug it, and it was probably spinning down the hall right now. I’d get out of here, and I’d go find a teacher and tell him or her, and everything would be fine. I looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was almost as white as Mr. Hall’s, making the Salmon Fantasy look cheap and too bright. “It’s going to be fine,” I told my reflection. “Everything is fine.” I walked to the door, and as I did, I had to step over that weird pillow thing Mr. Hall had strapped to his body. Oh, right. That. Why did Mr. Hall have a fake belly? My brain felt like it was in a blender as I tried to think up a plausible explanation, hopefully one that would tie in with my possessed machinery idea. Okay, Mr. Hall was younger than I’d thought. And cuter. Why would he be wearing a disguise? Was he in the witness protection program? A deadbeat dad hiding out from paying child support? And there was something else. Something weird about him. I looked back at his body, bracing myself against throwing up or fainting, but I didn’t feel anything except that tingle in my chest. 1S R
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I crept back to him, still careful about the blood, then I reached down and touched his beard. My dad and granddad both have beards, and neither of theirs felt like this one. Sliding my finger around the edge of his beard, just under his left ear, I saw why. It was a fake. It was a pretty good one, and it was glued on super tight, but it was still a fake. Then I glanced up at his balding head and saw a fine stubble covering the bare half-moon of his scalp. So Mr. Hall hadn’t been fat, or bearded, or balding. “Oh, this is some bullshit,” I whispered. That’s when I knew I was seriously freaked out. I never curse out loud, not even in private. It’s just not ladylike. There was no theory I could come up with to explain any of that, no matter how CSI: Pine Grove I was trying to be. No, the best thing to do was to get the heck out of the bathroom and find a teacher, or a cop, or an exorcist. I’d take anyone at this point. I hurried to the door before realizing I’d left Bee’s lip gloss in the sink. My brain was still scrambled, and despite the dead body at my feet, all I could think was that Bee loved that ugly stuff, and I had to grab it before it was, like, confiscated for evidence or something. So I ran back to the sink. It’s funny to think about now, because even though that lip gloss had gotten me into this whole mess, that same lip gloss totally saved my life. If I hadn’t gone back for it, I would have been at the door when it exploded into two pieces and slammed 1S
into the row of stalls with the force of a small bomb.
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And if that hadn’t flattened me like a pancake, I still would
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have been directly in the path of the man who came running in with a long, curved blade—a scimitar, I was pretty sure I remembered from World History II with Dr. DuPont—held out in front of him. So thanks to Bee’s lip gloss, I was standing frozen by the sink when the sword-wielding maniac came in and my life stopped making even the littlest bit of sense. In all the dust from the door flying off, it took the man a minute to realize I was there. He had his back to me as he knelt by Mr. Hall’s body. I watched, still as a statue, as he reached into Mr. Hall’s pockets, but I guess he didn’t find what he was looking for because he stood up really fast and muttered the F-word. I couldn’t hold it against him, though. This did seem like a dire situation. Then he turned around, and I’m sure the look of total confusion on his face was reflected on mine. “Harper?” “Dr. DuPont?” I didn’t get much time to wonder why my history teacher had just killed a janitor, even though I had this whole joke forming about how Dr. DuPont must really hate when his trash cans aren’t emptied—you know, to make him see me as a person and not just a potential shish kabob. I learned that in the self-defense class Mom and I went to at the church last spring. But that joke dried right up in my mouth, because Dr. DuPont crossed the bathroom in two strides, and put his sword against 1S
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( one)
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The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from
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high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Kather-
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ine, he took a bath. Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general poli-
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cies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be
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done lying down. He climbed into the tub as soon as the water got hot, and
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he sat and watched with a curiously blank look on his face as the water over-
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took him. The water inched up his legs, which were crossed and folded into
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the tub. He did recognize, albeit faintly, that he was too long, and too big, for
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this bathtub—he looked like a mostly grown person playing at being a kid.
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As the water began to splash over his skinny but unmuscled stomach,
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he thought of Archimedes. When Colin was about four, he read a book
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about Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who’d discovered that volume
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ould be measured by water displacement when he sat down in the bathtub.
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and then ran naked through the streets. The book said that many impor-
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tant discoveries contained a “Eureka moment.” And even then, Colin very
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much wanted to have some important discoveries, so he asked his mom
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about it when she got home that evening.
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“Mommy, am I ever going to have a Eureka moment?”
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“Oh, sweetie,” she said, taking his hand. “What’s wrong?”
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Upon making this discovery, Archimedes supposedly shouted “Eureka!”
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“I have found it.”
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An Abundance of Katherines “I wanna have a Eureka moment,” he said, the way another kid might
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have expressed longing for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
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close to his that he could smell coffee and makeup. “Of course, Colin baby.
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Of course you will.”
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She pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and smiled, her face so
But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.
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Colin took a deep breath and slid down, immersing his head. I am crying,
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he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I
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feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it’s impossible to tell because I’m
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underwater. But he wasn’t crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry.
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Too hurt. It felt as if she’d taken the part of him that cried.
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When he exited the bathroom, his parents were sitting together on his bed.
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It was never a good sign when both his parents were in his room at the same
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time. Over the years it had meant:
He opened the drain in the tub, stood up, toweled off, and got dressed.
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1. Your grandmother/grandfather/Aunt-Suzie-whom-you-never-met-buttrust-me-she-was-nice-and-it’s-a-shame is dead.
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2. You’re letting a girl named Katherine distract you from your studies.
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3. Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intrigu-
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ing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes
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people do stuff that involves baby-making parts that does not actu-
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ally involve making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places
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that are not on the face.
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It never meant:
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4. A girl named Katherine called while you were in the bathtub. She’s
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sorry. She still loves you and has made a terrible mistake and is wait-
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5 • • •
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But even so, Colin couldn’t help but hope that his parents were in the room
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to provide news of the Number 4 variety. He was a generally pessimistic
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person, but he seemed to make an exception for Katherines: he always felt
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they would come back to him. The feeling of loving her and being loved
6
by her welled up in him, and he c ould taste the adrenaline in the back of
7
his throat, and maybe it wasn’t over, and maybe he could feel her hand in
8
his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say
9
I‑love-you in the very quick and quiet way that she had always said it. She
10
said I love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.
11
His dad stood up and stepped t oward him. “Katherine called my cell,”
12
he said. “She’s worried about you.” Colin felt his dad’s hand on his shoul-
13
der, and then they both moved forward, and then they were hugging.
14
“We’re very concerned,” his mom said. She was a small woman with
15
curly brown hair that had one single shock of white toward the front. “And
16
stunned,” she added. “What happened?”
17
“I don’t know,” Colin said softly into his dad’s shoulder. “She’s just—
18
she’d had enough of me. She got tired. That’s what she said.” And then his
19
mom got up and there was a lot of hugging, arms everywhere, and his mom
20
was crying. Colin extricated himself from the hugs and sat down on his
21
bed. He felt a tremendous need to get them out of his room immediately,
22
like if they didn’t leave he would blow up. Literally. Guts on the walls; his
23
prodigious brain emptied out onto his bedspread.
24
“Well, at some point we need to sit down and assess your options,” his
25
dad said. His dad was big on assessing. “Not to look for silver linings, but it
26
seems like you’ll now have some free time this summer. A summer class at
27
Northwestern, maybe?”
28
“I really need to be alone, just for today,” Colin answered, trying to
29
convey a sense of calm so that they would leave and he w ouldn’t blow up.
S 30
“So can we assess tomorrow?”
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“Of course, sweetie,” his mom said. “We’ll be here all day. You just
2
come down whenever you want and we love you and you’re so so special,
3
Colin, and you can’t possibly let this girl make you think otherwise because
4
you are the most magnificent, brilliant boy—” And right then, the most
5
special, magnificent, brilliant boy bolted into his bathroom and puked his
6
guts out. An explosion, sort of.
7
“Oh, Colin!” shouted his mom.
8
“I just need to be alone,” Colin insisted from the bathroom. “Please.”
9
When he came out, they were gone.
10
For the next fourteen hours without pausing to eat or drink or throw
11
up again, Colin read and reread his yearbook, which he had received just
12
four days before. Aside from the usual yearbook crap, it contained seventy-
13
two signatures. Twelve were just signatures, fifty-six cited his intelligence,
14
twenty-five said they wished they’d known him better, eleven said it was
15
fun to have him in English class, seven included the words “pupillary
16
sphincter,”2 and a stunning seventeen ended, “Stay Cool!” Colin Singleton
17
could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangla-
18
desh could stay rich. Presumably, those seventeen people were kidding. He
19
mulled this over—and considered how twenty-five of his classmates, some
20
of whom he’d been attending school with for twelve years, could possibly
21
have wanted to “know him better.” As if they hadn’t had a chance.
22
23
XIX’s inscription:
But mostly for those fourteen hours, he read and reread Katherine
24 25
Col,
26
Here’s to all the places we went. And all the places we’ll go. And
27
here’s me, whispering again and again and again and again:
28
iloveyou.
29
yrs forever, K-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e
30 S 31 R
2 More
on that later.
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7 Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he
1
lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed
2
“yrs forever” until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there
3
in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and
4
wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus.
5
Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had
6
was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept
7
thinking about one word—forever—and felt the burning ache just beneath
8
his rib cage.
9
It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he’d ever gotten. And he’d gotten plenty.
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S 30 R 31
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1 2 3 4 5
( two)
6 7 8 9 10 co
It hurt like this until shortly before 10 p . m ., when a rather fat, hirsute
11
guy of Lebanese descent burst into Colin’s room without knocking. Colin
12
turned his head and squinted up at him.
13
“What the hell is this?” asked Hassan, almost shouting.
14
“She dumped me,” answered Colin.
15
“So I heard. Listen, sitzpinkler,3 I’d love to comfort you, but I could put
16
out a house fire with the contents of my bladder right now.” Hassan breezed
17
past the bed and opened the door to the bathroom. “God, Singleton, what’d
18
you eat? It smells like—AHHH! PUKE! PUKE! AIIIIEEE!” And as Hassan
19
screamed, Colin thought, Oh. Right. The toilet. Should have flushed.
20
21
the edge of the bed and softly kicked Colin’s prostrate body. “I had to hold
22
my nose with both fugging hands, so Thunderstick was swinging freely. A
23
mighty pendulum, that fugger.” Colin d idn’t laugh. “God, you must be in
24
some state, because (a) Thunderstick jokes are my best material, and (b)
25
who forgets to flush their own hurl?”
26
27
carpet with no audible emotion.
28
“Forgive me if I missed,” Hassan said upon returning. He sat down on
“I just want to crawl into a hole and die.” Colin spoke into the cream “Oh, boy,” Hassan said, exhaling slowly.
29 30 S 31 R
3 A
German word, slang for “wimp,” that literally means “a man who sits to pee.” Those wacky Germans—they’ve got a word for everything.
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9
“All I ever wanted was for her to love me and to do something meaning-
ful with my life. And look. I mean, look,” he said.
1 2
“I am looking. And I’ll grant you, kafir, that I don’t like what I’m see-
3
ing. Or what I’m smelling, for that matter.” Hassan lay back on the bed and
4
let Colin’s misery hang in the air for a moment.
5
“I’m just—I’m just a failure. What if this is it? What if ten years from
6
now I’m sitting in a fugging cubicle crunching numbers and memorizing
7
baseball statistics so I can kick ass in my fantasy league and I don’t have her
8
and I never do anything significant and I’m just a complete waste?”
9
4
Hassan sat up, his hands on his knees. “See, this is why you need to
10
believe in God. Because I don’t even expect to have a cube, and I’m happier
11
than a pig in a pile of shit.”
12
Colin sighed. Although Hassan himself was not that religious, he often
13
jokingly tried to convert Colin. “Right. Faith in God. That’s a good idea.
14
I’d also like to believe that I could fly into outer space on the fluffy backs of
15
giant penguins and screw Katherine XIX in zero gravity.”
16
“Singleton, you need to believe in God worse than anyone I ever met.”
17
“Well, you need to go to college,” Colin muttered. Hassan groaned. A
18
year ahead of Colin in school, Hassan had “taken a year off” even though
19
he’d been admitted to Loyola University in Chicago. Since he h adn’t en-
20
rolled in classes for the coming fall, it seemed his one year off would soon
21
turn into two.
