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The Door of No Return Zac Baxter’s grandfather has always told him that he’s the descendant of African kings, whose treasure was stolen when his ancestors were sold into slavery. Of course, Zac brushes this off as a tall tale—until his grandfather is murdered and their apartment is completely ransacked. Clearly somebody is after something. Heeding his grandfather’s dying words, Zac is off to Ghana to track down his family’s history. But what did his grandfather mean when he said that Zac had the map to the treasure? Following every clue he can find, Zac begins to suspect that the treasure is real, and hidden in one of Ghana’s old slave forts. Too bad the killers always seem to be one step ahead of him.

With no one he can trust and with everything to lose, Zac races against time as he tries to uncover the truth about the past—and a fortune in gold.

Sarah Mussi is an English woman who lived in Ghana for many years. Married to a Ghanaian, she currently lives in England and works as a school teacher.

This is her first novel.

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Caruthers & Ambrose LEGAL PRACTITIONERS, CONSULTANTS

364 London Road Gloucester GL49 DDF Tel/Fax: 01442 564789 Beamish, Ludgate & Perkins 226 Camberwell New Road London SE5 9JK Dear Messrs Beamish, Ludgate & Perkins RE: SUIT NO. MISC 991/200 ZACHARIAH BAXTER & OTHERS VS. HAROLD REEVES, INGLEWORTH & OTHERS in the FIRST INST. & THE STATE in the SECOND INST. Please find enclosed the statement of my foster son, Zachariah Baxter. I asked him to write the story down exactly as he related it to us. The police had it typed up and used it in preparing their case against Reeves and others (criminal charges). Attached also is all his supporting evidence.

I’d like you to read it carefully and extract what you need for the breach of contract petition and compensation claim against the State. We may have to take it to the Court of Human Rights. If so, I am happy to advise; it being, as you know, my area of speciality.

Of course, the bond itself will form the basis of the case, with the other artifacts and records, which you already have, but Zac is prepared to take the stand.

Let me know if you need clarification on any parts of his story.

Yours sincerely,

Bernard Caruthers Bernard Caruthers

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Form MG 11 Witness Statement (CJ Act 1967, s. 9; MC Act 1980, ss. 5A(3) (a) and 5B; MC Rules 1981, r. 70) Statement of Zac Baxter Age if under 18 16 (if over 18 insert “over”) Occupation student This statement (consisting of 3 parts page(s) each page signed by me) is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowingly, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.

Signature

Zac Baxter

Date

November 5th DI Hesketh

Statement

The diaries—what is left of them—sit here in front of me.

Three hundred years of history. When I am done with this account, I’ll add it to the pile. I doubt if that will be the end of the matter, but I know Pops would like it.

After all, it started with him and the diaries.

5

The Lost Prince I knew something was wrong the minute I shut the door of number 13, Arrowsmith House, Tuffley. I’d lived there as long as I could remember.

What I didn’t know was I’d just closed the door on that part of my life.

We were late. Pops had insisted on wearing his kente cloth. He didn’t really know how to tie it, and he had to get his coat over the top of the whole thing, so we’d been fussing in the front hall for ten minutes. It was cold outside, bitterly cold, and with only two days to go, I was hoping for a white Christmas.

I think it was because I was inspecting the patch of grass at the front, to see if it was snow or frost, that I noticed the footsteps. Someone had been standing there for a while. The frozen grass was broken and crushed; there were patterns of pale steps pacing along the front of the flat, up and down.

For some reason I felt a flash of anger. Someone was taking liberties.

I scanned the parking lot and thought I saw a shape, a woman—sort of ageless with a blank gray face.

“We’ll dazzle them tonight, eh, Zac?” said Pops.

I didn’t reassure him. That woman’s gray look had unsettled me. Instead I took his arm and glanced the length of the housing estate. It looked safe.

Fairy lights twinkled in windows—but people get angry at Christmas. Angry for all the things they want and can’t have. So I wasn’t taking any chances.

“When I get to the part about the Lost Prince, you show them your back.”

6

My back is stunningly fit like the rest of me, but that was not why Pops wanted to show it off. A cat ran out from under a car and I jumped.

Pops chuckled; I was not in a mood to humor him. “It’s cold,” I said. “I don’t really want to.” To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to go at all.

The Cormantin Club was Pops’s baby. He was the founding member, Big Chief, the soul of the whole thing. That’s Pops for you. Really the Cormantin Club was just a bunch of old black folks harking back to the days of slavery and drinking. After a few glasses they tried to outdo each other with wild tales. Pops’s were always the wildest.

“They can’t disprove me today, ’cause I got the diaries.” He clutched the plastic bag up to his chest.

I remember that bag.

“I’m going to read them the dying words of King Baktu.” Pops stopped and flung out his hand. Funny the things you remember. His outstretched arm, the plastic bag, and that feeling that something was wrong.

“Until my son, the Lost Prince—get it, that’s you—comes back through the Door of No Return and claims his ransom, my soul will never rest in the land of my ancestors. That’ll shut the old buggers up.”

“But Pops, you wrote that bit in your diary.”

“But that’s what he said, son, so it doesn’t matter which diary it’s wrote in.”

I’d got him a briefcase for Christmas. I figured he needed it!

That’s when I noticed the two shadows up ahead. I shivered. A cloud passed over the moon like a hand across a face. The pavements darkened.

Only the orange glare of the streetlights glittered on the frost.

“Then when they see the tribal marks . . .”

7

“Let’s cross over.”

It was always the same old story. Pops told it over and over, as if nobody had heard it before. That him and me were the last descendants of King Baktu, that King Baktu’s chosen son and heir, our great-times-whatevergrandfather, had been stolen away as a child by slavers, that a king’s ransom had been raised, but the treasure and the child were lost. It was true that we did have scar marks on our backs. But I know for certain that mine had been put there by Pops.

I suppose he was trying to feel important about something. Living on a Gloucester housing estate needed bigging up a bit.

The two shadows waited, half hidden behind some large waste bins. As we crossed over, they came forward. I can’t remember much about either of them, other than a glimpse of royal blue tracksuit with white stripes.

What I do remember was that woman’s blank face flashing into my brain.

I began to feel very edgy. Despite the cold I broke out in a slight sweat. I moved Pops to the inside so I was between him and the street. I tightened my features into a really mean screwface. I thought I was tough. What was I thinking? Why couldn’t I have done more?

It happened very fast. Suddenly one of the shadows came running straight at me, yelling something about a stabbing, about needing help.

The other one staggered into the street, screaming. I looked at one, then the other. My jaw dropped. I should never have hesitated. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back with my head exploding. I heard Pops scream.

I saw the other shadow sprint forward and grab the plastic bag. I heard the dull thwack of Pops’s skull hitting the pavement. Then they were gone.

8

I can’t remember reaching Pops; I thought stupidly that he must have arranged it all as a bit of drama. My head hurt so much I couldn’t think straight. I think I was bleeding.

Pops looked so small lying there—crumpled, like a bundle of discarded rags. In his hand was part of a diary and shreds of bag. He wasn’t moving.

Everything was going to be okay. I shook him a little and then remembered not to. I pulled out my mobile. Funny how I’d always wanted to dial 999.

“Pops, it’s going to be okay.”

“No,” he said, “it’s not.”

He was speaking—so of course it was going to be okay.

“They’ve got the diaries, but they haven’t got the map.”

“Just hold on, the police are coming.”

“Look in my pocket.” His hand fluttered. I tore aside the kente. I looked in the breast pocket of his overcoat and pulled out one slim volume.

“That’s the one they wanted.” His voice was so old and tired. An ache started somewhere in the back of my throat. I looked helplessly around.

That was when I saw the woman with the blank gray face again; she was right behind us. Far too close.

“Don’t let them get it,” he said, and pressed the last diary toward me.

I took off my jacket and covered him. I sat down and cradled his head. I thought, if that woman comes any closer I’ll smack her so hard she’ll be the one who needs the ambulance. Somebody leaned out of an upstairs window and started shouting something.

“You’ve got to promise me, Zac, to go back and get the treasure.”

9

My heart was thudding. My head hurt. The tightness in my throat was choking me. But I didn’t want the woman to see the diary, so I let go of Pops’s hand and stuffed it inside my hoody. She was weird. She just stood there, not offering to help, not doing anything! Just standing there pushing back the cuticles of her left hand with that blank gray face.

“They haven’t got the map,” said Pops again. “It never was in the diaries.”

I didn’t want her to hear what he was saying either.

“The map is the secret, see.”

“Try to stay quiet.”

“They haven’t got it.”

The woman moved closer. Pops’s hand clutched at mine. “Zac, promise . . .”

I played along. “Who’s got it then?”

“You have.”

The Police Station The ambulance came. I wanted to help, but they looked at my head and made me sit down while they made Pops comfy. Then the older guy came over to check me. The other put a silver blanket on Pops and went back to the cab for something. I saw the woman move toward Pops and I shouted.

The older guy calmed me. I gripped his arm and told him that the woman was nothing to do with us.

“She’s a witness, though, mate,” he said.

10

Then more people and the police arrived, and it all got mad. They wouldn’t let me go to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me give Pops the funky we-can-beat-this handshake. I ended up at the station making statements, seeing social workers, I don’t know.

At first I didn’t think it was odd that the woman ended up in the police station as well. I supposed the ambulance guy was right and she was simply making a statement too. I was worried about Pops. I was wondering what he meant about the map. I was angry with myself. I was thinking about how I was going to find those brothers and pulp them. But still, she gave me the creeps and instinctively I checked that the diary was safe.

At some point a lady came in. She said, “Sit down, Zac. This is going to be hard for you.”

I was already sitting.

“You have to be very brave.”

I waited. It’s funny how some minutes seem long.

“We’ve just got word from the hospital. Is there anyone we can phone for you?”

I shook my head. It had always been just me and Pops.

“Your grandfather was declared dead on arrival.

I’m sorry.”

I remember thinking—strange—we certainly are going to show the “old buggers” now.

I think I smiled. Then felt that I shouldn’t smile. It wasn’t true anyway.

It was all a mistake. He’d been talking to me before the ambulance came.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

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“You’re lying,” I said. “I want to see him.”

“We don’t want you to go home alone. If there’s no one we can call, I’d like you to stay here until we can fix something up.”

“Where’s Pops?” I said.

“He’s dead, Zac. You’ve got to be very strong.”

I made for the door. The lady said, “You’ll need a few minutes alone. I’ll make you some tea. Do you take sugar?”

I waited until she’d left, then I left too. I was going to the hospital, even if I had to walk. I took the stairs to the ground floor and I was just about to go out when I saw that gray-faced woman again. She was standing inside the main door making a phone call: “. . . Stage one, objective one . . . It can’t be helped at present. . . . Objective two in progress . . . Objective three completed. . . . The boy has it. . . . Another objective three? . . . Well, he’s already in the system. You’ll have to pull strings on your end. . . . Yes . . . Yes . . .”

Click.

I belted back up the stairs. I asked for the toilet. I bolted myself in a cubicle and sat on the loo seat shivering. “. . . Objective three completed. . . . The boy has it. . . . Another objective three? . . . Well, he’s already in the system. . . .” Didn’t sound like a call you’d make when you’d just witnessed a mugging. I don’t know what it sounded like, but the words “the boy has it” were pretty clear. There was only one boy around and there was only one thing he’d got. And right now I was pulling it out of my hoody and opening it up.

Pops’s last diary, the one he’d said they wanted, was written in a foreign language.

12

Unreadable.

I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t stay in the toilet forever, so I went back to the interviewing room.

Ms. Shaw, the lady with the tea, was there. She puckered up her lips in that I-feel-sorry-for-you way that adults do, then she said, “Did your grandfather give you anything before he died that might be a clue as to why he was attacked?”