22
“Don’t make this about me,” Hassan said through a smile. “I’m not the
23
one who’s too fugged up to get off the carpet or flush my own puke, dude.
24
And you know why? I got me some God.”
25
“Stop trying to convert me,” Colin moaned, unamused. Hassan
26
jumped up and straddled Colin on the floor and pinned his arms down
27
and started shouting, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is His
28
29 S 30
4
“Kafir” is a not-nice Arabic word meaning “non-Muslim” that is usually translated as “infidel.”
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Prophet! Say it with me, sitzpinkler! La ilaha illa-llah!”5 Colin started
2
laughing breathlessly beneath Hassan’s weight, and Hassan laughed, too.
3
“I’m trying to save your sorry ass from hell!”
4
“Get off or I’m going there quite soon,” Colin wheezed.
5
Hassan stood up and abruptly moved to serious mode. “So, what’s the
6
problem exactly?”
7
8
God, I’m alone again. And not only that, but I’m a total failure in case
9
you haven’t noticed. I’m washed up, I’m former. Formerly the boyfriend of
10
Katherine XIX. Formerly a prodigy. Formerly full of potential. Currently
11
full of shit.” As Colin had explained to Hassan countless times, there’s a
12
stark difference between the words prodigy and genius.
13
14
out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered.
15
Prodigies learn; geniuses do. The vast majority of child prodigies don’t be-
16
come adult geniuses. Colin was almost certain that he was among that un-
17
fortunate majority.
18
19
the real problem here the genius thing or the Katherine thing?”
20
21
Colin’s mind, the problems were related. The problem was that this most
22
special, magnificent, brilliant boy was—well, not. The Problem itself was
23
that He didn’t matter. Colin Singleton, noted child prodigy, noted veteran
24
of Katherine Conflicts, noted nerd and sitzpinkler, didn’t matter to Kather-
25
ine XIX, and he didn’t matter to the world. All of a sudden, he wasn’t any-
26
one’s boyfriend or anyone’s genius. And that—to use the kind of complex
27
word you’d expect from a prodigy—blew.
28
29
fessed his love, “is nothing. That’s just about wanting to be famous.”
30 S 31 R
“The problem exactly is that she dumped me. That I’m alone. Oh my
Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured
Hassan sat down on the bed and tugged at his stubbly second chin. “Is “I just love her so much,” was Colin’s answer. But the truth was that, in
“Because the genius thing,” Hassan went on as if Colin hasn’t just pro-
5
The Islamic statement of faith, in transliterated Arabic: there is no God but God.
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11
“No, it’s not. I want to matter,” he said.
1
“Right. Like I said, you want fame. Famous is the new popular. And
2
you’re not going to be America’s fugging Next Top Model, that’s for god-
3
damned sure. So you want to be America’s Next Top Genius and now you’re—
4
and don’t take this personally—whining that it hasn’t happened yet.”
5
6
“You’re not helping,” Colin muttered into the carpet. Colin turned his
face to look up at Hassan.
7
“Get up,” Hassan said, reaching a hand down. Colin grabbed it, pulled
8
himself up, and then tried to let go of Hassan’s hand. But Hassan gripped
9
tighter. “Kafir, you have a very complicated problem with a very simple
10
solution.”
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1 2 3 4 5
( t h r ee )
6 7 8 9 10 co
“A road trip,” Colin said. He had an overstuffed duffel bag at his feet
11
and a backpack stretched taut, which contained only books. He and Hassan
12
were sitting on a black leather couch. Colin’s parents sat across from them
13
on an identical couch.
14
15
nome. “To where?” she asked. “And why?”
16
17
coffee table (which you were not allowed to do), “but you’re sort of missing
18
the point. There is no where or why.”
19
20
skrit,” said his dad. “I know how you’ve been wanting to learn Sanskrit.6
21
Will you really be happy just driving around aimlessly? That doesn’t seem
22
like you. Frankly, it seems like quitting.”
23
“Quitting what, Dad?”
24
His dad paused. He always paused after a question, and then when
25
he did speak, it was in complete sentences without ums or likes or uhs—as if
26
he’d memorized his response. “It pains me to say this, Colin, but if you wish
27
to continue to grow intellectually, you need to work harder right now than
28
you ever have before. Otherwise, you risk wasting your potential.”
29
30 S 31 R
Colin’s mother shook her head rhythmically, like a disapproving metro “No offense, Mrs. Singleton,” Hassan said, putting his feet up on the
“Think of all you could do this summer, Colin. You could learn San-
“Technically,” Colin answered, “I think I might have already wasted it.”
Which, pathetically enough, was true. Colin r eally had been wanting to learn Sanskrit. It’s sort of the Mount Everest of dead languages. 6
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13 • • •
1 2
Maybe it was because Colin had never once in his life disappointed his
3
parents: he did not drink or do drugs or smoke cigarettes or wear black
4
eyeliner or stay out late or get bad grades or pierce his tongue or have the
5
words “KATHERINE LUVA 4 LIFE” tattooed across his back. Or maybe
6
they felt guilty, like somehow they’d failed him and brought him to this
7
place. Or maybe they just wanted a few weeks alone to rekindle the ro-
8
mance. But five minutes after acknowledging his wasted potential, Colin
9
Singleton was behind the wheel of his lengthy gray Oldsmobile known as
10
Satan’s Hearse.
11
Inside the car, Hassan said, “Okay, now all we have to do is go to my
12
house, pick up some clothes, and miraculously convince my parents to let
13
me go on a road trip.”
14
15
“You could say you have a summer job. At, like, a camp or something,”
Colin offered.
16
17
“Right, except I’m not going to lie to my mom, because what kind of
bastard lies to his own mother?”
18
“Hmm.”
19
“Well, although, someone else could lie to her. I c ould live with that.”
20
“Fine,” said Colin. Five minutes later, they double-parked on a street in
21
Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood, and jumped out of the car together.
22
Hassan burst into the house with Colin trailing. In the well-appointed liv-
23
ing room, Hassan’s mom sat in an easy chair, sleeping.
24
“Hey, Mama,” said Hassan. “Wake up.” She jolted awake, smiled, and
25
greeted both of the boys in Arabic. Colin answered in Arabic, saying, “My
26
girlfriend dumped me and I’m really depressed, and so Hassan and I are going
27
to go on a, a, uh, vacation where you drive. I don’t know the word in Arabic.”
28
Mrs. Harbish shook her head and pursed her lips. “Don’t I tell you,” she
29
said in accented English, “not to mess with girls? Hassan is a good boy, d oesn’t
S 30
do this ‘dating.’ And look how happy he is. You should learn from him.”
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“That’s what he’s going to teach me on this trip,” Colin said, although
2
nothing could have been further from the truth. Hassan barreled back
3
into the room carrying a half-zipped duffel bag overflowing with clothes.
4
“Ohiboke,7 Mama,” he said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.
5
6
English said, “You’re not going anywhere.”
7
8
up at Mr. Harbish and tried to look as screwed up as he possibly could. “He’s
9
going with or without me, but with me at least I can watch out for him.”
10
“Colin is a good boy,” Mrs. Harbish said to her husband.
11
“I’ll call you every day,” Hassan added. “We won’t even be gone long.
12
Just until he gets better.”
13
14
san a job,” he said to Mr. Harbish. “I think we both need to learn the value
15
of hard work.”
16
17
to learn the value of not watching that awful Judge Judy, for starters. If you
18
call me in a week and have a job, you can stay wherever you want as long as
19
you want, as far as I’m concerned.”
20
21
“Thanks, Dad.” He kissed his mother on both cheeks and hurried out the
22
door.
23
24
“It’s one thing to accuse me of laziness. But to malign the good name of
25
America’s greatest television judge—that’s below the belt.”
Suddenly a pajama-clad Mr. Harbish entered the living room and in “Oh, Dad. We have to. Look at him. He’s all screwed up.” Colin stared
Colin, now completely improvising, had an idea. “I’m going to get Has-
Mr. Harbish grunted in agreement, then turned to Hassan. “You need
Hassan seemed not to notice the insults, only meekly mumbling,
“What a dick,” Hassan said once they were safely inside the Hearse.
26 27
Hassan fell asleep around one in the morning and Colin, half-drunk on
28
well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway
29
at nighttime, drove south on I-65 through Indianapolis. It was a warm night
30 S 31 R
7
Arabic: “I love you.”
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15 for early June, and since the AC in Satan’s Hearse hadn’t worked in this mil-
1
lennium, the windows were cracked open. And the beautiful thing about
2
driving was that it stole just enough of his attention—car parked on the side,
3
maybe a cop, slow to speed limit, time to pass this sixteen-wheeler, turn signal,
4
check rearview, crane neck to check blind spot and yes, okay, left lane—to
5
distract from the gnawing hole in his belly.
6
To keep his mind occupied, he thought of other holes in other stom-
7
achs. He thought of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, assassinated in 1914.
8
As he looked down at the bloody hole in his middle, the Archduke had
9
said, “It is nothing.” He was mistaken. There’s no doubt that the Arch-
10
duke Franz Ferdinand mattered, although he was neither a prodigy nor
11
a genius: his assassination sparked World War I—so his death led to
12
8,528,831 others.
13
Colin missed her. Missing her kept him awake more than the coffee,
14
and when Hassan had asked to drive an hour back, Colin had said no, be-
15
cause the driving kept him going—stay under seventy; God, my heart racing;
16
I hate the taste of coffee; so wired though; okay, and clear of the truck; okay
17
yes; right lane; and now just my own headlights against the darkness. It kept
18
the loneliness of crushlessness from being entirely crushing. Driving was a
19
kind of thinking, the only kind he could then tolerate. But still, the thought
20
lurked out there, just beyond the reach of his headlights: he’d been dumped.
21
By a girl named Katherine. For the nineteenth time.
22 23
When it comes to girls (and in Colin’s case, it so often did), everyone has a
24
type. Colin Singleton’s type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Kather-
25
ines. And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays
26
or Kates or, God forbid, Catherines. K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. He had dated
27
nineteen girls. All of them had been named Katherine. And all of them—
28
every single solitary one—had dumped him.
29
Colin believed that the world contained exactly two kinds of people:
S 30
Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of p eople will claim to be both, but those
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people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the
2
other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may
3
not always be the heartbroken. But e veryone has a tendency.8
4
5
and fall of relationships. Dating, after all, only ends one way: poorly. If you
6
think about it, and Colin often did, all romantic relationships end in either (1)
7
breakup, (2) divorce, or (3) death. But Katherine XIX had been different—or
8
had seemed different, anyway. She had loved him, and he had loved her
9
back, ferociously. And he still did—he found himself working the words
10
through his mind as he drove: I love you, Katherine. The name sounded
11
different in his mouth when spoken to her; it became not the name with
12
which he had been so long obsessed, but a word that described only her,
13
a word that smelled like lilacs, that captured the blue of her eyes and the
14
length of her eyelashes.
15
16
Dumpers and Dumpees and of the Archduke. In the back Hassan grunted
17
and sniffled as if he were dreaming he was a German shepherd, and Colin
18
felt the ceaseless burning in his gut, thinking, This is all so CHILDISH.
19
PATHETIC. YOU’RE EMBARRASSING. GET OVER IT GET OVER IT
20
GET OVER IT. But he did not quite know what “it” was.
Perhaps, then, Colin ought to have grown accustomed to it, to the rise
As the wind rushed in through the cracked windows, Colin thought of
21 22 23 24 25
8 It
might be helpful to think about this graphically. Colin saw the Dumper/Dumpee dichotomy on a bell curve. The majority of p eople are lumped somewhere in the middle; i.e., they’re either slight Dumpees or slight Dumpers. But then you have your Katherines and your Colins: Slight Dumper Slight Dumpee
26 27 28 29 30 S
Katherines Colin
31 R
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17 1
Katherine I: The Beginning (of the Beginning)
2
Colin’s parents never considered him to be anything but normal until one
3
June morning. Twenty-five-month-old Colin sat in a high chair, eating a
4
breakfast of indeterminate vegetative origin while his father read the
5
Chicago Tribune across their small kitchen table. Colin was skinny for his
6
age, but tall, with tight brown curls that erupted from his head with an
7
Einsteinian unpredictability.
8
9
“Three deed on West Side,” Colin said after swallowing a bite. “No
want more greenies,” he added, referring to his food.
10
“What’d ya say, bud?”