I thought that was a very odd question. It made me feel very suspicious.

Ms. Shaw was nodding away, as if to reassure me, but I could tell she was looking at someone else. I glanced round. I’ll give you one guess who was standing in the corridor outside. Yep, through the glass door behind me was that woman again. She was just standing there with her blank face looking in on us—just like she’d done on the street.

“Who’s she?” I said.

“I don’t know, Zac,” said Ms. Shaw. “She’s—I really can’t . . . They don’t tell me anything.” She smiled as if she’d like to be more cooperative.

I hate tea, but I drank that one. My brain had just added up 2+2. I’m not stupid.

They made 4.

“She wants to help with the attack,” continued Ms. Shaw.

I spluttered the tea. She helped all right, I thought. She really helped a lot.

It was a good job I did not find out the truth about that woman then.

I might have given up. I might just have walked out, handed her the diary, and said, “I’m ready for my objective three. Please make it as painless as possible.”

13

Pops used to say, “Ignorance is bliss.” That might be an exaggeration, but right then it probably saved my life.

December 23 I stayed in the police station that night. Oh, they tried to get me into emergency care, but it was the night before Christmas Eve. People were wrapping presents, eating mince pies. Ms. Shaw had her own family to get back to. I don’t want to talk about it.

I didn’t sleep. I sat on the corner of the bed and watched the door. Every hour or so a guard strolled by. I didn’t see the woman, though. I gave up biting my nails when I was ten, but that night I cheated.

I thought about Pops. I thought about the mugging. I thought about that woman. Who was she? Why had she been watching our flat? Was she connected to the muggers? And what was she up to in the police station?

My head hurt and I had a pain deep in my chest that hadn’t been there before. The words “declared dead on arrival ” kept swimming up into my ears. Pops couldn’t be dead. He was too colorful to die. He couldn’t be dead: It was Christmas. I didn’t care if he never used the briefcase; I would even carry his plastic bag for him. I’d show his old blokes at the club my back. I’d believe in his stories. Yes, we’d go to Africa. We’d rest beneath rustling palms and hunt for his treasure. . . . Look, I’d even turn my music down. What was going to happen to me? Where had they put him? I was all alone now in a big unfriendly world.

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The next morning they brought me beans on toast for breakfast, but I wasn’t hungry. One of the policemen was reading the newspaper. It was the Christmas Eve edition. He showed it to me. I think that was when I really believed. I kept it. Here it is. I’ll stick it in.

OLD GOLD-COASTER DIES IN BRUTAL MUGGING Popular pensioner Samuel Baxter died late last night as another victim of street crime in Gloucester. He was attacked by two assailants outside his home in Tuffley. They only got away with some personal papers, but left their victim dying. Mr. Baxter, 85, was well known in the area for founding the Cormantin Club. He was actively involved in seeking sponsors to fund his Return to Africa venture. Mr. Baxter believed that he was the inheritor of a vast fortune in gold dust raised by one of his distant ancestors. He had traced his history and said he knew where the treasure was buried.

In a recent interview with the Daily Echo one month ago, Mr. Baxter said, “I have tangible evidence of where the treasure is. In 1701 my ancestor was sold as a slave from Cape Coast. All I want is for members of the black community to come forward and sponsor my club to mount an expedition to retrieve the gold. Until the West pays the descendants of slavery due compensation, our community needs every penny it can get.”

Mr. Baxter leaves behind a teenage grandson. The police are now treating the assault as a murder inquiry.

“It was murder!” I told the policeman. “He was alive and somebody killed him in the ambulance.” Then I paused. I’d remembered something.

When I’d been sitting on the curb, when that woman had gone over to Pops, in that split second when the ambulance guy had spoken, 15

I’d heard a second dull thwack. A second crunch of bone hitting paving stone. Or had I? “That woman did it,” I said. “She killed him.”

“You’ve been through a lot, kid,” said the policeman.

“I’ve remembered something,” I said. “I want to change my statement.”

“Sometimes it’s like that,” he said. “Stress.”

I think I made a bit of a fuss, but they wouldn’t allow me to change anything. I demanded to know who the woman was. “I want her name— the one who made the witness statement.”

Eventually a policeman went to check. He came back shaking his head.

“No witnesses,” he said. “Only you.”

I stopped making a fuss. I went cold all over.

Even though I don’t have asthma, I couldn’t breathe. In my mind I saw her crouching over Pops, whispering, “Are you okay?” Then dragging his poor, old, beloved head up with her cuticled nails and slamming it back down on the pavement.

Writing that makes me very, very scared. I may never prove it and I may never get even, but, like King Baktu, my soul will never rest until I do.

Bernard says justice is the best revenge. He likes to quote. He says, “The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.” I’m sure hoping they are going to grind right over her. Bernard says it’s best to record everything. He says my “insights are important.” He says to attach all the documents I’ve collected, so that the barrister can create a case out of it. I’ll take the stand as well if necessary. I was scared once, but I’m not anymore.

16

You see, this is all part of the justice, part of the revenge, and part of my pledge to Pops. He wanted a court case and he’ll get it. I’ll make sure he does, if that’s the last thing I do.

Talking of diaries, I did ask my social worker, Ms. Shaw, if I could have the pages that Pops had held on to.

“As soon as the inquest is over, I promise you.”

I asked her if I could go home now. I wanted to be alone in the flat. I don’t know, but I still felt ill. I wanted to curl up in Pops’s bed, like when I was small. I wanted to look at his picture, because for some silly reason I couldn’t remember what he looked like.

“Sit down, Zac,” she said. “There’s something I need to tell you. Try to be strong.”

I sat down.

“Last night your home was broken into. It seems with all the upheaval going on, we forgot to send an officer to check on your flat.” ?

“Za-ac?”

“What did they take?”

“Well, it’s quite extraordinary: Everything except the carpets is gone.”

I looked at her. Boy, she had to be making that up.

“We are not connecting it to the attack at the moment, but it does seem strange. . . .”

Strange? My CDs, my clothes, Pops’s papers, my sound system, his drums, his bed with the quilted cover. I think at that point I put my head down on the table.

17

“We know your grandfather was involved in a bid to return to Africa. . . . Had he collected any sponsorship money? Did he keep it in the flat?”

“No. That buried gold was just an old story—nobody believed it.”

Even I didn’t. But you know how it is—it kept him going somehow; it was his dream. Everyone needs a dream. And it was kind of fun to help him make his plans.

“We’ll need you to make an inventory of the flat—but not now, not until you’re ready. Do you know if your grandfather had any insurance?”

I shook my head.

“I’ve arranged for you to go to a foster home. They’re nice people. They know all about what’s happened. Try to be strong.”

When I look back now, I can see how un-strong I was. Boy, I didn’t have a clue. I was adding 2+2 and getting 4. Duh! I didn’t imagine anyone could take Pops seriously. What—seriously enough to kill him?

Did I say I was all alone in a big unfriendly world? I was about to find out just how unfriendly it could get.

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Ice When Cassie was little her grandmother would tell her fairytales about the Arctic—stories about snow and ice, and about her mother who made a deal with the Polar Bear King and was swept away to the ends of the earth to become a prisoner of the trolls. Now that Cassie is older, and determined to become a leading scientist and Arctic researcher, she has no time for fairytales or lies about her dead mother and talking animals.

But when Cassie comes face to face with a mysterious polar bear, one that defies all scientific fact or knowledge, she realizes that the fairytales could actually be true---her mother might be alive, and Cassie might be the only one who has the power to save her. She makes a deal with the Polar Bear King, but this deal comes with consequences she never bargained for.

Before long, Cassie finds herself on a journey against time, traveling across the brutal Arctic, through the Canadian boreal forest, and on the back of the North Wind to the land east of the sun and west of the moon. Before the end of her journey, Cassie will learn the true meaning of love and family, and what it means to become an adult.

Sarah Beth Durst is the author of the middle grade novels Into the Wild and Out of the Wild. Into the Wild was recently selected as a finalist for a Cybil (Children’s and YA Bloggers’Literary) Award in the middle grade fantasy/SF category, and it will also appear on the preliminary ballot for SFWA’s Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Stony Brook, NY with her husband and daughter. For more information, visit her website at www.sarahbethdurst.com.

PROLOGUE: The North Wind’s Daughter “Once upon a time, the North Wind said to the Polar Bear King, ‘Steal me a daughter, and when she grows, she will be your bride.’”

Four-year-old Cassie clutched her quilt and stared at her grandmother.

Tall and straight, Gram looked like a general. She perched stiffly on the edge of Cassie’s bed. She had a mahogany cane in her left hand. Tonight, Dad was away from the station, which meant Cassie would hear the story. Gram never told it when Dad was home. It was the only story she ever told.

“And so, the Polar Bear King kidnapped a human child and brought her to the North Wind, and she was raised with the North Wind as her father and the West, South, and East Winds as her uncles. She grew into a beautiful, but lonely, young woman. One day, while the Winds were gone (as they often were), she met a human man. She befriended him, and it wasn’t long before they fell in love.

“When the Polar Bear King came to claim his bride, she refused him.

Her heart, she said, belonged to another. ‘I would not have an unwilling wife,’ he told her. ‘But your father has made a promise to me.’

“Knowing the power of a magic promise, the North Wind’s daughter sought to counter it with her own bargain. ‘Then I will make a promise to you,’ the North Wind’s daughter replied. ‘Bring me to my love and hide us from my father, and when I have a daughter, she will be your bride.’ And so, the Bear carried the North Wind’s daughter to her human husband and hid them in the ice and snow.

21

“Angry, the North Wind tore across the land, sea, and sky. But he could not find them. For a long while, the North Wind’s daughter and her husband were happy.

“In time, the woman had a child. Passing by, the West Wind heard the birth and hurried to tell the North Wind where his daughter could be found.

With the strength of a thousand blizzards, the North Wind swooped down onto the house that held his daughter, her husband, and their newborn baby. He would have torn the house to shreds, but the woman ran outside.

‘Take me,’ she cried, ‘but leave my loved ones alone!’

“The North Wind blew her as far as he could—as far as the castle beyond the ends of the world. There, she fell to the ground and was captured by trolls.” Cassie heard the bed creak as Gram stood. Her rich voice was softer now. “It is said that when the wind howls from the north, it is for his lost daughter.”

Cassie blinked her eyes open. “And Mommy is still there?”

Gram was a shadow in the doorway. “Yes.”

22

PART ONE: The Land of the Midnight Sun

One Once upon a time, in a land far to the north, there lived a lovely maiden . . .

Latitude 72˚ 13’ 30” N Longitude 152˚ 06’ 52” W Altitude 3 ft.

Cassie killed the snowmobile engine.

Total silence, her favorite sound. Ice crystals spun in the Arctic air.

Sparkling in the predawn light, they looked like diamond dust. Beneath her ice-encrusted face mask, she smiled. She loved this: just her, the ice, and the bear.

“Don’t move,” she whispered at the polar bear.

Cassie felt behind her and unhooked the rifle. Placid as a marble statue, the polar bear did not move. She loaded the tranquilizer dart by feel, her eyes never leaving the bear. White on white in an alcove of ice, he looked like a king on a throne. For an instant, Cassie imagined she could hear Gram’s voice, telling the story of the Polar Bear King. . . . Gram hadn’t told that story since the day she’d left the research station, but Cassie still remembered every word of it. She used to believe it was true.

When she was little, Cassie used to stage practice rescue missions outside 23

of Dad’s Arctic research station. She’d pile old snowmobile parts and broken generators to make the troll’s castle, and then she’d scale the castle walls and tie up the “trolls” (old clothes stuffed with pillows) with climbing ropes.