11
“Three deed on West Side. I want french fries please thank you.” 9
12
Colin’s dad flipped the paper around and stared at the large headline
13
above the fold on the front page. This was Colin’s first memory: his dad
14
slowly lowering the paper and smiling at him. His dad’s eyes were wide with
15
surprise and pleasure, and his smile was uncontainable. “CINDY! THE
16
BOY IS READING THE PAPER!” he shouted.
17
His parents were the sort of parents who really, really enjoyed reading.
18
His mom taught French at the prestigious and expensive Kalman School
19
downtown, and his dad was a sociology professor at Northwestern Univer-
20
sity, just north of the city. So after three died on the West Side, Colin’s
21
parents began to read with him, everywhere and always—primarily in En
22
glish but also from French-language picture books.
23
Four months later, Colin’s parents sent him to a preschool for gifted
24
children. The preschool said that Colin was too advanced for their school
25
and anyway, they didn’t accept children who weren’t yet fully potty-trained.
26
They sent Colin to a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
27 28 29
9 Like
a smart monkey, Colin possessed an extensive vocabulary, but very little grammar. Also, he d idn’t know “dead” was pronounced ded. Forgive him. He was two.
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And so the periodically incontinent prodigy ended up in a small, win-
2
dowless office on the South Side, talking to a woman with horn-rimmed
3
glasses, who asked Colin to find patterns in strings of letters and numbers.
4
She asked him to flip polygons. She asked him which picture did not fit
5
with the rest of the pictures. She asked him an endless string of wonderful
6
questions, and Colin loved her for it. Up until that time, most of the ques-
7
tions Colin had been asked centered around whether or not he had pissed
8
himself, or whether he c ould please eat one more bite of the miserable
9
greenies.
10
11
your extraordinary patience, Colin. You’re a very special person.”
12
13
somehow—he could never hear it enough.
14
15
the professor told Mrs. Singleton that Colin was brilliant, was a very special
16
boy, Colin played with wooden alphabet blocks. He gave himself a splinter
17
rearranging p-o-t-s into s-t-o-p—the first anagram he remembered making.
18
19
aged but not pushed, and she warned, “You s houldn’t have unreasonable
20
expectations. Children like Colin process information very quickly. They
21
show a remarkable ability to focus on tasks. But he’s no more likely to win a
22
Nobel Prize than any other reasonably intelligent child.”
After an hour of questions, the woman said, “I want to thank you for You’re a very special person. Colin would hear this a lot, and yet— The horn-rimmed-glasses woman brought his mom into the office. As
The professor told Mrs. Singleton that Colin’s gifts must be encour-
23 24
That night at home his father brought him a new book—The Missing Piece
25
by Shel Silverstein. Colin sat down on the couch beside his dad and his
26
small hands flipped through the big pages as he read it quickly, pausing
27
only to ask whether “lookin’” was the same as “looking.” Colin emphatically
28
pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading.
29
“Did you like it?” his dad asked.
30 S
“Yup,” Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of
31 R
reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
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“What was it about?” his dad asked.
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Colin placed the book in his dad’s lap and said, “This circle is missing
2
a piece. The missing piece is shaped like a pizza.”
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“Like a pizza or a pizza slice?” Smiling, his dad placed his big hands on
4
top of Colin’s head.
5
“Right, Daddy. A slice. So the circle goes looking for his piece. He finds
6
a lot of wrong pieces. Then he finds the right piece. But then he leaves it
7
behind. Then it ends.”
8
“Do you sometimes feel like a circle missing a piece?” his dad wondered.
9
“Daddy, I am not a circle. I am a boy.”
10
And his dad’s smile faded just a bit—the prodigy could read, but he
11
could not see. And if only Colin had known that he was missing a piece,
12
that his inability to see himself in the story of a circle was an unfixable prob-
13
lem, he might have known that the rest of the world would catch up with
14
him as time passed. To borrow from another story he memorized but
15
didn’t really get: if only he’d known that the story of the tortoise and the
16
hare is about more than a tortoise and a hare, he might have saved himself
17
considerable trouble.
18
Three years later, he enrolled in first grade—for free, because his mom
19
taught there—at the Kalman School, merely one year younger than most of
20
his classmates. His dad pushed him to study more and harder, but he wasn’t
21
the kind of prodigy who goes to college at eleven. Both Colin’s parents
22
believed in keeping him on a semi-normal educational track for the sake of
23
what they referred to as his “sociological well-being.”
24
But his sociological being was never all that well. Colin d idn’t excel at
25
making friends. He and his classmates just didn’t enjoy similar activities.
26
His favorite thing to do during recess, for instance, was to pretend to be a
27
robot. He’d walk up to Robert Caseman with a knees-locked gait, his arms
28
swinging stiffly. In a monotone voice, Colin would say, “I AM A ROBOT. I
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CAN ANSWER ANY QUESTION. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO
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THE FOURTEENTH PRESIDENT WAS?”
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“Okay,” said Robert. “My question is, Why are you such a tard, Colon
2
Cancer?” Even though Colin’s name was pronounced like call in, Robert
3
Caseman’s favorite game in first grade was calling Colin “Colon Cancer”
4
until Colin cried, which usually didn’t take very long, because Colin was
5
what his mother called “sensitive.” He just wanted to play robot, for God’s
6
sake. Was that so wrong?
7
8
recognizing that words can never hurt, but sticks and stones can sure break
9
bones, they invented the Abdominal Snowman.10 They would order him
10
to lie on the ground (and for some reason he’d agree), and then four guys
11
would take a limb apiece and pull. It was a kind of drawing-and-quartering,
12
but with seven-year-olds tugging it w asn’t fatal, just embarrassing and
13
dumb. It made him feel like no one liked him, which, in fact, no one did.
14
His single consolation was that one day, he would matter. He’d be famous.
15
And none of them ever would. That’s why, his mom said, they made fun
16
of him in the first place. “They’re just jealous,” she said. But Colin knew
17
better. They w eren’t jealous. He just wasn’t likable. Sometimes it’s that
18
simple.
19
20
when, just after the start of third grade, Colin Singleton proved his socio-
21
logical well-being by (briefly) winning the heart of the prettiest eight-year-
22
old girl in all Chicago.
In second grade, Robert Caseman and his ilk matured a bit. Finally
And so both Colin and his parents were utterly pleased and relieved
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 S 31 R
Which, for the record, Colin actually named. The others called it “The Stretch,” but then one time when they were about to do it to him, Colin shouted, “Don’t give me an abdominal snowman!” And the name was so clever that it stuck. 10
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1 2
( fo u r )
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Colin pulled into a rest stop near Paducah, Kentucky, around three in
co 10
the morning, leaned his seat back until it pressed against Hassan’s legs in
11
the backseat, and slept. Some four hours later, he awoke—Hassan was kick-
12
ing him through the seat.
13
“Kafir—I’m paralyzed back here. Lean that shit forward. I gotta pray.”
14
15
He’d been dreaming his memories of Katherine. Colin reached down
and pulled the lever, his seat snapping forward.
16
“Fug,” Hassan said. “Did something die in my throat last night?”
17
“Um, I’m sleeping.”
18
“Because my mouth tastes like an open grave. Did you pack any tooth-
19
paste?”
20
“There’s a word for that, actually. Fetor hepaticus. It happens during
21
late st—”
22
23
“Not interesting,” said Hassan, which is what he said whenever Colin
started going off on a random tangent. “Toothpaste?”
24
answered.11
“Toiletry kit in the duffel in the trunk,” Colin
Hassan slammed the door behind him, then slammed the trunk shut a
26
few moments later, and as Colin wiped the sleep from his eyes, he figured
27
he might as well wake up. While Hassan knelt on the concrete outside,
28
25
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But anyway, it’s called fetor hepaticus, and it’s a symptom of late-stage liver failure. Basically, what happens is that your breath literally smells like a rotting corpse. 11
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facing Mecca, Colin went to the bathroom (there graffiti in the stall read:
2
call dana for blow.
3
cocaine, and then, for the first time since he’d been lying motionless on the
4
carpet of his bedroom, he indulged his greatest passion. He anagrammed:
5
Call Dana for blow; Ballad for a clown).
6
7
table across from Hassan, who seemed to be attacking the table with the
8
pocketknife attached to his key chain.
9
10
his head down.
11
12
here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that
13
god hates fag,
14
lutely ridiculous. So I’m changing it to ‘God Hates Baguettes.’ It’s tough to
15
disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes.”
16
17
“You aime lots of stupid crap.”
18
19
like this: (1) baguettes (2) Katherine XIX (3) the ruby necklace he’d bought
20
her five months and seventeen days before (4) most rubies come from In-
21
dia, which (5) used to be under control of the United Kingdom, of which
22
(6) Winston Churchill was the prime minister, and (7) isn’t it interesting
23
how a lot of good politicians, like Churchill and also Gandhi, were bald
24
while (8) a lot of evil dictators, like Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein,
25
were mustachioed? But (9) Mussolini only wore a mustache sometimes,
26
and (10) lots of good scientists had mustaches, like the Italian Ruggero
27
Oddi, who (11) discovered (and named for himself) the intestinal tract’s
28
sphincter of Oddi, which is just one of several lesser-known sphincters like
29
(12) the pupillary sphincter.
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Colin wondered whether Dana provided fellatio or
He walked out into the warmth of Kentucky and sat down at a picnic
“What are you doing?” Colin folded his arms on the table and then put “Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is abso-
“J’aime les baguettes,” Colin muttered. While Hassan worked to make God hates baguettes, Colin’s mind raced
And speaking of which: when Hassan Harbish showed up at the Kalman
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23 School in tenth grade after a decade of home-schooling, he was plenty
1
smart, albeit not prodigiously so. That fall, he was in Calculus I with Colin,
2
who was a ninth-grader. But they never spoke, because Colin had given up
3
on pursuing friendships with individuals not named Katherine. He hated
4
almost all the students at Kalman, which was just as well, since by and large
5
they hated him back.
6
About two weeks into class, Colin raised his hand and Ms. Sorenstein
7
said, “Yes, Colin?” Colin was holding his hand underneath his glasses,
8
against his left eye, in obvious discomfort.
9
“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
10
“Is it important?”
11
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin, and
12
the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and
13
then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring in the mirror, plucked the
14
eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
15
16
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly
sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
17
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life,
18
and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And
19
you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
20
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
21
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an
22
ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, e verybody’s just wonder-
23
ing how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
24
25
And so they were friends.
26 “I’ve gotta say, I don’t think much of Kentucky,” Hassan said. Colin tilted
27
his head up, resting his chin on his arms. He scanned the rest-stop parking
28
lot for a moment. His missing piece was nowhere to be found.
29
“Everything here reminds me of her, too. We used to talk about going
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to Paris. I mean, I don’t even want to go to Paris, but I just keep imagin-
2
ing how excited she’d be at the Louvre. We’d go to great restaurants and
3
maybe drink red wine. We even looked for hotels on the Web. We could
4
have done that on the KranialKidz money.”12
5
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pickle.”
7
8
And then he looked down at Hassan’s clever handiwork. “Baguettes,” Colin
9
explained.
10
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tossed the keys lazily across the picnic table. Hassan snatched them as he
12
stood, then made his way to Satan’s Hearse. Colin followed, forlorn.
“Dude, if Kentucky is going to remind you of Paris, we’re in a hell of a Colin sat up and looked across the poorly kept lawn of the rest stop.
“Oh, my God. Give me the keys.” Colin reached into his pocket and
13 14
Forty miles down the road, still in Kentucky, Colin had curled up against
15
the passenger window and was starting to fall asleep when Hassan an-
16
nounced, “World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix—Next Exit!”
17
“We’re not stopping to see the World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix.”
18
“We shitsure are,” Hassan said. “It must be huge!”
19
“Hass, why would we stop and see the World’s Largest Wooden Cru
20
cifix?”
21
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wheel to emphasize his excitement. “It’s not like we have somewhere to go.
23
Do you r eally want to die having never seen the World’s Largest Wooden
24
Crucifix?”
25
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off, spending the summer chasing after idiotic roadside attractions is not
27
going to fix anything. Third off, crucifixes remind me of her.”
28
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“Of her.”
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“It’s a road trip! It’s about adventure!” Hassan pounded on the steering
Colin thought it over. “Yes. First off, neither of us is Christian. Second
“Of who?”