Once, Dad had caught her on the station roof with skis strapped to her feet, ready to ski beyond the ends of the earth to save her mom. He’d taken away Cassie’s skis and had forbidden Gram to tell the story. Not that that had slowed Cassie at all. She’d simply begged Gram from telling the story when Dad was away, and she’d invented a new game involving a canvas sail and an unused sled. Even after she’d understood the truth—that Gram’s story was merely a pretty way to say her mother had died—she’d continued to play the games.

Now I don’t need games, she thought with a grin. She snapped the syringe into place and lifted the gun up to her shoulder. And this bear, she thought, didn’t need any kid’s bedtime story to make him magnificent. He was as perfect as a textbook illustration: cream-colored with healthy musculature and no battle scars. If her estimates were correct, he’d be the largest polar bear on record. And she was the one who had found him.

Cassie cocked the tranquilizer gun, and the polar bear turned his head to look directly at her. She held her breath and didn’t move. Wind whistled, and loose snow swirled between her and the bear. Her heart thudded in her ears so loudly that she was certain he could hear it. This was it—the end of the chase. When she’d begun this chase, the aurora borealis had been dancing in the sky. She’d tracked him in its light for three miles north of the station. Loose sea ice had jostled at the shore, but she’d driven over it and then onto the pack ice. She’d followed him all the way here, to a jumble of 24

ice blocks that looked like a miniature mountain range. She had no idea how he’d stayed so far ahead of her during the chase. Top speed for an adult male bear clocked at thirty miles per hour, and she’d run her snowmobile at sixty. Maybe the tracks hadn’t been as fresh as they’d looked, or maybe she’d discovered some kind of superfast bear. She grinned at the ridiculousness of that idea. Regardless of the explanation, the tracks had led her here to this beautiful, majestic, perfect bear. She’d won.

A moment later, the bear looked away across the frozen sea.

“You’re mine,” she whispered as she sighted down the barrel.

And the polar bear stepped into the ice. In one fluid motion, he rose and moved backward. It looked as if he were stepping into a cloud. His hind legs vanished into whiteness, and then his torso.

Impossible.

She lowered the gun and stared. She couldn’t be seeing this. The ice wall appeared to be absorbing him. Now only his shoulders and head were visible.

Cassie shook herself. He was escaping! Never mind how. Lifting the gun, she squeezed the trigger. The recoil bashed the butt of the gun into her shoulder. Reflexively, she blinked.

And the bear was gone.

“No,” she said out loud. She’d had him! What had happened? Bears didn’t—couldn’t—walk through ice. She had to have imagined it. Some trick of the Arctic air. She whipped off her goggles. Cold squeezed her eyeballs, and the white was blinding. She scanned the frozen waves. Snow blew across the ice like fast-moving clouds. The landscape was as dead as a 25

desert. When the cold hurt too much for her to stand it a second longer, she replaced her goggles.

Her radio crackled. She pulled it out of her parka pocket. “Cassie here,” she said, trying to sound casual. She’d chased the bear onto the pack ice without backup. If she’d caught him, all would have been forgiven. But now . . . How was she going to explain this? She couldn’t even explain it to herself.

“Cassandra Elizabeth Dasent, get home NOW.” Dad’s voice. And he was not happy.

Well, she wasn’t happy either. She’d promised herself that she’d tag a bear as a birthday present to herself—she was turning eighteen in just a few hours. It seemed the ideal way for the only daughter of the head scientist at the Eastern Beaufort Sea Research Station to celebrate becoming a legal adult. When this bear had sauntered past the station while she’d been out fixing the radio antennae, it had felt like a gift. She’d never expected the chase to lead her so far out onto the ice, and she’d never expected the bear to . . . He couldn’t have gone far. He had to be somewhere just beyond the ice ridges. She checked the gas gauge. She had another three hours of fuel to spare.

“Cassie? Cassie, are you there?”

“I’m going after him,” she said into the radio. She revved the engine, drowning her father’s response, and headed across the ice.

Cassie abandoned the snowmobile in the shed. Slinging her pack over her shoulder, she trudged to the station. She ached from head to toe, inside 26

and out. Even her fingernails ached. The sun hovered on the horizon, as it would for less and less time every day before it sank permanently for the winter. The low-angled light made her shadow look like a snow giant out of an Inupiaq legend.

She’d lost him.

She didn’t know how, but she’d lost him. She kept replaying the search in her mind as if that would make her envision the tracks she must have missed. If she’d just searched more carefully in the first few moments instead of speeding across the sea ice . . .

Owen, the station lab technician, met her at the door. She blinked at him—a potbellied man with a pepper beard. Clearly, he’d been waiting for her.

“Cassie, the case!” Owen cried in an anguished voice.

She glanced at her pack. The syringe case dangled out of the bag. It was encrusted in ice. Cassie winced. “He got away,” she said.

Owen rescued the bag and gun from her. “Do you know how much these cost?”

Cassie followed him inside through the double door entryway. As she shut the inner door behind her, the thick, sour warmth of the station rolled over her like a smothering wave. It was the smell of home, stale and stifling and comfortingly familiar. She wished she had been coming home victorious.

Clucking over the tranquilizer gun, Owen said, “You have to be careful with this equipment. Treat it like a baby.”

Her stomach sank as she watched him examine her equipment. She 27

didn’t need another strike against her. She’d taken the snowmobile out onto the pack ice alone and she’d been careless with equipment. Dad was not going to be pleased. Peeling off her outer layers, she asked, “Where is he?

Radar room?” She’d better get it over with. There was no point in delaying.

Owen didn’t respond. He was absorbed in cleaning the tranq gun. She could tell he’d already dismissed her from his mind. She almost smiled. He loved his equipment like she loved the pack ice. Both of them were a bit . . . single-minded. She could admit that about herself. “Jeremy?” she said. The new research intern looked up from his desk.

“He’s not a happy camper,” Jeremy confirmed. “He wants to talk to you.” He nodded toward the research lab door. “You’re welcome to hide here,” he added helpfully, pointing under his desk.

She managed a grin. Jeremy had been blasted by Dad his first week at the station for going out on the ice without the proper gear, and now he had a healthy respect for Cassie’s father’s temper. Of course, in that case, he had deserved it. She didn’t care if he was from UCLA. What breed of idiot went out on the ice without a face mask? You’d never catch her making that kind of newbie mistake. No, she thought, I specialize in the more spectacular mistakes, such as misplacing a full-grown polar bear.

Cassie pushed through the door to the research lab. She scooted between the boxes and equipment. She could hear Dad’s voice, deep and clipped, inside the radar room. Ugh, this was not going to go well. Here in the faintly sour warmth of home, it was going to sound like she was quoting Gram’s old fairy tale about the Polar Bear King. What seemed almost believable out on the sea ice seemed patently unreal here, back in the prosaic old station.

28

Here, it seemed far more plausible that she’d imagined the bear walking through ice. She wished she’d imagined losing him.

In the radar room, Dad was in his typical position, half-perched on a stool, flanked by two other researchers. Cassie halted just inside the doorway, watching them. Her father was like the sun. People tended to orbit around him without even realizing they were. Scott and Liam were his most common satellites. She wondered if that was how she looked next to him—overshadowed and small. Not liking that thought, Cassie stepped farther into the room.

The door swung shut behind her, and Dad looked up at the sound. He lowered his clipboard. His face was impassive, but she knew he was furious.

She steeled herself. She’d deliver her report as professionally as possible.

How he reacted would be his choice.

Scott flashed a smile at her. “Ah, the little workaholic.”

“Could you gentlemen excuse us?” Dad said to Scott and Liam. “Family discussion.” Oh, that was not a good sign. She swallowed hard.

Cassie wondered, not for the first time, if her mother hadn’t died, would that have softened Dad? Would she have been able to talk to him without feeling like she was approaching a mountain? So much could have been different if her mother had lived.

The two scientists looked from father to daughter, as if suddenly noticing the tension that was thick enough to inhale. Both of them bolted.

For a long moment, Dad didn’t speak. His expression was unreadable.

His eyes were buried underneath thick, white eyebrows. His mouth was hidden in a mountain-man beard. Six-foot-five, he looked impervious.

Cassie raised her chin and met his eyes.

29

Finally, he said, “You know better than to go out on the pack ice without backup. I raised you to be smarter than this.”

Yes, he had. One thing he’d always made sure of was that she knew the rules of the ice. Everything else in her childhood he may have left to others.

With her mother dead soon after Cassie was born and Gram gone from the station when Cassie was five, she’d done a lot of her own raising—with only a sort of tag-team parenting from Dad, Max, Owen, and whoever else was passing through the research station. But he had made sure that she knew what to do when she stepped outside the station, and she was grateful for that. “I know,” she said.

“You could have fallen into a crevasse,” he said. “A pressure ridge could have collapsed. A lead could have split the ice, and you could have driven directly into ocean water.”

“I know,” she repeated. What else could she say? She wasn’t going to make excuses. Maybe she would have a few years ago, but she wasn’t a kid anymore. If she expected to be treated as a professional, she knew she had to act like one.

He continued to scowl at her.

Cassie felt her face redden, but she forced herself not to look away. She refused to be intimidated by him.

Dad sighed. “Report,” he said.

“There’s something unusual about this bear.” Taking a deep breath, Cassie plunged into a description of how she had tracked him and how he had walked into the ice. She told Dad about searching the pressure ridge and failing to find tracks leading out of it. She told him how she had 30

searched the surrounding area, crossing miles of pack ice, with no further sign of the bear. Finishing, she braced herself, waiting for Dad to tear apart her report.

Instead, she saw the anger drain out of her father’s face. He dropped his clipboard to the table, and he hugged her. “I could have lost you,” he said.

This was new. “Dad,” she said, squirming. Anger she had expected, but hugs? They were not a hugging family. “Dad, please, I’m fine. I know what I’m doing. You don’t have to worry.”

Dad released her. He was shaking his head. “I should have known this day would come,” he said. “Your grandmother was right.”

Awkwardly, she patted his shoulder. “I’ll bring backup next time,” she promised. “I’ll catch the bear. You’ll see.”

He didn’t appear to be listening. “It’s too late for application deadlines for this year, but some of my friends at the University of Alaska owe me favors. You can work in one of their labs and apply for undergrad next year.”

Whoa—what? They’d agreed she would take courses remotely. She wasn’t leaving the station. “Dad . . .”

“You can live with your grandmother in Fairbanks. She’ll be thrilled to say ‘I told you so.’ She’s been pushing for this since you were five, but I selfishly wanted you here,” he said. “I’ll contact Max to fly you there.”

She stared at him. “But I don’t want to leave,” she said. She loved it at the station! Her life was here. She wanted—no, needed—to be near the ice.

He focused on her, as if seeing her afresh. “You’re leaving,” he said, steel back in his voice. “I’m sorry, Cassie, but this is for your own good.”

31

“You can’t simply decide that—” “If your mother were here, she would want this.”

Cassie felt as if she’d been punched in her gut. He knew full well how Cassie felt about her mother, how much she wished she were here, how much she wished she’d known her. To use that as a weapon to win an argument . . .

It was a low blow. Cassie shook her head as if she could shake out his words.

“I’m not leaving,” she said. “This is my home.”

Her father—who shied away from feelings so much that he had delegated her childhood to her grandmother and had left her puberty to a stack of bio textbooks—her father had tears in his eyes. “Not anymore,” he said softly.

“It can’t be anymore.”

32

Two Latitude 70˚ 49’ 23” N Longitude 152˚ 29’ 25” W Altitude 10 ft.

Cassie blinked at her clock: three a.m.

What were they doing? It sounded as if the whole station staff were stomping around outside her door. She could have sworn she’d even heard a plane engine. She tossed off her covers and raked her fingers through her hair. She knew she looked like a redheaded Medusa, and she was sure she had bags under her eyes the size of golf balls. She was wearing long johns, mismatched socks, and an oversize T-shirt that read: alaska—where men are men and women win the iditarod. Cassie yanked on pants and a sweater over her long johns and T-shirt before she stuck her head out her door. She spotted Owen scurrying down the hallway. “Hey,” she called to him. “It’s three a.m.” She nearly added, And it’s my birthday.

“Max’s plane is here,” Owen said. “Just landed. We’d have had more warning if you had fixed the antennae instead of going off to chase trouble.”

She winced. She deserved that. After all, she’d wrecked his equipment.

His crankiness was justified. But what did he mean that Max’s plane was here? Max wasn’t scheduled for a visit. . . . Oh. He’d come for Cassie.

33

Her heart sank. How had Dad convinced him to come so fast? Before the budget cuts, Max had been on the station’s staff. He’d flown his Twin Otter for them when Cassie was little; he’d been her earliest babysitter, practically an uncle to her—but now he worked for a commercial runway in Fairbanks. He couldn’t take off on zero notice. She hadn’t imagined Dad would call for him immediately.

Cassie brushed past Owen and headed for the research lab. She had to put a stop to this right now. She had to talk sense into Dad and convince Max to return to Fairbanks without her.

Before Cassie reached the lab door, she heard boxes scrape across linoleum, and the door flew open. “Cassie-lassie!” Max bellowed. He strode down the hall and scooped her up into a bear hug. He swung her in a half circle, then thumped her shoulder blades as if he were burping her as he set her down.

“Did you find the Abominable Snowman?” he asked, their old routine.

“Stuffed and mounted,” she said, on cue. He grinned at her, his white teeth startlingly bright against his dark skin. She automatically grinned back. She’d forgotten how much she’d missed seeing him.

Maybe this is a normal visit, Cassie thought as Max beamed at her. Maybe it’s unrelated to my argument with Dad. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

And maybe there really is an Abominable Snowman. She shook her head at herself. Max wasn’t here by coincidence, not within mere hours of Dad’s pronouncement. She shouldn’t bother trying to fool herself.

“Got a surprise for you,” Max said.

“Yeah?” He hadn’t said it like it was a bad surprise, but her stomach knotted as if it knew this couldn’t be good.

34

Cassie heard a familiar tap from the doorway—a cane. Gram. Max had brought Gram. Cassie wished she could be happy. She hadn’t seen her grandmother in months, and now she was here. Ordinarily, this would have been a wonderful surprise: Max and Gram, her two favorite people in the world, were here. But now she was going to have to tell her grandmother face-to-face that she didn’t want to live with her in Fairbanks.

She shouldn’t have told Dad about the bear walking into the ice. If she had simply left that detail out of her report . . .

Gram hit her mahogany cane sharply on the floor. “I haven’t shriveled to nothing. Come hug me.” She held out her arms.

Forcing herself to smile, Cassie bounded the remaining steps to the lab door. She wrapped her grandmother in her arms. It was like holding a bird. Gram was almost as tall as Cassie, but her bones were tiny. She felt breakable. Cassie released her quickly.

“You’ve grown,” Gram said.

“You’ve shrunk,” Cassie responded automatically.

Gram frowned and shook her head. Like Cassie, she had a fierce frown.

Both of them had strong faces, but Gram’s skin hung loose over hers, and her hair, once as thick and red as Cassie’s, rustled like an old curtain. “Nonsense.

I’m as beautiful as the day your grandfather met me. First time in the back of his pickup, do you know what he said? ‘Ingrid,’ he said. ‘Ingrid, God Himself could not have more perfect breasts than you.’”

Cassie couldn’t help laughing. “I’ve missed you.”

“Oh, my Cassandra.” She hooked her arm around Cassie’s waist. “Let me look at you. So grown-up. Such a fine young woman now.”

35

Cassie swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “Gram . . . ,” she began.

She stopped. How did she say this without hurting Gram’s feelings? The last thing in the world she wanted to do was hurt her grandmother. “How . . .

How was your flight?”

“Idiotic FCC almost didn’t let us lift up,” Max said. “No Fed can tell me how to fly safe. Thirty years flying in the bush, and I can smell ice. It’s not like flying in the lower forty-eight . . .”

Only half-listening to Max’s rant, Cassie watched her grandmother’s face and tried to read what she was thinking. “Gram, what did Dad tell you?”

Max fell silent.

Gram plucked lint from Cassie’s wool sweater. For as long as Cassie could remember, Gram was always tidying. Gram herself was as neat as a soldier.

Her white shirt was pressed with a crease down the sleeves. She looked her neatest when she was most upset. She was looking very neat now. “Ah, my Cassandra.” Gram adjusted Cassie’s sweater, and then she took Cassie’s face in both her hands. Gram kissed her left cheek, and then her right cheek, an oddly formal gesture. Cassie pulled back. “Gram, what is it?”

“You found him,” Gram said. “You found the Polar Bear King.”

Cassie flinched as if she’d been slapped. Of all the things she’d been expecting Gram to say, that wasn’t one of them. “That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Gram said.

“Did Dad tell you I also saw Elvis?” Cassie said. “Oh, yes, the King’s taken up dog mushing. Saw him last week racing the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”

36

Gram gripped Cassie’s shoulders. “Cassandra . . .”

Dad had told them . . . what? She’d been hallucinating? She was crazy? That was how he had convinced Max and Gram to drop everything and fly here?

Max inched backward down the hallway. “I’ll just . . . let you two talk. . . . Yeah. Takeoff will be at six a.m. Um, happy birthday, by the way.” He fled through the lab door.

Some birthday. Why was everyone she loved and trusted acting crazy?

First Dad, and now Gram. . . . Gram steered Cassie away from the lab door. “Come, let’s go to your room,” Gram said. “This isn’t a public conversation.”

Yes, that was a good idea. She’d talk to Gram alone—find out what was really behind all this. There had to be an explanation for Dad’s uncharacteristic overreaction. Cassie managed a smile and tried for normalcy: “My room isn’t exactly Gram-ready.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Gram said.

Cassie banged her hip on her bedroom door, and it popped open. Socks spilled into the hall. She kicked them out of the way and switched on the bedroom light. Longjohns were draped over the dresser. Her bivy sack was wound around the bed frame. On her pillow, Mr. Fluffy, her old stuffed fox with the chewed ear, sported a roll of duct tape around his neck. Gram surveyed the wreckage. “Mmm,” Gram said. “You didn’t make your bed.”

“You can see the bed?”

Using her cane, Gram picked her way over a nest of climbing ropes.

She scooted a heap of maps off the bed and onto the floor and spread the comforter. “Fix your side, dear.”

37

Cassie really didn’t want to talk about the state of her room. She was sorry she’d mentioned it. “Gram . . . ,” Cassie began.

“Dear?” Gram repeated, more steel in her voice.

Cassie knew her: Gram wasn’t going to talk until the bed was made.

Dad had learned his implacable resolve from her. Sighing, Cassie tugged the comforter straight. “Tuck in the corner,” Gram said. Cassie obeyed. “Very nice,” Gram said. “Now, fetch your bag, dear. We need to get you packed.”

“Gram . . . It’s not that I don’t want to live with you. I just don’t want to live in Fairbanks. I want to stay here.”

“You’ll need sweaters and underwear.” Gram plucked a backpack out of the mess. She laid it open on the bed.

Stay calm, Cassie told herself. This is Gram. Cassie continued in a reasonable tone, “It’s prime season—bears are migrating back onto the sea ice. I’m needed here.”

Gram poked her cane into Cassie’s closet. “Clean or dirty?” She extracted a wool sweater and sniffed it. “You need to take better care of your clothes.”

“Gram, talk to me,” she pleaded.

Gram handed Cassie three sweaters. “Fold.”

Cassie dumped the sweaters onto her bed. Gram gave her a look, and then neatly folded the sweaters and placed them inside the backpack. Cassie fished them out again and tossed them back into the closet.

“Don’t be difficult,” Gram said. She fetched the sweaters. “Your father worries. He has always worried, the stubborn fool.” Gram refolded the sweaters.

“He wanted to shield you. He thought ignorance would protect you . . . but 38

that’s an old argument, and the point is moot now. The important thing is to get you to Fairbanks. I’ll explain everything once you’re safely there.”

Cassie felt a chill. She didn’t need protection from a fairy tale. There was no Polar Bear King. What was Gram hiding behind this ridiculous lie?

“Gram, what ‘everything’?”

“You aren’t going to make this easy, are you?” Gram said.

No, of course she wasn’t. Gram was asking her to leave her life, her home, her career, and her future. “What aren’t you telling me?” Cassie asked.

Gram sighed. “Oh, my Cassandra, he should have told you the truth a long time ago. He only wanted to protect you. We both only wanted to protect you. We merely disagreed on the best approach.” She sounded tired.

Old and tired. Cassie had never heard Gram sound like that.

“What truth?” Cassie asked.

Gram sat on the edge of Cassie’s bed like she used to when she’d tuck Cassie in at night. Gram held one of Cassie’s sweaters on her lap. “Your mother,” Gram said gently, “was the daughter of the North Wind. She bargained with the Polar Bear King, and now, on your eighteenth birthday, he’s coming for you.”

Cassie heard a roaring in her ears as her pulse pounded. Her mother, the daughter of the wind? That was only a story.

“You know it’s true,” Gram said. “You’ve seen him.”

She’d seen a bear, larger than any on record, who’d walked into solid ice.

But that didn’t mean . . . Cassie shook her head. Why was Gram doing this?

It wasn’t funny. Teasing her about the Polar Bear King, teasing her about her mother . . . It was cruel. “Don’t do this,” Cassie said.

39

“Cassandra, it is true,” Gram said. “You know I left the station because your father and I had a disagreement. This was what we fought about. I believed you should have been told the truth.”

Gram’s expression was grave. Her eyes were kind and serious. Her hands were nervously flattening the sweater on her lap. Cassie stared at her. For a brief, marvelous, crazy instant, Cassie thought, What if . . .

But no, it wasn’t true. Her mother had died in a blizzard shortly after Cassie was born. She wasn’t at some troll castle. If she were . . . If she were, if there were even a possibility that Gram’s story were true and her mother was a prisoner somewhere, then Dad would have rescued her. Cassie wouldn’t have had to grow up feeling like she was missing a slice of herself.

“You need time to think,” Gram said kindly. “I understand. It’s a lot all at once.” She patted Cassie’s shoulder. “You rest. We’ll leave in a few hours.”

Before Cassie could object again, Gram left her alone.

Cassie tossed her backpack into the closet and deposited the sweaters onto her dresser. Why had Dad and Gram invented this lie? They’d never lied to her before. But they were either lying to her now or . . .

Cassie blinked fast. Her eyes felt hot as she stared at her bed. Years ago, Gram used to sit there, a profile in the dark. Her voice, telling the story, was as familiar as a heartbeat. She’d told it every time Dad had been away from the station. Cassie had always thought that was because Dad had disapproved of fairy tales. His idea of a bedtime story was Shackleton’s journey to Antarctica. Now she was supposed to believe he’d objected to Gram telling her the truth?

40

She wished she’d caught that bear. If she had, they could’ve run tests on him, taken a blood sample, even tagged him with an ID and tracked his movements. She could have proved he was ordinary.

Maybe she still could. If she called their bluff, they’d have no excuse to force her to Fairbanks.

Without waiting for second thoughts, Cassie tiptoed out into the hall and then cut through the research lab. The fluorescents were off, but the computer screens glowed green. She heard hushed voices from the direction of the kitchen. If she were quick enough, no one would even notice she had left her room. She exited the lab, closing the door softly behind her, and then flicked on the light of the main room.