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on that later, but basically: about a year before, Colin had come into some cash.
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25 “Kafir, she was an atheist!”
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“Not always,” Colin said softly. “She used to wear one a long time ago.
2
Before we dated.” He stared out the window, pine trees rushing past. His
3
immaculate memory called forth the silver crucifix.
4
5
“Your sitzpinkling disgusts me,” Hassan said, but he gave the Hearse
6
some extra gas and shot past the exit.
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{ } one
we plunged toward the future without a clue. Tonight, we were four sweaty guys heading home from a day spent shooting hoops. Tomorrow, I couldn’t even guess what would happen. All I knew for sure was that our lives were about to change. “Any idea what it’ll be like?” I asked. My mind kept flashing images of cattle. They shuffled up a ramp, unaware that their path led to a slaughterhouse. “A Tomb Raider movie,” Patrick said. “Or Indiana Jones.” “It’ll be the same as always,” Kyle said. “Boring and stupid.” Patrick shook his head. “Nope. Tomb Raider, for sure. We’ll get eaten alive if we aren’t careful, but we’ll be surrounded by amazing stuff.” “Right. Amazing stuff,” Mitch said. He rubbed his hands together as if he were about to dive into a juicy burger. “High school girls. Hundreds of ’em.” “Like we have a chance with them,” Patrick said. “I heard the seniors snag all the hot girls.” “Not when I’m around.” Kyle slicked his hair back with his right hand, then made a fist and flexed his biceps. “Girls melt when I get near them.”
{} 3
“Mostly from the fumes,” Patrick said. “What about the classes?” I asked as Kyle shoved Patrick toward the curb. “Think they’ll be hard?” “Who cares?” Mitch said. “You just have to show up and you’ll pass.” We reached my house. Second from the corner on Willow Street. The guys lived on the other side of the neighborhood. I realized that the next time we saw one another, we’d be freshmen at J. P. Zenger High. Freshmen. Unbelievable. Fresh? Definitely. Men? Not a clue. I turned toward my friends. “Bye,” Patrick said. Mitch grunted a farewell. Kyle’s hand twitched in a lazy wave. I wanted to say something more meaningful than See ya later. There they were, right in front of me—Kyle, who I’d known since kindergarten, Patrick, who I’d met in second grade, and Mitch, who’d moved here in sixth grade. We’d done everything together, all through middle school. The perfect words were so obvious, I couldn’t help smiling as I spoke. “One for all and all for one.” The phrase was greeted with silence. Around us, I could hear the last crickets of summer chirping faintly. The crickets, too, seemed puzzled. “One for all . . .” I said again. Mitch frowned. “One for all what?” “Is that like a Marines slogan?” Kyle asked. “No, I think it’s on coins. It’s that Latin stuff, right?” Patrick said. “It’s E Pluto Pup something or other.”
{} 4
“It’s from The Three Musketeers,” I told them. “It’s a famous book.” Three pairs of eyes stared at me without a glimmer. “There’s a movie, too,” I said. “These guys stuck together no matter what.” Kyle looked around, tapped his thumb against the tip of each of his fingers, then said, “But there are four of us.” “Absolutely. That’s what’s so perfect. There were four Musketeers, too.” “That’s stupid,” Mitch said. “Somebody couldn’t count.” “Well, anyhow, let’s stick together tomorrow,” I said. “You bet,” Patrick said. “For sure,” Mitch said. “One for all and all for me,” Kyle said. He turned to go. “See ya later,” I called as they walked off. Mom and Dad were side by side on the living-room couch. The TV was on, but it didn’t look like they were watching it. They stopped talking when I walked in. “What’s up?” I asked. “Hi, Scott,” Dad said. “You have fun with your friends?” “Yeah.” I noticed his eyes kept shifting from me to Mom. “Is something going on?” “Tomorrow’s the big day,” Mom said. “You must be excited.” Now I got it. They were stressed out from worrying whether they were headed for another disaster, which was one of the milder ways to describe my brother Bobby’s high school experience.
{} 5
“I’m sure I’ll do fine.” I could almost guarantee I wouldn’t skip history seventeen straight days in a row, get nabbed nine times for public displays of affection—with nine different girls—or pull off any of the other stunts that helped end Bobby’s high school experience half a year earlier than planned. “I’m really excited about school.” “Good.” Mom smiled with way more joy than the situation seemed to call for. “Do you want me to make you a lunch? I bought your favorite rolls.” “No.” I tried to hide my shudder as I imagined carrying a paper bag into the cafeteria. “Thanks.” “I think he’d rather buy lunch,” Dad said. I nodded, shot Dad a grateful look, and headed upstairs. I wanted to get my stuff ready, and they probably wanted to talk more about how there was nothing to worry about because I was different from Bobby. Man, was that ever true. Bobby was almost as tall as Dad, good with tools, and strong enough to carry two sacks of concrete at once. Eighty pounds on one shoulder. That sort of load would snap my spine. Girls chased him like he was some kind of movie star. He’d gotten all the good genes. I was a runt who had to think hard to remember which way to turn a wrench. I put my stuff in my backpack. Then I grabbed the books I’d bought last Saturday. Dad and I had gone to the flea market up near Stroudsburg. We go there at least once a month when it’s open. He looks for tools. I look for books. I’d snagged a whole stack of Robert Heinlein novels for two
{} 6
bucks, and a Field Guide to North American Game Fish for fifty cents. Dad had gotten some huge clamps for five bucks. That’s the weird thing about flea markets—books and tools seem to cost about the same amount per pound. I crammed the novels into one of my bookcases, then sat on my bed and leafed through the field guide, looking at the color photos of smallmouth bass and imagining landing a four pounder while wading in the Delaware. Before I went to sleep, I called Bobby at his apartment to see if I could get any advice from him about school. Which I guess was like asking General Custer for combat tips. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t in. That night, I dreamed I was field-testing flamethrowers for the army. In a supermarket. I awoke to the smell of bacon. First day of high school. I couldn’t believe it was finally here. Dad had already left for work. Mom was sitting on a stool by the kitchen counter, reading a magazine. But as my nose had told me, she’d been hard at work creating breakfast. “Good morning,” she said. She slipped the magazine under the newspaper. “Hungry?” “Starved.” Mom always made blueberry pancakes and bacon on the first day of school. As she loaded up my plate with enough protein and carbs to fuel a Mars mission, I glanced at the corner of the magazine where it stuck out from under the paper. Mom didn’t usually hide stuff. It was probably one of those supermarket things, with stories about aliens who
{} 7
looked like Elvis and kids who’d been raised in the desert by giant toads. Mom got herself a plate and joined me as I tried to make a dent in my stack. We didn’t talk much while we ate. She seemed to be a million miles away. “You okay?” I asked. The too-big smile reappeared. “I can still make you a lunch. There’s plenty of time.” “Maybe tomorrow.” I glanced at the clock. “Gotta go.” I grabbed my backpack and headed for the bus stop. I was the first one there. I should have brought a book to help kill the time. But that would immediately mark me as a real geek. Eventually, I heard a noise in the distance. “Hey, Scottie,” Mouth Kandeski shouted when he was still half a block away. “Whatcha think? High school. It’s the big time. We’re in high school. Man, that’s cool. That’s sooooo cool.” He dribbled a trail of words like a leaking milk carton as he closed the distance between us. My best guess is that he can only breathe when he’s talking. “Hi, Mouth,” I said when he reached me. His name’s Louden. Bad move on his parents’ part. He got called Loudmouth the moment he started school. It was shortened to Mouth soon after that. We didn’t hang out or anything, but I guess since I was one of the few kids on the planet who’d never screamed, “Shut up!” at him, he figured I was interested in what he had to say. I was more interested in wondering what would happen to him if I clamped a hand over his mouth. Maybe he’d swell up and explode. Maybe the top of his head
{} 8
would pop off, sending his dorky orange ball cap into orbit where it belonged. Maybe the words would shoot out of his butt with so much force his pants would rip. Left unclamped, Mouth had plenty more to discuss. “I’ll tell you, I can’t wait. This is awesome. I’m kinda nervous. Are you nervous? I mean, I’m not scared, or nothing, but just kinda nervous. You know, nervous isn’t the same as scared. It’s sort of like the buzz you get from lots of coffee. I drank eight cups, once. I started drinking coffee this summer. You drink coffee? It’s not bad if you put in enough sugar.” Past Mouth, I spotted more freshmen. Familiar faces from Tom Paine Middle School, looking like Easter eggs in their new clothes. Then one unfamiliar face. A goddess. An honestto-goodness goddess. At the first sight of her, even from a distance, I felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut with an icicle. I wanted to gather branches and build a shrine, or slay a mastodon and offer her the finest pieces, fresh from the hunt. “Whoa, it’s Julia,” Mouth said, breaking the spell. “Hey, Julia, you look different.” Wow. Mouth was right. It was Julia Baskins. I’d known her most of my life, and I hadn’t recognized her. She was one of those kids who blend into the background. Like me, I guess. Well, the background had lost a blender. She was gorgeous. She’d always kept her dark brown hair in a braid. Now it was cut short and shaggy, with a couple of highlights. She was wearing makeup that did amazing things to her eyes, and a sweater and khakis that did amazing things to the rest of her. She looked taller, too. “You’re wearing contacts, right?” Mouth called to her. “I
{} 9
wanted contacts, but Mom said I had to wait until I got more responsible. Just because I let my braces get gunked up and had all those cavities. And lost my retainer three times. Well, really just twice. The other time, my dog ate it, so that doesn’t count. You have a dog?” Julia shook her head and managed to squeeze in the word “Cat.” “I don’t have a cat. I have an Airedale,” Mouth said. “He’s not purebred, but that’s what we think he mostly is.” He jammed his hand into his jacket pocket, fished around, and pulled out a broken Oreo. “Want a cookie?” “No, thanks.” Julia slipped away from Mouth and joined her friend Kelly Holbrook near the curb. I worked my way closer and tried to think of some excuse to talk to her. I never got the chance.
{ } 1 0
CHAPTER 1
The Krieger Estate
My grandfather liked to say, “The only time you are ever truly alone is when you are dead.” And I thought that was perhaps something to look forward to as I sat among my bags and trunks on the steps outside the front door of the Krieger Estate. That’s what my family’s house is called: “the Krieger Estate.” My grandfather called it that because he wanted to come up with a really good name, something big and meaningful, but he never did and so he ended up picking nothing. I really don’t know how long I was sitting outside. I figured someone would come out to look for me at some point—they should’ve been informed by the school that I was coming home. But it was hours before anyone emerged. It had just begun to get dark when my mother opened the front door. My mother’s name is Viviana Mary Elizabeth July Krieger but people call her “Vivi,” even me and my sister, 1
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Lisbet. I don’t know what it would be like to call her “Mom,” and it would be even stranger to call her “Mommy,” like some weirdos still call their mothers. She has never come out and said that she doesn’t want people to think she’s a mother (because that’s probably not the case), but she certainly doesn’t want people to start mathematically determining her age if they ever realize that she has given birth to a now seventeen-year-old (me) and a now twenty-year-old (Lisbet). Vivi spends four weeks every year going “skiing,” and she returns at least four years younger. If she is not getting plastic surgery, she is surely a vampire. Vivi didn’t come out the door for the purpose of greeting me. She came out to smoke. She didn’t smoke anything fancy or imported. She smoked off-brand menthol cigarettes. They smelled like Tic-Tacs, and her smoking was a secret. So when she saw me, she hugged herself with her arms as if to say that she had come out for a little fresh air and nothing else. She didn’t really look at me. She just nodded at nothing and stared across the driveway. “You’re home from school already, Astrid?” “I’m done. I’ve learned everything,” I said. Vivi frowned. She’d never really found me all that funny. “There’s no point in making up a story. They called us. At least Lisbet will be happy to see you.” “Eh,” I said. “Lisbet is happy about everything.” 2
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This is true. This wasn’t just me being a jerk. Almost everything made Lisbet happy. When I was four and Lisbet was six or seven, our nanny would spend way too many hours at the bus station because Lisbet loved looking at buses. I guess kids are fascinated by all sorts of things, but the buses weren’t even moving. They were just parked. “Look at all those wheels,” she would say. It was this wide-eyed joy about every single thing that had led her to get engaged so young. I have no idea why else she would be in such a rush to get married. A lot of people get married at twenty, but usually not rich people. The house felt cold the second I walked through the doorway. It always did. This was the consequence of houses too large for the amount of people who live there. There would have to be fifty people living in the house for it to feel perfect. “Sam,” Vivi said into an intercom next to the front door. “There are bags on the steps that need to be taken in.” She turned to me. “We have a new Sam. He’s from Sierra Leone.” She was talking about a butler. Apparently there used to be another butler named Sam, and she wanted to make sure I knew there was a difference, I guess in case I started a conversation with Sam about the old times. I didn’t remember another butler named Sam, though. I never spent a lot of time living in the house, and 3
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certainly not long enough to know the name of everyone who ever worked there. I remembered Eda, who was one of my nannies. She was from Turkey and had long black hair and would feed me candy even though Vivi didn’t allow candy in the house. I have no idea what happened to Eda. “We are about to start dinner,” Vivi yelled over her shoulder. “So sit down if you want.” That was how I was welcomed back home. >>>>>>>>>>>>> The Kriegers first came to America in the seventeenth century to seek a new life. Back in Germany a couple members of the royal family had been poisoned, and the Kriegers probably did it, so it was a good idea for the family to vamoose from the old country. America was the land of opportunity, and my ancestors seized it. As some of the earliest settlers, we were part of the very first group of influential and successful people. Back then, we were rich, but soon enough, we were really rich. First we owned plantations. Then gold mines. Then railroads. Then airlines. 4
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Somewhere in there, the family lost all their money and my grandfather grew up poorer than the last ten generations. But he restarted the company to build weapons. Big, destructive, blow-every-single-thing-up weapons. And then the Kriegers became really, really rich. And blah, blah, blah, lots of things happened in between. It’s called history. Go to the library and read a book about it. People lived and they died. For the purposes of this story (because it’s a story about me, Astrid Krieger), all you really need to know about my family is that we have always been what people would like to call “the bad guys.” If you ever hear anyone talk about how “The Man” is responsible for all sorts of evil that happened in this country and the world—well, they’re pretty much describing the Kriegers. There’s a portrait of my whole extended family that hangs over the main fireplace from about four years ago. It’s a huddled mass of grey and blond people with red ties and tight, fake smiles. My little brother, Fritz, is even in the picture, even though he had died several years before the portrait was commissioned. It’s the only proof in the entire house that he even existed. The only real evidence that anything might be wrong with the family is me. In the portrait I am lurking off to the side—one of the few Kriegers with dark hair—and wearing my favorite expression: a half smirk with eyes rolled high. I have no idea why 5
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I ended up that way in the portrait. Yes, that’s the way I looked that day, but it’s a painting. The painter could’ve done anything he wanted with me. I actually love that portrait because even caught on canvas, I look like I don’t belong with those people, and everyone who sees it can tell that I didn’t want to be there. At the center of the painting is my grandfather, Montgomery Krieger, looking serious and clutching an American flag. He is the second-oldest US senator ever. He has pretty much had his hands in everything bad that happened anywhere since World War II. As a result, he learned how to avoid getting caught doing bad things. When I was six years old, he taught me what an alibi was and to always have one handy. “Tell them you were with me,” he would say. “And if I have any problems, I’ll tell them I was with you.” This has helped out plenty for both of us in years since. Grandpa was old and had a woman working for him full time who was responsible for his feeding and hygiene. Sometimes he referred to her as his nurse. Other times, he called her his “girlfriend.” Either way, he would often elbow whoever was sitting next to him and say, “Isn’t she buxom? Like a winding road.” At the dinner table the night I returned, I happened to be the person sitting next to him. 6
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“Yeah, she really puts it all out there, doesn’t she?” I said. He looked up from his soup at me and asked no one in particular, “Has she been home all this time?” “It didn’t work out in the end with Astrid and the Bristol Academy,” my father said. He had a way of putting a simple and bright spin on a situation that wasn’t simple or bright. “They didn’t share my imagination as far as what a proper education should entail,” I said. “They caught her cheating. She stole tests and term papers,” Vivi said. “And didn’t you try to burn down a classroom?” “That’s false,” I said. “Well, more or less. It was just time for me to go. It’s actually a good thing because I really need some time off. You know, to spend a little time with me.” “But that’s great too,” Lisbet said. “You can help with wedding planning. You remember Randy, right?” she asked as she reached her hand over to Randy, apparently her soon-to-be husband. I didn’t remember Randy. I still don’t. “Oh, if I can fit it in. Depends where I go next.” I turned to my father. “Can I go to a school in Switzerland again so I can get my needs more properly addressed?” 7
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That was the scenario that I was most excited about as I’d considered my options while being driven home from Bristol. I felt like I needed an ocean and a few thousand miles of distance from my life of the past few years. Dad made a noise but nothing really came out, and I could feel Vivi staring at him. Unlike all the other Kriegers, my father, Dirk, was never a bad person. He’s the CEO of Krieger Industries, and probably the worst thing you could say about him is that he isn’t actually very smart. He wanted to be CEO of the company so he could play with toy airplanes and rocket ships all day. And that’s pretty much what he does. “You’re going to live at home,” Vivi said. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “How will I be able to live at home and get to my classes all the way in Switzerland?” “I don’t think you understand, Astrid,” Dad said. “I don’t think you understand how far away Switzerland is, Dad.” “What I mean is that you’re going to go to school here.” “I think she knows what you mean, Dirk,” Vivi said. “She’s joking.” Dad nodded, reminding us all that he doesn’t really get jokes unless they involve farting. “We’ve decided that 8
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we’re not going to drop money into your education if you are not going to take it seriously,” Dad said. “Fair enough,” I said. “It’s time I began living a life of leisure anyway. None of us are getting any younger.” I then stared for a little too long at Lisbet. She didn’t notice. “No, we’re going to give you structure.” Dad wrapped his lips around the word like it was a new toy. “You are going to live here, and you’re going to school.” “Come on. Lisbet doesn’t do anything and she lives here.” “I have a job,” Lisbet said. “I’m an actress and a yoga instructor.” “Those are barely jobs,” I said. “Lisbet is also getting married,” Vivi said. “So I need to get married or get a job?” I said. “You are too young to get married,” Dad said. “But you’re also not a little girl. You need to be in school or work.” Vivi had this thing about working and the necessity of doing it even if you don’t need the money. She would always say things about how I don’t have any values because she worked herself through school and all that bootstrap-pulling crap, but she hadn’t worked since before Lisbet was born. True, I’d never had a job, but she hadn’t had a job for way longer. 9
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“But how can I be in school if you’re not going to pay for me to be in school? You’re contradicting yourself.” “We think you should go to the public school,” Dad said. This was just a horrible, mean thing to say. Just hearing the words “public school” out loud made my mouth taste like urine (which, not coincidentally, is exactly how the public school smells). “Are you kidding?” I asked. “No,” Dad said. “I went to public school,” Vivi said. “I think it taught me values that you just can’t learn by having us spend money on you.” She then adjusted the cuff of her blouse, which probably cost four thousand dollars. “The problem is in the name. I mean, ‘public school.’ It’s full of the public. I’m not a fan of the public.” “It’s that or nothing. Think of it as a great adventure,” Dad said. We had reached an impasse. My parents did have some control over where I lived and where I went to school. I’m sure I could have found a way to wrest back that control, but then I wouldn’t get money from them, and I would have to get a job anyway. “Fine,” I said. “But if I go to public school, then I don’t have to live in the house. I can live in the guesthouse.” “Randy and I live in the guesthouse,” Lisbet said. 10
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Because of course they did. How could they possibly live anywhere else on her lucrative actress/yoga instructor salary? I could’ve sworn Randy had a job. What was it? Something with leaves? Did he study leaves? Was that a job? “Fine,” I said. “Then I get to live in the rocket ship.” Five years ago, Dad brought home a prototype of a Krieger Industries rocket ship; rather, a giant truck brought it home. It was full-sized and had all of the buttons and compartments a real rocket ship would have if it were going to space. I suppose it really could go into space with the proper launchpad, fuel, and wiring. Vivi hated everything about it and had the landscapers build a wall of bushes around it so you couldn’t even tell it was there unless you got really close. But that actually made it better—it wasn’t just a rocket ship; it was a secret rocket ship. Dad set up a television and a refrigerator in the cockpit and he could stay in there for hours if he wanted, maybe even days. “Not my rocket ship,” Dad said, actually whining like a child. “Who cares? It doesn’t even work,” Vivi said. Dad took a deep breath. “Fine. It’s a deal. You can live in the rocket ship. But you also have to see a psychologist.” “You think I’m crazy?” I said. 11
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“No. A lot of not-crazy people go to therapy,” Vivi said. Then Dad just stared for a moment as he tried to think of a not-crazy person who was in therapy. “We already found someone to see you,” he told me. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I’d only been expelled from Bristol six hours before. It didn’t seem likely that they’d spoken to a wide array of psychologists during that time. I had a feeling they’d only spoken to one person all day about me, and I didn’t like what that meant. “Dean Rein?” I asked. My father looked at Vivi. He was terrible with names. “He’s the therapist at Bristol, right?” “He’s not a real therapist. He just says that to make himself feel smart or something,” I said. “We hate each other. Hate. He’s my actual, honest-to-god archenemy.” “I think you’re being a little dramatic,” Vivi said. “No I’m not. He’s the one who had me kicked out of Bristol.” “No,” my grandfather said. His attention once again drifted away from his soup. He motioned for the nurse to bring him a cigar and a lighter, which is something I imagine no nurses are actually supposed to do, but she nonetheless had both of those things in her pocket and seemed happy to oblige. I don’t know how long he’d been 12
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listening to the conversation, but he stared at me, then examined his pinky finger, and then turned back to me. Everyone at the table looked at him nervously. “You’re the one who had you kicked out of school,” he finally said. “Things are about to change, huh, Chickadee?” And he was right. Things were about to change. If nothing changed, I wouldn’t be writing this down because this is a book about the time when everything changed. And isn’t that what every book is about? No, seriously, isn’t it? I don’t know. I don’t read books.
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÷÷÷÷
Of course I didn’t like Digby when I first met him. No one does. He’s rude, he doesn’t ever take no for an answer, and he treats you like a book he’s already read and knows the ending to even if you yourself didn’t yet. Now, if you’re a normal sixteen-year-old like I am, and you spend half your time obsessing about the future and what you’re supposed to be and spend the other half reading about makeup, diets, and all the ways to change who you already are, then the stuff he hits you with is hard to take. Like Digby himself said: The truth is almost always disappointing. Not that I need him to tell me about the truth. Or disappointment. In the last six months, I went from living in an almost-good part of Brooklyn to my parents divorcing and Mom and me moving to River Heights, a small city in the armpit of upstate New York. Trust me, it’s an even bigger lifestyle demotion than it sounds like. Here’s my first confession. I hung out with cool people, sure, but looking back, I think maybe we were friends only because we were in the same classes and our parents all got divorced around the same time. Digby calls them circumstantial friends. Right place, right time—it was easy to be friends, and so we were. 5
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My friendship with Digby, on the other hand, while circumstantially convenient—he just shows up, after all—is not easy. Nothing with that guy ever is. At first, I thought I hung out with him because I was bored and wanted to get back at Mom for moving me here. Then I thought it was because he seemed so lost and alone all the time. But now I’m standing outside a house wired with enough explosives to blow up our entire block into a pile of matchsticks, trying to figure out the best way to get back in, and I realize that really, I’m the one who’s been lost. But I’m jumping too far ahead. All this began on the first day of school and we need to go back there for you to understand.