Someone stirred. “Whaa . . .”

Cassie froze. It was Jeremy. He’d fallen asleep at his desk again. “Go back to sleep,” she whispered.

“Mmmuph,” he said, closing his eyes.

She held her breath. He was the newbie—the cheechako, to use Max’s native Inupiaq. Dad and Gram wouldn’t have told him anything, she assured herself. If she acted normal, he wouldn’t be alarmed, and he wouldn’t fetch her father. She moved slowly to her desk and pulled on her Gore-Tex pants.

The pants rustled, and Jeremy’s eyes popped open again.

Jeremy peered at her blearily. “Where are you going?”

“Repair work,” she lied. “Nothing to worry about.” She shoved her feet into her mukluks and secured her gaiters over them.

“Don’t know how you can stand it out there,” Jeremy said. “It’s a wasteland. An ice desert. At least you’re getting out, eh?”

41

Her fingers faltered as she fixed her face mask. “Who told you that?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm and casual. She pulled the hood up over two wool hats—almost ready. She felt as if her insides were shouting, Hurry, hurry!

“That plane guy, Max, said you were going to undergrad.”

“Max talks too much,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” She Velcroed the throat gusset of her hood shut and then fetched her emergency kit.

The small pack held a flashlight, her ice axe, extra flannels, and a few food rations. With this, she could search the pack ice for several days, if that’s what it would take.

“Just because this is all you know, it doesn’t mean this is all there is,” he said. “Don’t you want a normal life? You’ve never lived outside this station.

You’ve been homeschooled your entire life. Don’t you want to get out there, meet kids your age, do what normal people do?”

She loved the ice. She loved tracking bears. “This is home,” she said shortly.

“I thought this would be my home. Coming here was my dream, you know, for years. But now . . . Hey, whatever, dreams change. Nothing wrong with that. I’m applying for a nice, cozy postdoc back at UCLA.” “Good for you,” she said. Her dreams weren’t changing. Nothing and no one—Dad, Gram, Max—could force her to leave her life here. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said as she opened the inner door and shut it behind her.

For a brief second, she debated staying inside and trying to talk sense into Dad and Gram, but words had failed to convince them before. No, she thought, if I don’t act now, I’ll be on a plane to Fairbanks in three hours. She 42

couldn’t let that happen. She opened the outer door and stepped out into the Arctic.

Cold seared into her, slicing her, and her face mask instantly frosted.

She took a deep breath of night air. It felt brittle and sharp in her throat, as if the air were filled with shards of glass. This was exactly what she needed to clear her mind. The piercingly cold air soothed her, as it always did.

Standing within the station floodlights, she faced out toward the blue darkness. Silence surrounded her. “Polar Bear King!” she shouted into the silence. “I’m coming to find you! Do you hear me?”

She waited for a moment, listening. Snow drifted over her feet.

Rubbing frost from her goggles, she scanned the darkened ice fields. Wind blew surface snow over the moonlit snowbanks and ridges. Blue shadows oscillated over the ice.

Cassie shook herself. She hadn’t honestly expected the so-called Polar Bear King to answer, had she? That was crazy. Kinnaq, she remembered— that was the Inupiaq word for lunatic.

Just because she had let her overtiredness make her (for an instant) want to believe in a magical polar bear, that did not mean she was snow-crazed.

Just because she’d wanted Gram’s story to be real and her mother to be alive, it didn’t make her crazy. She’d find that bear and prove to Gram, Dad, and herself that he was ordinary. Cassie marched toward the shed with the snowmobiles— —and a shadow rose over her.

Towering over her, the bear was immense. He blotted out the stars. In the station light his fur was luminescent, his silhouette glowing as if he were 43

some Inupiaq spirit-god, Mashkuapeu himself. Suddenly, the Arctic didn’t feel big enough. It collapsed down to just her and the polar bear.

He opened his jaws, and she glimpsed white canines and a black tongue.

A massive paw came down toward her, and she dodged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glint drop from the polar bear’s claws. As the glint hit the snow, the bear twisted, dropped to four paws, and retreated to the edge of the station floodlights.

Cassie looked down at her feet, at the snow where the bear had stood.

Dusting snow blew into the concave curves of his tracks. In the curve of a paw-print lay a silver needle with an orange tail, the tranquilizer dart.

44

45

Blood Ninja Blood Ninja is the story of Taro, a boy from a simple fishing village who is rescued by a ninja when his father is murdered, and who finds himself dragged into a bitter conflict between the rival lords ruling Japan. What is the connection between Taro and Lord Tokugawa? What could an ancient curse on the Emperor’s house have to do with a fisherman’s son? Where will Taro’s love for the evil Lord Oda’s daughter Hana lead them both? What is the Buddha Ball, and why are men and gods alike willing to kill for it? And is Taro, a peasant-turned-ninja, destined to become Shogun?

Nick Lake is a children’s book editor at Harper UK. He received his degree in English from Oxford University. Blood Ninja was inspired by his interest in the Far East, and by the fact that he is secretly a vampire ninja himself. Nick lives with his wife in England.

Though Taro remained worried about his bow, he wasn’t able to sneak out the next night either, nor the night after that.

He was too exhausted.

The first morning after they arrived, it seemed like Taro had hardly slept when he was awoken by a rough hand shaking his shoulder. He looked up to see Shusaku looking down on him. “Come on,” the ninja said. “It’s time you learned to handle yourself with weapons. Now that we are in the crater, we can train before nightfall, thanks to the caves and the covering over the main hall.”

Hiro, Yukiko, Heiko and Little Kawabata joined them, though Little Kawabata wouldn’t speak to Taro, or even meet his eye. In that first lesson, Shusaku showed them the basic principles of taijutsu – unarmed combat.

Hiro challenged Yukiko to a fight straight after their lesson.

He lost.

Soon they progressed to the sword, which all of them took to naturally, as if they had spent their early childhoods wielding katana, and had simply forgotten about it. Initially they were given wooden bokken to fight with —unable to cut flesh, but hard and heavy enough to break bones if the attacker—and the defender— were not careful. However, Taro progressed so quickly with the main forms of kenjutsu that Taro soon entrusted him with a katana. Taro loved the elegant blade, despite the nicks and scratches in its body. He slept with it next to him, encased in a silver-chased sheath.

Unfortunately Little Kawabata, too, was rapidly fighting with a real sword.

47

When Shusaku wasn’t instructing them, Yukiko and Hiro would go off together, wrestling or sparring. They were both excellent sword-fighters and often as Heiko and Taro played there was the ringing sound of metal on metal, for they had all been allowed to practice with real swords, so quickly had they progressed.

Though neither of them were as good as Taro.

He had never felt anything like the joy—the rightness—that he felt when wielding the sword. It was one with him; it was meditation in movement. There were the stars of the crater, and the tedium of lessons; there were the games of Go with Heiko, who had taught him to play, and the conversations with his new friends; but always in his mind’s eye there was the flash of steel.

And always there was the joy of swift movement, the cutting of the air.

But on this occasion Shusaku did not want to spar. He wanted to show Taro one of his own kata—a formal sequence of movements that a swordsman would practice over and over again, until its execution flowed from a particular mistake of the opponent’s as quickly and unstoppably as ripples from a stone dropped in water.

“Can’t we just spar?” asked Taro. “Learning sequences by heart is not going to help me in the real world.”

Shusaku sucked his teeth. “Most sword fights in the real world,” he said, “are over before your heart can beat twice. If you practice these katas every day, so that you can perform them without thinking, you will have an advantage over your opponent.”

Taro nodded, unconvinced. He liked the random spontaneity of sword48

fighting, the sense that the fight itself was alive, evolving all the time out of the movements and snap decisions of its violent actors. Katas seemed to him boring and rigid, like the rules that governed a Geisha’s life. They didn’t seem suited to ninjas, who should be cunning and unpredictable, rather than restricting their motions to rote patterns.

Shusaku gave a little bow, which Taro returned. Then the ninja raised his sword. “Get ready,” said Shusaku. “Hold your sword as you normally would, ready to block me if necessary.”

Taro warily drew near, his eyes fixed on the ninja, his sword trembling slightly in his hand. “Good,” said Shusaku. “Now, imagine we are deadly enemies. Try to destroy me quickly. React as you normally would.” As he said this, he moved forwards, tipping his sword a fraction to his right, but keeping his eyes low, on Taro’s face.

Taro glanced down at the ninja’s feet, looking for the tell-tale muscle contractions the older man had taught him about – the ones that revealed a person was about to spring forwards, lowering his sword.

Shusaku’s feet were perfectly flat on the ground.

Taro grinned inside. He recognised the ninja’s intention—Shusaku wanted him to believe that he was about to lunge, but in fact he was going to slash across Taro’s body. Taro had seen the slight movement of the sword’s tip, and knew that the ninja planned a strike from the right—and that, by readying himself for it, he was leaving an opening. Seizing his chance, Taro snapped his sword up and then round in a tight curve, through the channel of empty air that led to the ninja’s neck.

But Shusaku’s sword was suddenly raised in a vertical block that stopped 49

Taro’s blade, and then in a continuation of that blocking motion the ninja flipped his wrist over, bringing his sword under Taro’s.

Taro looked down.

Shusaku’s blade was pressed against his stomach.

“That,” said Shusaku, “is a kata. I call it the high-block-and-gut-slash.

And if we were fighting for real, you would be dead.”

Taro swallowed. The whole thing had been so fast – he’d moved to exploit the man’s opening, and a heart-beat later he had been dead. In theory, anyway.

“Show me again,” he said.

Shusaku’s eyes sparkled. “Of course. But remember, this one only works if your opponent underestimates you.”

Taro blushed. He had underestimated the ninja. He had thought he’d learned so quickly, had grown so strong. But of course he’d only been here a few days, and it was arrogant to think that he would have advanced so far in such a short time.

Taro lifted his sword.

“This time,” said Shusaku, “you try it. Come a little closer to me, then let your sword-tip waver a little to your right, as if you’re planning a high slash.

Not too much. Yes, that’s it. Now I think I can strike at your neck…”

He went for the same attack that Taro had adopted, and Taro raised his sword to block it. Then he tried the wrist-flip to turn the block into a low belly-strike, but he wasn’t quick enough and Shusaku blocked him in return, before bringing his sword to shivering rest against the skin of Taro’s neck.

50

It felt cold.

“Not fast enough,” said Shusaku. “That’s why you practice over and over.”

Taro nodded, a little ashamed. “Yes. I see. Sorry for— But Shusaku waved the apology away. “Until you see how quickly it is possible to lose a swordfight, you don’t know how important it is to be quick, and to move without thinking. The kata should become unthinking reactions – just the way that your body responds to certain attacks. In a way, they’re spontaneous. It just takes a lot of boring practice to make them so.”

He laughed.

Taro laughed too, although the muscles of his forearms ached already.

“So,” he said. “This wrist-flick…”

Shusaku stepped closer and put one hand on either side of Taro’s wrist.

“You turn it like this,” he said, pressing down with his top hand. “As it goes over, push your forefinger forewards – that will help the sword to bite forwards in a low arc, and you only have to give a little push with your arm to finish the slash.”

Taro tried it, and again he wasn’t quick enough, and again Shusaku put his hands on his wrist to show how it was done. Taro was reminded of when his father had taught him spear-fishing, patiently repeating the wrist-flick time after time, as they shivered in the cold water of the bay.

At that thought, he fumbled the movement, and more than just being slow this time, he twisted his hand too hard and caused the sword to drop from his fingers. He cursed.

“Something wrong?” asked Shusaku, concern in his eyes, and again 51

Taro was reminded of his father’s solicitude, the way that he had so patiently showed Taro time after time how to make the spear leap forwards from his hand.