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ONE I’d been telling Mom to change the drained batteries in the doorbell since we moved in. The chimes were out of tune and dinging at half their normal speed. They sounded like a robot dying in slow agony. And now some jackass was ringing it over and over. After five minutes of pretending nobody was home, I thought I was going to snap, so I answered the door. “Nice bell,” he said. He was my age, wearing a black suit that made him look even taller and skinnier than he already was. It was a hot morning and he was sweating into the collar of his white button-down. He held a black book and I would’ve thought he was a Jehovah’s Witness with a Bible, but I doubted they wore sneakers when they came calling. His messy brown hair had probably once been pop-star shaggy, but now it needed cutting. His sad brown eyes turned down at the corners and he had a bored facial expression that I later realized was one of his main weapons in life. 7
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“Sorry, not interested.” Just to be safe, I yelled, “It’s no one, Mom, just some guy selling something.” “Why are you pretending your mom’s home? You’re here alone. You guys drove off together, but you’re back and her car isn’t. I’m guessing she dropped you at school and you walked home,” he said. “Next time, fake sick and save her the gas.” I tried another one. “Dad!” “You only had the one car in the garage—the tires are squishy, by the way—the grass on your lawn that isn’t brown is a foot tall, recycling isn’t sorted, and you know . . . the doorbell,” he said. “There’s no dad in the picture.” I was too shocked to deny it. “What, were you casing the place? Because I gotta tell you, we don’t have anything nice.” The following catalog ran through my head: letter opener in the hall drawer, knives on the kitchen counter, poker by the busted fireplace in the den, and a collection of advice from Sexual Assault Prevention Day, like: “Never let them take you to a second location.” “Casing the place? No. Well . . . technically, I guess I was casing around your house, but not your actual house,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve watched you photograph yourself every morning—” “What?! You’re looking in my window—” “I need to see the photos,” he said. “Although, if you only take them at the same time every day, they probably won’t tell me much because they never do anything interesting in the mornings. Then again, you never know . . .” “I’m calling the police.” 8
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I slammed the door so hard, the doorbell started ringing on its own. “Listen, my name’s Digby. Here’s my e-mail address.” He slid a small piece of paper under the door that said: Digby@ TheRealDigby.com. “E-mail the photos if that’s less freaky for you.” Through the glass panel in the door, I saw him start to knock, so I grabbed the letter opener and flashed it in an I’mgonna-stab-you way. I guess I was convincing, because he said “Whoa” and backed away. When he got to the sidewalk, he looked up to my bedroom window, then stared at the mansion across the street for a long time. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing that happened that day. I’d just started as a junior at River Heights High and didn’t know they phoned parents of absent students after first period bell. They called it the Ferris Bueller Rule. Apparently the school board made the new rule after a girl disappeared during summer vacation. Marina Jane Miller (TV news always used all three of her names) had been kidnapped while friends were sleeping over in her room. They hadn’t heard a thing. The whole of River Heights was freaked, especially the rich people, because Marina Miller was rich. The school called Mom at work and she called me, but when I didn’t pick up, she rushed home only to find me napping. Naturally, she had a mini conniption fit but much worse than that was the fact that cutting school landed me in an early intervention meeting with thirteen other kids who got busted that day. Which is where I saw Digby again. 9
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TWO The truancy officer was a hard-ass named Musgrave. He was the kind of man about whom Mom would say, “Poor thing wasn’t held enough as a baby.” He sat us in a circle and slowly walked around outside it. When I was first summoned to the meeting, I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, but Musgrave’s black uniform and shiny badge were intimidating. Meanwhile, our guidance counselor, who introduced himself as “please-call-me-Steve,” stood in the middle of the circle handing out chocolate chip cookies he’d baked for us. He’d also made hello, my name is
stickers. Mine had zoe webster in swirly red
ink like all the girls’. The boys’ were done in blue. Musgrave scowled when Please-Call-Me-Steve offered him a cookie. Funnily, the two of them looked evil-twin/good-twin alike. Both were short, dumpy men with bad haircuts and red splotchy faces, but where Steve’s was red with sunburn from riding his bike to work, Musgrave’s was red from, I’d guess, drinking and rage. 10
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Musgrave was halfway through his threats about unexcused absences and summer school when Digby arrived. It had taken Musgrave twenty minutes to wind up to this climax, so he was totally derailed when Digby sauntered in. “You must think you’re a funny guy, almost missing a disciplinary meeting on truancy,” Musgrave said. “Grab your name tag and get your butt over here.” Digby had to write his own tag, which he did in swirly red letters. Then he sighed and dragged a chair to the circle. The metal legs screamed the entire way. The other truants clapped and laughed. To my horror, Digby parked himself next to me and greeted me like we’d planned to sit together. I tried to look saintly and refused to acknowledge Digby’s muttered asides. He stage-whispered things like, “It’s nine a.m.—he smells like jerky. Discuss,” and, “Do you think it’s fun to stay at the YMCA in that outfit?” I sat, frozen, but Musgrave threw me the same evil stare he pointed at Digby. As far as he was concerned, we were in it together. Finally, after repeating the policy on truancy and summer school twice more, Musgrave ended the meeting. “Okay, everybody,” Please-Call-Me-Steve said. “Please come and leave your information on the sign-up sheet here. Make sure you take a look . . . and help yourself to some snacks. Give pepitas a chance!” Meanwhile, Musgrave cornered Digby and me. “How’s it going, Harlan?” Digby said to him. “Welcome back to River Heights, Mr. Digby,” Musgrave said. “I haven’t gotten your file from your school in Texas. 11
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Did they teach you manners there or are you and I gonna have problems?” “Harlan and I go way back . . . before his demotion, when he was an actual police officer,” Digby said. “Guess that answers my question about manners,” Musgrave said. “Don’t be sad, Harlan. You should learn to see the positive in this new job . . . after all, I believe children are our future,” Digby said. “You will call me Mr. Musgrave,” he said. “And you, Zoe Webster, your fancy Manhattan psychiatrist called.” Everyone in the room was listening. Musgrave checked his clipboard. “Didaskaleinophobia? That’s a mouthful. Fancy way of saying you don’t like school. That’s a thing now? When did that become a valid excuse?” “That’s confidential student information,” Digby said. “Excuse me?” Musgrave said. “I’m pretty sure if she told her parents you read all that to her classmates, they’d call their ‘fancy Manhattan’ lawyer and sue you and the school board for violating her privacy,” Digby said. “Still a troublemaker,” Musgrave said. “I remember you were fractious and disruptive to our investigation. Nothing’s changed, I see.” “And might that be more confidential student information you’re revealing?” Digby said. Musgrave’s left eye twitched but, thank God, Please-CallMe-Steve called him to the other end of the room. 12
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“What are you doing?” I smacked Digby’s arm. “You wanted him to announce your private business to the whole room?” Digby said. “Stop helping and get away from me, please—I don’t want him to think we’re friends.” “Don’t knock it. Spend some time in River Heights and you’ll know it ain’t easy making friends around here.” “I’m serious. I can’t get in trouble. I need a clean transcript or I’ll never get out of here.” “Which makes your decision to skip school super-interesting,” Digby said. “Are you transferring out of this fine establishment?” “Hope to.” “To where?” “A school in New York. The Prentiss Academy.” “Sounds uptight.” “It’s a feeder school for Princeton.” “Princeton? You wanna go there?” He was laughing at me. “Not that I have to explain myself to you, but I have the grades.” “Your answer to having school phobia is applying to a really hard school so you can get into a really, really hard college?” “I’m not phobic anymore.” “Were you ever really?” Digby took a bite of cookie. “Hey, these cookies are good.” “Yeah, the guidance counselor made them.” “Wait. He said he physically made them?” “Yeah . . .” 13
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Digby rifled through the tray of cookies. A few of the kids standing near us groaned in disgust. “You’re touching all the cookies. That’s gross,” I said. Across the room, Steve and Musgrave argued loudly. “Wanna get out of morning classes this semester?” Digby said. “How?” “Think fast—Steve’s losing against Musgrave—are you in? Now or never, Princeton.” I meant to say no, but as I later found out, something about Digby makes me do the exact opposite of what I know is the right thing. Over and over again. “I guess . . . I’m in?” Digby ran over and inserted himself into their argument. “Steve, I gotta talk to you about our independent project,” Digby said. Steve looked blank but played along. “Oh?” “What independent project?” Musgrave said. “Our approval form’s right here,” Digby said. “It’s new,” Steve said. “Students work on projects off campus to pursue interests the curriculum doesn’t address.” “They don’t come to school?” Musgrave said. “They meet with a faculty advisor, but they work on it outside the classroom. They come to school for the rest of their credits,” Steve said. “That’s ridiculous! That’s kids schooling themselves. Blue state liberal garbage . . . what’s this project anyway?” Digby used his extra-bored expression. “We’re calling it ‘Convicted in Absence.’ We’re looking at whether skipping 14
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class leads to criminal behavior, or whether being punished like a criminal for skipping class actually causes the criminal behavior. Bet it’s the second one.” It came out fast and shiny, like he’d spent time polishing up his spiel. “We’re talking about securitization . . . schools as an extension of the police state. ‘Convicted in Absence.’ Good title, right?” “This crap is destroying this country,” Musgrave said. That sealed it. Anything to annoy Musgrave. Steve signed the form. ÷÷÷÷ I caught up with Digby in the hall. “What just happened? How’d you do that?” I said. “Manhattan psychiatrist, but downgraded to a falling-down house in a B-grade suburb? Your parents are divorced. C’mon, you never use divide and conquer? It’s a divorce-kid classic.” Digby looked at me hard. “Although . . . no makeup, no piercings, loose jeans.” He looked at my butt a little too hard for my taste. “I don’t see a whale tail . . . good girl who doesn’t play that game? Yeah . . . that’s you. The girl in the music video before the makeover.” “Half the school’s got divorced parents. You had a fifty-fifty chance,” I said. “What was with the cookies?” “When Mommy, or Steve in this case, lies about storebought cookies being homemade, it means the battle for the kids’ affection is not going well for her. I gave Steve a way to win the battle,” he said. “How’d you know these weren’t homemade?” “Unless they’re OCD, people don’t use cookie cutters on 15
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chocolate chip cookies. Perfect circles.” He held up cookies he’d swiped. All unnaturally round. “Plus, they’re warm, so the guy microwaved them, meaning he really cares.” “Great, Professor Pillsbury. But now we have to actually write this.” “Read the room. Steve will give us a good grade no matter what we turn in just to freak out Musgrave,” he said. “What’s with you, anyway?” “What’s with me?” “The psychiatrist. Bipolar? Plain vanilla depression? Rainbow sprinkles of phobias and anxieties? What’s your deal?” “That’s personal.” “Is it like you can’t get out of bed because you feel like someone’s sitting on your chest, but who cares anyway because what’s the point?” he said. “Or like you can’t be around people because you feel like everyone knows?” “Fine. I skipped class a bunch when my parents were divorcing, but Dad said it’d look bad on my transcript, so he called his psychiatrist friend and . . . I’m a fake, okay?” “Just because your psychiatrist’s note’s fake, it doesn’t mean you’re not really depressed.” I hadn’t considered that. “But hey,” Digby continued, “your dad’s got a medical professional who’s willing to falsify medical records for you, huh? That’s pretty handy.” He pointed at my earrings, a pair of big diamond studs. I’d wondered if I shouldn’t wear them to school, but when he gave them to me, Dad had insisted that I never take them off. “Is that part of the official uniform of 16
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Team Dad?” When I winced, he said, “Just kidding. They’re beautiful, Princeton.” Digby turned and walked away. “Hey, wait! Now what?” I said. “I’m gonna check out the cafeteria,” he said. “Zoe Webster, right? You have a school e-mail? I’ll e-mail you.” Then I didn’t see or hear from him for weeks.
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11
In the beginning, I had a mother, a father, a sister, and two real friends. My friends’ names were Neil and Dusk. (Her real name is actually Dawn, but she prefers Dusk for reasons having to do with her essential nature and temperament, which is less morning, more evening.) Together, my friends and I formed the Truth Commission. We went on a search for truth and, to our surprise and my chagrin, we found it. When all this started, the three of us had modest ambitions. We didn’t set out to change lives. You will have noticed that there is no “reconciliation” in our title, as with other, more famous and important, truth commissions.12
11. I wasn’t sure whether this should be called a prologue or a preface. As far as I can tell, a preface is more common in nonfiction. Feel free to advise. Would it sound like sucking up to say that I’m really enjoying this creative writing project so far? 12. F or the gentle reader who has no knowledge of the subject, a truth commission (also known as a truth and reconciliation commission) is established to help a country’s citizens find out the truth about abuses of human rights (such as genocide and torture and false imprisonment)
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10 Susan Juby
By the time you finish this story, you will agree that adding a bit of reconciliation to truth-seeking endeavors is a smart move. Neglecting it was an oversight on our part. A bad one. As you know, there are several classes of truth. There are the truths that pour out on confessional blogs and YouTube channels. There are the supposed truths exposed in gossip magazines and on reality television, which everyone knows are just lies in truth clothing. Then there are the truths that show themselves only under ideal circumstances: like when you are talking deep into the night with a friend and you tell each other things you would never say if your defenses weren’t broken down by salty snacks, sugary beverages, darkness, and a flood of words. There are the truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it’s like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart. Truths like those are rare and getting rarer. But there are other truths lying around, half exposed in the street, like drunken cheerleaders trying to speak. For some reason, hardly anyone leans
and make recommendations—that’s the “reconciliation”—about how to go forward. Think apartheid. Think Canadian residential schools for First Nations peoples. Dusk, Neil, and I were working on a completely different scale, obviously, but we didn’t give much thought to reconciling ourselves or anyone else to the truths we found. Why is this a problem? Consider, if you will, the Oxford Dictionary definition of reconciliation: 1. The restoration of friendly relations; 2. The action of making one view or belief compatible with another. I think we can agree that we may have screwed up by leaving that part out.