And now his father was dead, and he was standing in a crater many ri from home, practising katas with an assassin who had not only subtracted Taro from his old life, but had imposed on it too a new and terrible addition —a real father, a samurai, a stranger.

But for Taro there would only ever be one real father.

Ignoring the sword at his feet, he stepped back from Shusaku’s wellmeaning touch as from a snake.

Shusaku bent to pick up the sword. “It takes time,” he said. “You’ll get it eventually.”

Taro walked away, not bothering to tell the ninja that it wasn’t the kata he was worried about.

He knew that he would get it in the end. After all, it was a matter of coordination and speed, and those things were in his power. What was not in his power was to bring his father back to life, to speed that cursed pigeon towards the mountain, with its news of his mother.

Taro walked over to where Yukiko and Hiro sparred with swords.

Yukiko parried a strike from Hiro and, pirouetting lithely, executed a perfect movement that would have taken off Hiro’s head if she hadn’t stopped the blade just in time. He held his hands up in surrender.

Hiro stomped over to Taro.

“Commiserations,” said Taro.

Hiro grimaced. “She cheats.”

52

“What, by being more skilled than you?”

“Exactly. I’m bigger and stronger than her and she knows it, so she should lose. But she doesn’t. Therefore: she is a cheat.”

Taro laughed. “One of these days you’ll best her, my friend.”

“One of these years, maybe,” said Yukiko, walking past. Hiro gave her a push and soon they were fighting again.

But Hiro had not been the wrestling champion of Shirahama for nothing. The next day, Hiro came swaggering up to Taro, Yukiko rolling her eyes behind him. “I beat Yukiko at sword fighting and wrestling just now,” he said. “She is like a child before my superior skill.”

Yukiko jabbed him with her elbow. “One victory, and he thinks

he’s Yamato Takeru.” This was a famous prince who had defeated many enemies, and who had fought in later life with the legendary sword Ame-noMurakumo-no-Tsurugi – the Gathering Clouds of Heaven – which Susanoo the kami of storms had taken from the belly of the sea serpent.

“Two victories!” said Hiro.

“Two in one day only counts as one. Think of the number of days on which I have beaten you.”

Hiro sighed good-naturedly.

Taro was glad for Hiro that he had found a new friend, while a

small, jealous part of him wished that he could keep the big wrestler to himself. But so much had changed for Hiro – it was good that he had found a measure of happiness in his new life.

All in all, life at the crater was good – though something always seemed unreal about it, to Taro; like the death of his father and the unknown fate 53

of his mother existed in some other world, some other realm of samsara, far from this hidden place.

It was a sort of magical realm in which they lived, learning to fight and to move in harmony, no longer bound by the twin worlds of day and night, but living in a constant semi-darkness, illuminated by torches. Taro felt that he would like to remain here forever, though the thought of his mother was always at the back of his mind, and once he had dreamed a terrible dream that his father, the one who had brought him up, still lived – that his death was a colossal mistake – and he had come to Taro with open arms, saying I am here, don’t cry any more.

Then Taro had woken and his father was still dead, and he had cried till he thought the moisture would be wrung from his body, and he would be wrinkled and dry, like a piece of fruit left too long in the sun.

He would have liked to have stayed in that dream forever, by the sea, with his father fishing its depths and his mother always by the fire in the evening. But he had been rudely awakened.

And unfortunately, it was about to happen again.

Taro was woken by a rough hand on his shoulder. Shusaku leaned over him.

“Taijitsu. Get up.”

Taro followed, bleary eyed, as Shusaku woke the others and began clearing a space in the middle of the weapons hall.

First, Shusaku explained that no ninja ever fought entirely unarmed.

This, in fact was one of their great secrets.

54

Each of them were given a wooden ring to wear on their right hands.

The ring – called a shobo – was rough and unevenly textured, designed to stand out from the hand. It could be used to strike pressure points on an opponent’s body, immobilising or even killing him.

Shusaku stood, his shadow shivering under the candlelight. “First I’m going to show you some grips and throws. These are moves that send an assailant’s body – or part of it – in an unexpected direction. Now… I’ll need two volunteers.” His gaze travelled around the room, until it came to light on Little Kawabata. “Come on,” he said. “Let us see if you’re as good as your father. He was a talented fighter before he got so fat.”

Little Kawabata, scowling, came forwards.

Shusaku once again scoured the room. Then he called Taro forwards.

Heiko gave Taro a little smile as he passed her. “Make sure you beat him,” she said.

Little Kawabata turned and gave her a nasty smile. “The only one doing any beating will be me.”

The two boys stood in the middle of the cave and stared at each other.

Taro saw malice and amusement in the other boy’s piggy eyes. He knew that Little Kawabata had hated him almost on first sight – for making the arrow shot that had secured his entry to the school; for being already a vampire; for showing up his father by so easily passing the test he set him.

Shusaku stepped up to Little Kawabata. “Strike out with your arm flat, as if to hit me with a direct punch, then keep your arm outstretched.” The chubby boy did so and Taro saw that the layer of fat was deceptive – Little Kawabata was fast. And strong.

55

Shusaku put his two hands out, placing one under Little Kawabata’s wrist, palm up, and one above it, palm down. He rolled his hands in opposite directions and Little Kawabata’s legs gave away as he screamed a high-pitched scream. Shusaku helped him up, then showed him how to place his hands in order to do the same thing. The teacher put his own arm out and Little Kawabata demonstrated the move, forcing the older man to the ground. Shusaku nodded. “Well done.”

Taro walked over to them, anxious to learn the trick himself, but Shusaku waved him back. “Patience,” he said. “You will learn it soon enough. For the moment, I want you to keep trying to strike Little Kawabata. Let us see how well he can do it when it really matters.”

Shusaku positioned Taro right in front of Little Kawabata. “Alright.

Start punching.”

Taro let out a right-hand strike to the head which was too fast for the clan leader’s son – Little Kawabata yelped and clutched his ear. But Taro’s next shot – a lefty to the solar plexus – was caught in a vice like grip and suddenly Taro’s upper body was twisting despite itself and he fell to the ground. He got up again and lashed out instantly – his vampire’s speed allowing the upper cut to find Little Kawabata’s chin. Little Kawabata staggered backwards and Taro moved in to press the advantage, but the other boy wasn’t only fast, he was a quick learner, and Taro’s next few strikes were all easily caught, depositing him on the floor. The pain was not as bad as it might have been if he were human, but bad enough – with the humiliation – to sting.

Taro struck out viciously, again and again, and each time he was 56

parried or caught, and his muscles sang out with the strain of the torsion.

Involuntarily, he began to sob. Why wasn’t Shusaku putting a stop to it?

He fixed his eyes on Little Kawabata’s, gathering his strength. His blood thundered in his ears and his arms throbbed. Surely with the speed and agility that came with his vampire nature, he should be able to defeat this fat, spoiled child? He grimaced, spat out a mouthful of blood. The last fall had been a hard one.

Collecting all his qi, Taro let fly with a feint to the left, followed by a devastating blow to the right, which would have connected with Little Kawabata’s neck and probably knocked him out, if not killed him by snapping his spine – but the leader’s son twisted out of the way and caught Taro’s arm as it passed him, putting all his body weight into twisting it.

Taro crashed to the ground, his arm flapping as he tried to push himself upright again.

Little Kawabata laughed. “You’re not fishing now, boy. I’m harder to catch than the sprats in your little bay.”

Taro grunted.

“Get up,” said Little Kawabata. “Your feigned injury insults me.”

Taro turned his head – his arm was hanging at an unpleasant angle from his shoulder. Dislocated. He got up painfully, shaking his head. Surely Shusaku had to stop it now? He was hopeless. He was already a vampire, and he couldn’t even beat this stupid, podgy brute.

He staggered to his feet, then stumbled forwards. He pawed at Little Kawabata, looking for purchase, staining the fat boy’s robes with blood.

Little Kawabata sneered. “Peasant. Your manners are a disgrace. No 57

doubt you tricked my father, too – put the idea in his head of testing you with the bow, somehow. You will pay for your insolence.”

Taro caught his breath. Yet, as much as he hated the boy, he couldn’t help feeling jealous. At least you have a father, he felt like saying. All he said, though, was “Ugh…” “Stop,” said Shusaku. Taro gave a little whimper of relief.

Thank the gods…

He looked up through a film of sweat and blood – not all of it his own – and saw Shusaku staring grimly at him. Then the sensei threw a heavy stick to Little Kawabata – the kind used for sparring before the kids were trusted with swords. At the same time, he held out his other hand to Taro. “Hand me your shobo. You will fight now with no weapons.”

“What?” said Taro. “Why? Why are you doing this to me?”

“Be quiet. Hand me the ring.”

Taro pulled the wooden ring off his finger and handed it to the man who had rescued him, the man who had escorted him half way across the country, the man he had trusted. He was incredulous. Was Shusaku trying to get him killed? To make a martyr of him in front of the class and so prove some kind of point? Or was he hoping to exhaust Little Kawabata’s supply of hatred, by making Taro his punching bag for the afternoon? If so, Taro thought the teacher was badly mistaken. No amount of one-sided combat could satisfy Kawabata’s bloodlust. He would not be content until Taro was dead.

And if he died, he would never find his mother again.

Someone had stepped up from the ring of students – Hiro. “What are you doing to him?” he asked. “He has no weapon. This is unfair.”

58

Shusaku whirled on Hiro. “Sit. Down. Now.” His voice was deadly cold.

“A ninja always has a weapon.” He turned to Taro. “Remember that. You always have a weapon.” Then he put a restraining hand on Hiro’s chest and snapped his fingers in Little Kawabata’s direction. “You are free to attack as you wish,” he said to the grinning boy. Little Kawabata advanced on Taro, brandishing the stick and grinning.

Little Kawabata lay on the cold, hard floor, listening to Shusaku’s hateful voice.

How this man had taken over the clan was beyond him. His father had told him the whole story – how he had sent a ninja girl named Mara to protect Lord Tokugawa, and how Lord Shusaku Endo had learned her secret and forced her to turn him, before murdering her in cold blood.

The devious brilliance of it was that no one could accuse him, because everyone had to pretend she was only a serving girl. And for the same reason, Little Kawabata’s father had never been able to prove what Lord Endo had done – Lord Endo claimed that the girl had been killed by some mysterious agent working for Lord Oda, and how could anyone contradict him? No one had seen her die.

But for Lord Endo to become such a strong vampire that he ended up leading the clan, at the expense of the man whose envoy he had tortured and killed?

That was unbearable.

And now, to add insult to injury, Shusaku had brought another samuraivampire to the mountain. Tokugawa’s son, of all people. This would destroy the clan, Little Kawabata was sure of it. How could Lord Oda allow such a boy to live – how could Lord Tokugawa allow it? He was willing to use the ninjas, but to have one as a son? It was grotesque.

59

Little Kawabata’s head was aching terribly and his mouth felt filled with broken glass. But he felt strong – he felt good. His father had never succeeded in ridding himself of Shusaku; but his father had always relied on words. Little Kawabata thought words were perhaps not the best way to deal with one’s enemies.

He spat something white out onto the floor – a tooth. In his mind he still heard Shusaku saying even vampires can be hurt. He was relying on it.

60

Blows rained down on Taro and he covered his head with his hands. He thought he felt bones splintering in his fingers. He barely even cared. His world had shrunk to this cave – its hard rock floor, its dusty crevices, its leering carvings.

He crawled towards where he thought Shusaku was, his broken hands scraping claw-like at the rock. He could dimly hear Hiro, Yukiko and Heiko shouting at the master, calling on him to stop the rout. He couldn’t make them out – his eyes were half-closed by bruises, his cheeks and nose swollen from numerous blows. Blood trickled into his right eye.

What had Shusaku meant by that? You always have a weapon… Was he supposed to meditate, make a mudra of protection with his shaking hands?

Tentatively, he formed the mudra for banishing evil – hand outstretched, palm out. He was on his knees with his hand stuck out towards Little Kawabata; the boy simply smashed it down with his stick, sending a jarring pain right down Taro’s arm and pinning it to the ground.

Little Kawabata turned, his stick still trapping Taro’s hand, readying a spinning kick that would catch Taro in the jaw. A drip from the rock ceiling landed on Taro’s forehead, cold and slick, like an intimation of mortality.

Taro thought about that little drop.

You always have a weapon.

Moving so quickly he felt his arm reach out before he was conscious of the desire to move it, Taro scrabbled at the floor and came up with a handful of dust, in which nestled a couple of sharp stones. He could feel them pricking at his hand – he could also feel the bones knitting already, a warm spreading sensation as the fingers healed. He grinned, tasting blood 61

that dripped into his mouth. In an instant, his warmth, his compassion, his pity, all fell from him like vain ornaments.

He was not himself; in the space his body normally occupied was a spectre that thought only of blood and violence.

He moved.

Little Kawabata’s head turned towards Taro before the rest of his body as he unleashed a textbook spinning kick, lining up the target before bringing his foot round. His eyes just had time to widen in surprise as Taro surged upwards and towards him, knocking the fat boy’s stick aside and throwing a handful of glittering, wicked rock dust into his eyes.

Little Kawabata screamed and fell blindly backwards – he had kept only one leg to the ground as he turned into his kick, and now he toppled like a tree, hitting his back hard against the stone floor. Immediately, Taro was on him, grinning like a lunatic through a mask of blood and tears. The vampire held the black stick in his right hand, and as Little Kawabata watched, powerless, Taro swung it in a hard, low arc. Little Kawabata felt his head snap to the side, then darkness descended like a sheet of heavy rain.

Just before he sank into dark water, Little Kawabata had one thought, which echoed like a mantra.

I’ll kill him.

Taro stood shakily. He dropped the stick, then knelt by Little Kawabata.

He felt the boy’s pulse. Weak, but present. He staggered over to Shusaku.

The ninja smiled at him and put a hand under his arm to support him.

“When I say that you always have a weapon, I really mean it,” he said.

“You always have your mind with you – your greatest weapon. And it’s 62

amazing what your mind can find to fight with, even in an empty room.

Or a cave. Very rarely are you ever completely unarmed—even if you lose your shobo.”

Shusaku summoned Hiro and handed Taro to him. Taro felt a little better as soon as he felt his friend’s hands under his armpits. He walked past the other students, Hiro taking most of the weight off his feet. He passed Yukiko, who looked ashen, and Heiko, whose eyes were lit by a kind of pained triumph. He smiled weakly at them.

“Take him to the sick room,” said Shusaku. “He will need patching up.

Even vampires can be hurt.”

63

64

Seven Rays Beth Michaels isn’t sure when it all began, but she’s pretty sure that the pink dots came first. Pink dots everywhere in her vision, clouding the people who stood before her. And then, little movie screens started to play, telling her more than she ever wanted know about their lives. Now, she can’t even eat a hamburger without seeing how the poor cow met his maker. As she approaches her eighteenth birthday, her visions just keep getting worse. And when a little gold envelope shows up proclaiming the words YOU ARE MORE THAN YOU THINK YOU ARE, she starts to do the super-freak. What does all of this mean? It means she’s in for a long senior year.

Jessica Bendinger is a movie writer, producer, and director who lives in Los Angeles who has written such screenplays as Bring it On and Stick It. This is her first teen novel.

There are some things you can’t unsee. I don’t know when I started seeing things. I don’t know exactly when the little flickers started popping up, demanding my attention, mucking up my vision. I really don’t remember.

Which is annoying, because you think you’d remember the first time your life was about to change irrevocably. But you don’t. Because when your personal cosmos explodes, you don’t remember precisely when the match first strikes the tinder. Or when the wick on the TNT gets lit. Me? I just remember pink dots. Stupid pink dots.

The only dots I’d seen previously were dotted lines, where I signed my name: Elizabeth Ray Michaels. Beth to those who knew me. Elizabeth to those who didn’t. I’m the only child of divorced parents, who neither speak to one another nor interact. This is a fact my over-protective, hardworking mother assured me was better than dodging my father’s fists and his screaming. It is also a fact I’ve learned not to question. In my seventeen years, I’ve mastered one thing: the art of staying out of trouble, and a knack for insanely good grades. That’s two things. Two things that were about to change faster than a fourteen-year-old boy’s voice. And a hundred times more awkwardly. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I don’t remember if my eye-flashes first started when my mom blew a gasket over the fact that I didn’t ever cut or style my long hair. Don’t get me wrong: I brushed it and loved it. I had been growing it since I was seven. It was dirty blonde, long and shiny, and the only thing I appreciated about my looks. Ever since reading that guys preferred long hair? I’d been growing mine. Superficial and shallow, I know, I know, but my hair was like my beauty raft: I clung on to it for dear life. Once Mom had tricked me into 66

cutting it by giving me a certificate to a salon in Chicago. When I used it towards a mani-pedi? She ragged on me, and there was a red, flashing dot.

Like, a flashing red smoke-alarm light that didn’t stop for several seconds.

On her head. The second visual flare was when my bestie Shirl wouldn’t admit she’d lost my favorite bag. She’d borrowed it. And failed to return it.

Period. Okay. So, second to my hair? I loved my stuff. I didn’t have a lot of it, but what I did have? I adored. My old stuffed animals, my clothes, my books, my shoes, my bags. We couldn’t afford much, I treasured everything and took good care of it. I guess I took “pride of ownership” a little too seriously at times, because I began naming things. ‘Betty’ was the name of my favorite bag. So, when Shirl “lost” Betty and wouldn’t admit it? This blast of dots went off. “You treat your stuff like it’s alive, Beth,” she was railing on me like she always did when she’d messed up, “Who names their stuff? You’d think they were pets the way you dote on them, it’s ridic.

And who do you think you are? Are you really accusing me of lying about something I could totes incredibly easily replace, anyway?” My things were like my pets. Betty was my fave and she was gone. And I was pretty sure Shirl was lying about it.

But that was all eclipsed by the fact Shirl was covered in pink dots...tiny dots, pancake-sized dots, quarter-sized dots, nickel-sized dots, penny-sized and micro-sized dots. She was covered in all size and variety of translucent, Pepto-Bismol pink dots. I was blinking so much at her she asked, “Are you developing eyelash Tourette’s, or what?” Then the dot-o-vision got all fuzzy and stopped. Sadly, eyelash Tourette’s was not to be the diagnosis. Or the live-agnosis.

67

Weird crap began popping in, out and around people in my field of vision every day for weeks. I was terrified to tell my mother (who had a tendency to become hysterique about any and everything), so I kept my mouth shut. I was tripping. Tuh-ripping. Although I knew there had to be a logical explanation for what was happening, I probably wasn’t going to discover it in my crappy high school’s version of AP Chem. Which wasn’t actually offered at my school, but (drumroll, please)…at the fabulously craptastic local community college! In fabulously craptastic New Glen, Illinois! Having sailed through high-school with a 4.1 GPA, I finished Senior year as a Junior. The faculty decided my time was better spent offcampus in AP classes then repeating classes I’d already straight A-ced. I’d be spending most of my last year in high school as an exotic export: A New Glen High School Senior dominating the academic scene at NGCC (otherwise known as No Good Criminal College). By the way, there is nothing less popular than a high-school kid in a college class crammed with college-aged underachievers. I was an interloper doing something my classmates had never dreamed of: graduating early.

It was the only thing I’d ever done early. I’d developed late, shot up late and shot out late. Shirl and I were the last girls in high school to have chests that weren’t concave. We were never the cutest girls or the hottest girls or the popular girls, the weirdest girls or the most annoying girls. You’d have to matter to someone, somewhere to be any of those things. And we didn’t matter. To anyone, anywhere. Not when we met at New Glen Elementary, not at New Glen Middle School, and not at New Glen High. We were, pretty much, invisible.

68

In private, Shirl was a drama queen, constantly battling the non-existent five pounds she had to lose, or complaining about her bad skin that was perfectly clear. She did it to combat her biggest fear, which she vocalized regularly: “We are becoming snore pie with yawn sauce, Beth! C’mon, let’s do something spontaneous and unforgettable!” Which usually involved the exciting rush of mainlining coffee at the local mall.

Shirl’s hobby was the cool kids. She pined for invitations to their parties, shopped where they shopped, knew where they hung out and where they worked. She studied them like they were constellations in a telescope: she understood what they were and how they behaved and could forecast their movements better than an astronomer. The difference between me and Shirl was simple: she wanted to be a part of their solar system. I wanted to get the hell out of that universe. And into university.

There was, however, one particular planet that Shirl revolved around: Ryan McAllister. Ryan Mac was the younger half of the lethally gorgeous, perpetually delinquent Mac Brothers. Stunning and troubled, athletic and not-so-bright, Ryan and his older brother Richie McAllister were legends around New Glen. They had dreamy hair, dreamy eyes and the kind of sad family story that let them get away with anything. I didn’t know the details, but Shirl swore their father abandoned the family under some kind of mob death threat involving guns and gambling debt. Their mother was in and out of rehab, and the boys were given the kind of free pass that is handed out to heart-stopping hotties with tragic life stories.

And how Ryan worked it! Ryan McAllister was the sworn nemesis to Promise rings anywhere in a hundred-mile radius. Reputed to have 69

deflowered bouquets of virgins, Ryan was legend. Arrested at fourteen, illegally driving an old motorcycle at fifteen, All-State in soccer and basketball by sixteen, Ryan Mac was drunk with power by seventeen. By his senior year, Ryan had plucked more local buds than the horticulture industry. This naughty fact was how Ryan McAllister got his very naughty nickname: the Hymenator. His conquests were legendary, and usually followed by the unfortunate and very public dangling of an unwrapped condom on the victim’s locker. Needless to say, Shirl would’ve willingly offered her rose to him without hesitation.

“I’m feeling thorny,” was her whispered giggle every time we’d cross Ryan’s path.

“Hey, Charlene,” Ryan always got Shirl’s name wrong and this didn’t deter her.

“A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet?” I squeaked out, trying to protect her fragile ego.

“He knows I exist. I’m making progress.” She was so gleeful about it. It was as if he’d just asked her out.

“Please don’t lose your ‘v’ to Ryan McAllister,” I’d beg, rolling my eyes out of worry more than anything.

“He’d have to find me first,” she’d laugh, “Unless I lost it already. Do you think my virginity is in the lost and found box in Principal Tony’s office? I haven’t seen it in a while…” she’d joke about her total lack of sexual experience. But underneath Shirl’s self-deprecating humor I worried about the truth: she’d do anything for Ryan McAllister.

I reluctantly indulged her fixation by hanging out with her at the 70

Bordens Books at Glen Valley Mall. Ryan worked part-time at the sporting goods store next door, and I could at least study and drink coffee while Shirl obsessed and memorized Ryan’s flight pattern.

There wasn’t one cool kid who Shirl didn’t know something about.

Grenada Cavallo—the style icon of New Glen—never wore the same thing twice, and her luxury Vuitton bags were way beyond what most kids could afford. Shirl would speculate relentlessly about their origin, “Do you think Grenada is a master shop-lifter or master web-shopper and deal-finder?”

“I no know,” was my constant refrain, “They are your specialty, not mine.” I needed to nail my physics test, and she was not letting me master Newtonian Mechanics.