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The Truth Commission   11
down to listen to them. Well, Neil, Dusk, and I did. And it turns out those drunken cheerleaders had some shocking things to say. This is a story about easy truths, hard truths, and those things best left unsaid.
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Tuesday, September 4
A Vest-Induced Optical Illusion
On the first day of grade eleven, Neil, Dusk, and I were sitting on the benches outside our fair institution of moderate learning, the Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design13 pretending to smoke candy cigarettes and comparing our running shoes. We have this hobby where we try to see how long our shoes can hold out. In a culture that places undue emphasis on new footwear, we are passive resistors. Dusk has been wearing the hell out of her grandfather’s New Balance (size 9, extra wide) for two years. They are disgusting, and Neil and I are envious and wish our grandfathers were still alive so they could give us some old man shoes. Neil whispered, “Sweet Mother Mary.” “I know. I wore them all summer. I even swam in them. I think they actually rotted onto my feet. Practically had to have surgery to get them off,” said Dusk, proudly lifting a wretched shoe the shade and texture of a badly used oyster. Dusk is one of the few people on the planet who can get away with disgusting shoes, because she’s chronically attractive. When she has a blemish and hasn’t brushed her
13. Serving oddballs in grades ten through twelve since 2007.
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hair or teeth, she’s a fifteen out of ten. On a good day, she’s up in the twenties, looks-wise. “Shhh,” said Neil. “Look.” He sounded like a bird-watcher who’d just spotted a blue-gray gnatcatcher. Gorgeous women are Neil’s subjects, which makes him sound pervy. He’s not. He’s just very interested. In his drawings and paintings, he seems to be trying to get to the heart of what draws everyone’s eye to one woman and not to another. Most of his paintings show a lone beautiful female avoiding the gaze of a crowd. Sometimes she’s slipping off the edge of the canvas. Sometimes she’s staring, exasperated, into the middle distance, as everything else in the picture seems to lean in toward her. Last summer Neil started a series of paintings of Dusk. He took Polaroids of her in various situations and then created his peculiar, uncomfortable scenarios around her. Dusk is perfect for Neil’s paintings because few people can muster such sour facial expressions while remaining devastatingly attractive. Dusk is Neil’s muse. Our instructors all think Neil has an extremely mature perspective and an “uncommonly sympathetic eye.”14 Here’s something else I can tell you about Neil: he has an adorably seedy vibe, thanks to his habit of dressing like characters from some of the grittier movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and thanks to his father, who leads a life of near-total leisure. For our first day of school Neil had on a too-large, formerly white, large-collared dress shirt over a V-necked T-shirt and brown polyester dress pants. This
14. A direct quote from Ms. Dubinsky, who teaches Women and Art: A Wild History at G. P. Academy.
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outfit was an homage to Al Pacino’s character in Dog Day Afternoon, which, according to Neil, is about an incompetent bank robber with a lot of secrets. Of course, no one picks up on the reference. They just think Neil is a super-bad dresser. Which is great. Dusk and I followed his gaze past our candy cigarettes and spotted Aimee Danes, who’d just gotten out of her claret-colored BMW. As we watched, Aimee stretched her nose up to catch passing scents and held out her arms to draw the sun’s rays to her chest. But what a nose! And what a chest! Aimee had had some renovations done over the summer. At the close of grade ten, just three months before, Aimee Danes had an insistent nose. Long and gracefully curved, it was a nose that was sure of itself and its opinions. It was a bit Meryl Streep-ish, and I was a great admirer of its confidence. Her chest never registered with me, which means that it probably wasn’t as impressive as her nose, but neither was it nonexistent, because I probably would have noticed that because I am relatively observant. Dusk, for example, is not well endowed. Neil says Dusk has a “runway bust.” She replies that it better run on back before she reports it to the authorities. Anyway, back to Aimee and the alterations. Here it was, the first day of grade eleven, and she showed up sporting a shrunken nose and a rampart of a bosom tucked into a white leather vest. You think I kid about the vest. I do not. It appeared soft and made of the rarest hide. Baby unicorn, maybe. The vest contrasted strangely with the new nose, which appeared to be huddling on Aimee’s face, hoping not to be noticed. It was not a nose that would put up its hand and
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venture a guess. It was not a nose that belonged anywhere near a unicorn-hide vest. You have to understand that G. P. Academy is not the sort of school where one expects to see plastic surgery. Maybe some of the students who are into the new primitivism have had radical and wince-inducing body modifications like forehead studs or whatever. But no one gets cosmetic procedures. We’re about self-expression here, but not that kind of self-expression. “Last year all she got was that car,” said Dusk as we watched Aimee continue to sniff the air with her tiny nose and expose the Mariana Trench of her cleavage to the warming rays. “Is all that new?” I whispered, making a windshield wiper gesture with my hand and wondering, as always, if I was seeing the situation clearly. “Nose or chest?” asked Neil. “Both, I guess. I mean, I can tell the nose is new. That’s too bad. I loved her old nose.” “The girls,” said Neil, making a vague double-handful gesture, “are definitely new.” “Maybe they just look really big because the nose is so small,” I suggested. “And because that vest is so . . . white.” “So you’re saying it could be a vest-induced optical illusion?” asked Dusk. “Maybe. We shouldn’t assume.” “I’m pretty sure those kinds of changes are meant to be noticed,” said Neil. “They are part of Aimee’s selfpresentation. My guess is that she’d be devastated if no one noticed. It’s like if you spent two days Photoshopping your
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Facebook profile picture and no liked it or commented on how good you look.” “So we’re supposed to notice but not ask?” said Dusk. By this time Aimee had begun a series of attentiongetting stretches. She looked as though she’d been gardening or bricklaying for eight hard hours and had a crick in her spine. A lot of her posturing seemed directed at us. Which made sense, because we were the only people around. We had arrived thirty minutes early because we came in my truck, which has a tendency to flood and stall, so we build extra time into every trip. “We should say something,” Dusk whispered. “Like what?” I asked. “Tell her she looks nice. She’s probably nervous. She’s made all these changes and we’re the first ones on-site for inspection.” “It’s not an inspection,” I said. “It’s school.” “Same thing,” said Dusk. “We need to be more specific,” said Neil, ignoring me. “We should tell her we think the work is excellent. Topnotch and first-rate. Madonna-caliber work.” “People don’t want their fakery exposed,” I said. “I think a lot of the time, they do,” said Neil. “We live in an age of unparalleled falseness,” said Dusk. Her voice had taken on that rebar quality it gets when she’s about to take a stand on some issue. “And I for one have had enough. I’m going to say something.” She stood, and her rotted shoes made a squelching sound. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said.
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Dusk repositioned the candy cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Dusk, you’re the wrong person for the job,” I whispered. “You’re too perfect.” My gaze slid over to Neil. “Are you suggesting that I’m less than a total Adonis?” said Neil. Then he laughed softly to himself. Neil has longish hair that he slicks back with just a hint too much product. He’d unbuttoned his dress shirt, and the T-shirt was cut low so it showed just a touch too much chest. There are days when Neil wears a silk scarf. Neil kills me, but in a good way. He acts like he has Teflon self-esteem, even though he’s one of the most sensitive people I know. His father is a local developer with a shady reputation and a relaxed approach to everything, including parenting his only child. The first time Dusk and I went over to his house, right after he moved to town last September, Neil greeted us at the front door in a white terry après-swim robe. He’d laid out a tray of pickled onions and pimento-stuffed olives skewered with toothpicks. He asked if we’d like gin and tonics. We said we were driving our bikes, so he gave us cucumber water instead. Neil, Dusk, and I have been inseparable ever since. It’s only been a year, but it feels comfortingly like forever. Anyway, back to that first truth telling. “There are dynamics to consider here,” I said. That was my role in our little threesome. Dynamics considerer. Consequence worrier. Diplomat. Dusk was in charge of our moral compass, passing snap judgments, peer pressuring, and making bold pronouncements. Neil dealt in unconditional acceptance and appreciation of everyone, as well as unpredictable areas of expertise and jokes, mostly aimed at himself.
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“Fine,” said Neil, completely unflustered. “I’ll do it.” By this point, I was no longer certain what we were doing or why, but Aimee was preening so hard that I was concerned she’d damage the vest that a unicorn baby had probably died for. “Go!” whispered Dusk. And so Neil got up, adjusted the enormous collar of his dress shirt, and shoved his entire candy cigarette into his mouth. We watched him stride over to Aimee. When he spoke, he was too far away for us to hear what he said. Aimee’s head reared back. Her posture stiffened. More words from Neil, whose hands were shoved deep in the pockets of his polyester pants. His tan was terrific, because this summer, in addition to painting a series of pictures featuring Dusk, he’d decided to revive what he called the “lost art of sunbathing.” He’s also working on what he calls a “disturbing hint of a mustache.” Disturbing on anyone else. Endearing on him. As we watched, Aimee’s shoulders relaxed. She leaned toward Neil. Touched his shoulder. She laughed and started to talk. Words, indistinguishable words, poured out of her. At the end of the conversation, she put her hand on his shoulder again and she kissed him. I swear it’s true. Neil had confronted a girl about her new rhinoplasty and freshly installed breast implants and in return he received a kiss on the cheek. He sauntered back, reverentially holding a hand to the cheek Aimee had kissed. “She had the procedures done in July because it’s her dream to become a broadcast journalist on a major network. She’s always wanted a nose job, even though her mother
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told her that a nose job ruined someone named Jennifer Grey’s career. It took some doing for her parents to agree to the implants because there was concern her chest was still growing but she talked them into it and she feels terrific and is glad we live in a time when God’s mistakes can be fixed.” “You’re a one-man truth commission,” said Dusk, admiring. “The truth shall set us free,” said Neil. “Will it?” I asked. But no one was listening. “My refreshing directness startled her at first. But it also allowed her to talk about the most important news in her life right now. We’re going for coffee later and she’s going to give me more details.” Neil was immensely pleased with himself. “Aimee and I are now on a different plane, relationship-wise.” “You have no secrets between you,” I said, ignoring the twinge of jealousy I felt; Aimee would probably end up being his next muse. Not that I’m keen to be featured in anyone’s art. I’ve had more than enough of that. “I want to ask someone the truth,” said Dusk. “I think truth is what has been missing in my life. Well, it’s one of the things that has been missing, along with a sense of purpose and positive self-esteem.” Neil faced us. “I believe this could be our new spiritual practice,” he said. “Each week, each of us will ask someone else the truth.” “It is our destiny to bring some much-needed truth into this world of lies,” said Dusk. And so the Truth Commission was born.
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A Word About My Sister
I’m not that keen to get into it, but this story would be incomplete without one major piece of background. As many people already know, I have a sister. She’s a famous graphic novelist and, to make a long story extremely short, she made me and my parents famous without our permission. The end. Ha. Just kidding. My sister, Keira Pale, is one of those people who seems 15
15. M s. Fowler, I just got your feedback on my first submission. The timing couldn’t be better! You suggested I stop beating around the bush about my personal history and lo! This submission just happens to be about my personal history, specifically as it pertains to my sister. It’s like we’re reading each other’s minds! Also you are probably drawing some conclusions about me, Dusk, and Neil, conclusions that may be shared by other readers. After all, in addition to your extensive collection of “how to write and feel good about it” books by Anne Lamott and Co., you are a highly trained guidance professional with your own copy of the DSM-V. You have probably diagnosed Dusk as an angry depressive, me as a neurotic, and Neil as a young man overcompensating for self-esteem issues with excessive focus on hot girls, sun tanning, early 1970s films and fashion, and poor boundaries. You wouldn’t be wrong. But there’s more to us than that, as I think this story will prove. Anyway, carry on! (Aren’t you glad you’re only a part-time guidance counselor? Could you imagine listening to stuff like this full-time?)
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to exist on a different plane. Maybe it’s an artistic genius thing. G. P. Academy is full of people like Keira. People who go so deep inside themselves, especially when they’re working, that they seem like sleepwalkers when they emerge. Traces of unconsciousness seem to cling to them, lending them an otherworldly sheen. I can’t tell you how many times I was sent to find Keira when it was time to eat/go to bed/graduate from high school only to find her deep in conversation with the neighborhood can collector, or out in the backyard staring intently at the moon at 3:30 in the morning, or watching some drama unfold between warring ants in the school parking lot twenty minutes after the bell rang. I believe the technical term is “space cadet.” But she is the kind of space cadet many people aspire to be. My sister is fully alive to each moment and each observation. When I was younger, living with Keira was like living with a fairy. It was never her intention to be hurtful or destructive. She was just doing what came naturally to her. Telling stories and turning the lives around her into fantastical creations. It wasn’t personal. Or so I kept telling myself, even after my sister started publishing her books. Backstory Alert!16 My sister’s complicated, so I think the only way to help you understand her is through what we learned in class is
16. A ccording to what we learned in class, backstory, flashbacks, digressions, and on-the-page musing are all welcome in creative nonfiction. I plan to take full advantage of that fact.
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called an infodump. Dear Reader: steel yourself for a taste of death by exposition.17 My sister was part of the first group of kids who went through the Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design. As a tenth grader, she’d already begun to write, illustrate, and self-publish installments of her graphic novel series, the Diana Chronicles. The first volume is called Diana: Queen of Two Worlds. Diana, the protagonist, is a suburban girl who lives with her “painfully average” family, which includes her high-strung, easily overwhelmed mother, her ineffectual father, and her dull-witted, staring lump of a sister. Diana, who looks a lot like my sister, also happens to be the queen of Vermeer, a more beautiful or at least more melodramatic alternate universe named after my sister’s favorite painter. Vermeer can only be accessed through a closet.18 In Vermeer, everything is the same as on Earth but amplified a hundredfold. In Vermeer, Diana’s mother is politically and emotionally manipulative and Game of Thrones all over the place to keep the family in power. Diana’s father is still unaccomplished, but he’s also unscrupulous and has a passion for exotic foodstuffs and inappropriate relationships with half the household staff (male and female), as well as
17. I f you don’t know what exposition is, you have not been paying attention in your creative writing class! If you have been away due to a legitimate case of mono or mumps, exposition gives important background information about characters and setting and what happened before the story starts. Exposition can be useful. It can also stall a story deader than my truck on a hill. 18. Yes, the connection to the Chronicles of Narnia is intentional.
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several of his first cousins. In Vermeer, as on Earth, Diana is burdened with a flaccid and enormous blob of a sister who is the target of every villain who passes through town. The sister (Flanders) is the especial favorite of cads and rakes who want to align themselves with the House of Vermeer. In Vermeer, Diana has to keep her family from imploding due to their own stupidity, avarice, and laziness. It’s a matter of multiverse importance. If the House of Vermeer falls, Vermeer will descend into war (always likely). Vermeer is Earth’s twin, which means that as Vermeer goes, so does the Earth. Or something. I’ve always gotten a little tripped up on that part of the story. The Diana Chronicles are funny and complicated and ironic. Diana’s a bit of a bitch in both universes. She’s rude to her family and half checked out, partly because she’s so exhausted by the demands placed on her in Vermeer, where she spends half her time. She needs to be left alone to recuperate when she’s in the Earth realm, but her mundane Earth family keeps interrupting. They sense her specialness and want a part of it. The first chapters of the Diana Chronicles were photocopied and sold online and stocked in a few specialty stores. It gained an instant and devoted following. The combination of extremely personal stuff about Diana’s life on Earth and the over-the-top violence and politicking in Vermeer made it hugely compelling to a lot of people. Her agent, Sylvia Kalfas, discovered her and got her a book deal with Viceroy, who put the chapters together into Volume 1. The money from that first book deal, which was serious, went into a trust administered by Sylvia and my parents until Keira turned twenty. The Los Angeles Times called the first
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Chronicle “groundbreaking and hilarious.” The Globe and Mail said the “combination of autobiography and fantasy make it an intoxicating entertainment.” The Guardian said it was “wildly inventive.” Readers couldn’t get enough. People mentioned Maus, which is what people always talk about when they talk about massively popular graphic novels. (The Chronicles have less than nothing to do with Maus. Just to be clear.) Keira had published three Chronicles by the time she left for college, which was the same year I entered Green Pastures. Each new Chronicle was more popular than the last. This is probably the time to bring up the fact that Diana’s family members look a lot like me and my mother and father. They are exaggerated versions, but identifiable. Of all of us, I’m the most deformed. The sister character is called Flanders (in a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that I was named after a famous World War battleground), and nicknamed the Flounder because she looks sort of like an obese, blank-faced flounder fish. I was a chubby kid, but I’ve lost most of my baby fat. I am not enormous and I am not dull-witted, not unless I’m really tired. In other words, we are ordinary people who have been made to look extraordinary, and not in a good way. You cannot imagine how embarrassing it is to be in those books, especially when all the Earth plotlines are taken from minor and usually un-excellent incidents in our real life. The plots hit Vermeer and go so over the top, it’s almost impossible to remember where they started. Man, this chapter is getting long. And exhausting. Possibly also boring. But I’m not quite done. Further background fact: I have never before spoken
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to anyone outside my family about how I feel about our depiction in my sister’s books. To be honest, we’ve never really discussed it inside my family, either. Breaking that long-standing silence is really taking it out of me. My parents have always treated Keira like a rare and delicate houseplant they aren’t quite sure how to care for. There’s a good reason for that. She’s like a rare and delicate houseplant they aren’t sure how to care for. End of backstory! Finally! xxxxx At the time I’m writing about, things had gotten strange at home. Strange is the wrong word. Bad. That’s better. After she graduated from Green Pastures, Keira took a year and a half off to write and draw the third Chronicle and bask in her ever-growing success. Then she went off to the most prestigious art and animation school in North America, CIAD—the California Institute of Art and Design. Meanwhile, I, Keira’s younger sister, Normandy Pale, started grade ten at G. P. on a partial scholarship. Keira had said she wanted to help out our parents by paying off the mortgage and covering some of my tuition, but things hadn’t worked out on that front so far. When I first got to school, I was semi-famous thanks to my sister’s books. Everyone assumed that I was the staring blob from the Chronicles, the hapless target of pervs and leeches, even though I wasn’t particularly big and didn’t stare much more than anyone else. Soon people realized I was deadly average, and I settled in and met my two friends—who just happened to be my
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first friends, really. With Keira away, life at home got simpler. She had always required a lot of quiet when she was working, so my parents and I had to tiptoe around. Strangers threw her off, so we didn’t invite anyone over. Now we could do potentially embarrassing things and not have them end up in a book. It was pretty much a halcyon time. Then, without warning, Keira came home at the beginning of April, not long after she turned twenty. She arrived in her white 1987 Crown Victoria, which looks disconcertingly like an unmarked police car. She wouldn’t tell us what happened, and when my parents asked if everything was okay, Keira got mad and said she’d leave if they asked again. So they dropped it. We’re not really discussers in my family. After all, who wants to rip open a bunch of scar tissue to expose the abscess beneath? Not that I mean to compare my sister to an abscess. She is more like an inheritance. Imagine someone gives you an incredibly valuable and famous gem. You can’t sell it. Your only job is to look after it. Now imagine your behavior can ruin the value of that gem. If you talk too loud or watch TV, you can tarnish it or crack it. Finally, take the next step and imagine that the gem you inherited likes to tell stories about what happens in the house where you are already trying to be extra careful so you won’t wreck the gem. Okay. That’s enough. The gem analogy has officially fallen apart. Anyway, in September, at the time our story begins, my sister was even less right than usual. She rarely left her room or our closet. When she did leave, she stayed out for days and we had no idea where she went. My mother turned nearly catatonic with concern, and my dad fussed around
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trying to distract himself. I concentrated on not making things worse. In other words, I made myself an extra unobtrusive presence. Caused no waves. Went to school. Did my work. When Keira was home, we tried not to upset her. We were all just waiting for her to tell us what was wrong and what had happened at school. The afternoon of the first truth telling, I went home and found Keira in our closet. For those who follow her career, it’s true: she actually does work in a closet that we share. We each have a door to it, but she’s the only one who uses the space. You probably want a visual of her, to help you digest all this dry, dusty exposition. So here goes: Keira has wild, two-toned hair (dark brown and silvery blonde) and dark circles under her eyes. There are photos of her as a toddler that show that, even then, she had dark circles under her eyes. She is a wisp of a person, and after she started making money and visiting New York on publishing business, she started buying all of her clothes from a store in SoHo called 45 RPM. They specialize in handwoven fabrics cut into simple shapes that make anyone over a hundred pounds look frumpy and anyone under a hundred pounds look like she stepped out of a clamshell on an enchanted beach. Keira owns about fifteen garments in total. Her look is based on white cotton smocks and elevenhundred-dollar jeans made
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from Zimbabwean cotton and hand-dyed by Japanese artisans. Her feet are almost always bare or encased in delicate ballet slippers. These clothes are not very warm, so I often open my closet to find her wearing one of my sweaters. Sometimes two. It’s funny that she sometimes borrows my clothes, since I’m not noted for the excellence of my wardrobe. In another story, this closet dwelling would be a heavyhanded sign that my sister has repressed sexual urges. She does not.19 She says she likes to situate herself at the “portal.” She’s turned that portal, AKA our shared closet, into a beautifully appointed art studio. She had excellent lighting installed, and she sits cross-legged on a special meditation seat, at a custom drafting lap desk she designed and built. When she first started working in our closet, I asked if she wanted me to keep the door on my side locked, so she could have it all to herself. She said no. She said she found it comforting to have me close-by. I was ten, and my hero worship of my sister was at an all-time high. Now I’m stuck with no closet, which means that I have to keep my clothes in a cupboard in my room. When I walked into my bedroom that afternoon, I could hear her humming as she worked. Having Keira at work in the closet meant I’d have to be very quiet all night, but having her at home meant my mom would be less worried. So that was good. “Keira,” I said after I gently knocked, then opened the door. “How’s it going?”
19. At least, I don’t think she does.
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“I’m fine,” she said. “Working.” So I quietly closed the door, picked up my needlework and schoolbag, and left. I would do homework for an hour or two, followed by a little writing, and then work on my embroidery until it was time for bed. There are few arts quieter than writing and stitching. And that, folks, is a glimpse at life with my sister. I would end this too-long chapter there, except I can’t. Because at midnight that same night, Keira left the closet and came into my room. I was awoken by her soft voice. “Normandy? Are you asleep?” I raised my head. The room was dark. Keira had turned out the lights in the closet. She was just a shape in the darkness. “No,” I croaked. “Can I come up?” she said. “Sure.” My sister hadn’t gotten into bed with me since— well, since before she published the first Chronicle. She shuffled up onto my bed. She’d wrapped herself in a puffy sleeping bag she keeps in the closet for when the “portal gets drafty” and my sweaters aren’t protection enough. I have a queen-sized bed, which is one of the most luxurious things in my life. I got it from Neil when his dad decided to change all the mattresses in their house, which he does every two years. I sincerely hoped this mattress was Neil’s or from a guest bedroom, and not his dad’s. Anyway, there should have been plenty of room for me and my sister, but somehow it didn’t seem like enough. She lay halfway down the bed, so she was talking to my knee. “I think it’s time for me to tell someone what happened.”
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Keira’s voice is soft and raspy. It goes with her haunted eyes and distracted demeanor. I used to live for the times my sister would focus her blazing attention on me. Her focus was so total, it seemed to transform the entire world. Just talking to her used to turn me into someone special. That was before I got scared of talking to her. Scared of what she would do with our conversations. With my small secrets. The key was to let her take the lead. Not react. I could hear my heart thud in my chest. I wanted to know what was wrong, but I also felt unqualified. What if I listened badly and made things worse? “I need to tell someone what happened at school,” she said.
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