Shirl was sucking down her fifth coffee, “She says it’s a wealthy aunt who works at Bergdorf ’s in New York.”

“I didn’t realize the wealthy worked in retail.”

“I know, right? Lucky her.” Shirl was buzzing, “Did you see Jake’s new tattoos?” she knew I hadn’t, “on his lower back?”

“He got a tramp stamp?” I asked, incredulous. “How tacky and how tragic!” I detested tattoos. “Why not just wear a sign that says, ‘Please think I’m cool. I’m begging you!’ How’d you see Jake’s lower back anyway?”

“He took off his shirt in P.E.” “Did the angels sing?” Shirl liked Jake. And by that, I mean Shirl liked all boys.

“Don’t mock me. You’re missing a lot, you know.” Shirl said it in a resentful voice, like I’d abandoned her and made a horrible mistake by 71

investing in my future, “And now that you’re gone, he’s probably going to be Valedictorian.”

She was trying to rile me up, and I wasn’t biting. “I have to take as many AP classes as possible. I can apply them as college credits and save money.

Gimme a break.”

It took a second to process what Shirl had said, “And since when is Jake Gorman smart?”

“His grades turned around after he was diagnosed with ADHD. They put him on Aderol, and he’s like an academic rock star now.” She was sucking on a straw, flattening the end and picking something out of her teeth with it. “You are so out of it! You can always make up college credits. But you will never make up lost time in high school. Jenny Yedgar is gaining weight. None of her clothes fit, and I have to sit behind her triple muffin top everyday in Trig. There’s some super compelling drama unfurling. Especially if you find back fat riveting.”

“You are the most compassionate person on the planet,” I laughed.

“Jenny Yedgar is a bitch. And the weight has only made her meaner.

She’s gone, like, all mad cow.” I had to get some studying done, so I pulled out the big guns.

“Was that Ryan?” ‘Twas a lie. But like clockwork, Shirl was out her chair in his phantom direction at light speed. I took a deep breath to focus.

I loved Shirl, but sometimes being friends with her was one-sided. In her favor.

As she ran towards her Ryan outpost, little blobs of squiggles were streaming behind her, blurring like runny ink. “Mine eyes are filled with 72

eye mines!” I said to myself as I tried rubbing them away. It didn’t work.

The act of blinking was becoming dangerous, setting off explosions without warning. I sneaked home early and climbed into bed.

The next day at No Good Criminal College, the eye-bomb really dropped. At 11:33AM in AP Chemistry, I thought my eyeballs were playing tricks, for sure. Because Richie Mac was smiling at me. Richard McAllister. The Richie Mac. Brother of Ryan. In all his nineteenly glory.

Eyes of an angel. Body of a god. Smile of death. He waved at me and I looked around. Nobody moved. I looked back. He waved again. At me. He shook his head as if to say, ‘Aren’tcha gonna wave back?’ As I was about to catch my breath and wave, some weirdness said hello. I mean, it’s not weird at all if the sight of dots animating before your very eyes is something you see every day. This time, the dots did something. They became giant fibers. Giant fibers braiding towards me. If the concept of three imaginary strands of nonexistent threads interlacing through thin air is normal, forgive me. They didn’t cover that in my SAT Prep Course.

Fortunately, my unexpected encounter with Beauty and The Braid got all fuzzy and blurry and disappeared in an instant.

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘hello’?” Richie said.

“Uh, hi-llo, I mean hello – “ I blurted as my cell began vibrating. My hello to His Royal Mackness was interrupted by a text. From my mom.

“Dinner 7:30. CHICKEN?” It’s like she knew I was lusting after a boy who was completely inappropriate for me in every way, busting my nonexistent flow. I resisted the urge to tell her to stop ruining my first taste of human eye candy when Richie spoke.

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“It’s rude to take a text message in the middle of a conversation -- ” he grinned. Shirl would’ve died. He was so beautiful I lost the powers of speech.

“Sorry—my mom—” and that phantom braid, I thought.

“Is she as pretty as you are?” Richie said without a hint of irony in his voice.

My blood pressure reversed direction, pausing briefly in my throat before flooding my cheeks and ears with heat. ‘I don’t know, do your teeth actually sparkle?’ Was my unspoken reply. I knew he wanted something and I couldn’t risk speaking with all the blushing taking place on my face.

“I was wondering if maybe you might wanna possibly join our study group? It’s usually after class.” I noticed two college girls loitering nearby.

They seemed less than thrilled with the prospect of me joining their band.

“I’m Richie.” Even his voice was beautiful. How was that possible? I couldn’t speak for a second, and he beat me to it.

“Do you want me to guess your name? I enjoy games.” He joked.

“I’m Beth,” I finally squeaked out.

“Hey, Beth,” he pointed his enormous hand at the duo, and I wondered how he could pick his nose with fingers that large, “That’s Elena and -- ?”

“It’s Marin, Richie. My name is Marin,” the girl who was not-Elena practically spat. Richie looked at me like, ‘sorry about her.’ He added a shrug that said, ‘How can I be expected to memorize names? I’m way too yummy for that.’

I pointed to my phone, “I have to do something today, so -” “I hope we’ll see you after the next class, then?” He must’ve been six foot 74

four, and he leaned on my table for emphasis, twinkling his freakishly long lashes at me. I felt him towering over me, pausing before saying, “Beth?”

My legs went numb. I could’ve wet my pants and never felt a thing, my body that paralyzed by his appeal. I wasn’t hypnotized, I wasn’t magnetized.

I’d been Mack-netized. I barely mustered a nod as he walked away. There I was. In Richie Mac’s Chemistry 101 study group. As my Mack-nosis wore off, I nervously slapped myself on the leg for being susceptible to his infamous charms. Maybe Shirl wasn’t crazy after all.

Before heading home, I had to pick something up at my future ex-alma mater, New Glen High School. The sign outside read, ”The ride of Illinois,” the ‘P’ in front of ‘ride’ stolen long ago and never replaced. I texted Shirl to meet me in our fave spot: the girls bathroom near the teacher’s lounge. Kids hated it because of its’ location. We loved it because it was always empty.

“What do you mean Richie Mac asked you to be in his study group?” I shouldn’t have told her. She had that tone friends get when they are jealous, and I hadn’t thought this through.

“Um, he says hello and that Ryan wants to marry you. I accepted on your behalf. I hope that’s okay,” I joked to ease the jealousy whammies coming my way, “You’ll be honeymooning in Cabo.”

“As long as the family doesn’t mind if I don’t wear white at the wedding.

I’m planning on having a lot of sex before my wedding night, FYI.” We’d each had our share of odd make-outs and exploratory sessions over the years, but we were both virgins. This drove Shirl crazy, “I’m just going to sell my virginity on eBay. It’s such a curse. How much do you think I can get for it?”

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“On the free market?”

“Ebay is not a free market. You have to put down ten percent of your reserve price, so we really need to think this through. I’m thinking a million dollars.” I spit out my latte.

“We could totally get a cool mill for your trampoline.” The word trampoline was our synonym for the revoltingly unsexy word, ‘hymen.’ I mean, a word that sounds like, “Hi, Men!” was a funny thing to call the membrane that separates virginity from sexual experience with actual men.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved men and I loved my hymen, but we preferred trampoline.

Whenever either of us said it, that was our cue to do a lame sing-a-long dance we’d made up in seventh grade. We’d cover our crotches with one hand and point our fingers sternly with the other, “Cross this line, and you’re a tramp! So do it while you’re off at camp!” Then we’d shake our butts and marvel at how stupid we were.

“How did we start calling hymens ‘trampolines’ anyway?”

“I think you’d heard some story about a gymnast busting hers doing tumbling—” “Oh, yeah, and how trampoline starts with the word ‘tramp’ and was a giant elastic thing everyone always wants to bounce on –“ “But no one wants it to break --” “—without protection!” we’d say in unison.

“Would anyone get that but us?” I asked.

“Of course not. No one’s as cool as us. Except the Mac brothers,” Shirl cooed, “So what are we wearing to our double wedding?”

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It was time to jet and so I grabbed my stuff, “We really need to see the world, Shirl. There’s a sea of guys beyond Ryan McAllister.”

“We’ll see the world on our double honeymoon. We’ll wear matching outfits.” We low-fived a goodbye and I had a weird feeling she wasn’t entirely kidding.

Per my mom’s instructions, I headed inside to the main office to pick up a package. I was promptly lectured by Mrs. Dakolias, the school secretary.

The moment she started speaking, her body grew something around it. I blinked. Out of thin air, these knotted braids sprouted around her in every direction. Like I was hallucinating.

“We’re not a post office for students. We’re not supposed to accept your mail.” She chastised, as she presented me with a trashed FedEx envelope.

The braids evaporated into nothingness before my eyes.

“They had to send it twice,” she whined, “The first time they spelled your name wrong. We couldn’t even pronounce it, let alone think it was you.”

The original addressee’s name had been crossed out and replaced

with the following: ELIZABETH RAY MICHAELS, c/o New Glen High School. I squinted at the newer Sharpie lettering, trying to decipher what name was underneath.

“What was the other name?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I don’t remember. It was some odd typo. We didn’t sign for it the first time—there was no name like that in the roster. We sent it back.” For someone who disliked kids, Mrs. Dakolias had picked a strange job.

I nodded while staring at the envelope, pondering the return address. It was from a company called 7RI, with an address on Fifth Avenue in New 77

York City. I didn’t know anyone in New York City. I didn’t even know anyone who knew anyone in New York City. It suddenly felt kind of glamorous to be getting a FedEx from the Big Apple. I hoped it was scholarship money.

‘Please, God, let it be enough for Columbia,’ I said to myself, ‘cause you know Mom can’t afford it.’

I didn’t want to open the letter in front of anyone,

“It’s probably

some scholarship information, or something.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience, Mrs. D. Thank you for your help.”

“Don’t let it happen again,” she grumped before returning to her filing.

“Beth?” It was Principal Tony, leaning out of his office and motioning for me to step inside. He was stuck in the seventies, and was the kind of guy who you called “Principal Tony”. He broke up fights and students liked him because he wasn’t a total dick.

I really wanted to open my package and I was getting impatient. He extended some paperwork my way.

“I called NGCC, I need some signatures on these,” he lectured, “Or you can’t graduate early, Beth.” I snatched the papers. Graduation – early or on time—could wait. I couldn’t wait to open my package.

I headed to the restroom, entering the big handicapped stall. I hung up my bag, put a thick layer of paper toilet seat covers on the lid and sat down. I couldn’t take my eyes off that Sharpie lettering. There was an energy coming off the envelope that gave me a big feeling. Not the creeps or anything, but just, like an anxious feeling when you are not expecting mail from a company called 7RI and they’ve sent something to your school.

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It was disconcerting, and kind of thrilling. I prayed for big bucks. Big Educational Bucks, por favor!

I pulled open the tab. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Inside, was another envelope. Gold and small, like an invitation. On the front of the envelope in very careful block lettering was the name ALEPH BETH RAY. Odd typo, indeed. It didn’t even look remotely like my name, and I started to doubt it was for me. I rechecked the packaging. That was my name on the outside, right?

I flipped it over and there was a beautiful antiquated wax seal. I carefully peeled it back so I could do forensics later. I extracted this heavy piece of pulpy, old-fashioned paper from the envelope. The message was written in that same block lettering. Only eight words. Eight words that read, “YOU ARE MORE THAN YOU THINK YOU ARE.” I flipped it over. That was it. Eight, hand-written words, eight words that couldn’t possibly be for me.

THE KEEPER Year after year, Sister Mary perfectly timed the mailing of the gold envelopes.

Patiently sending them on precise dates from the headquarters of 7RI, the process was always the same: mail a gold envelope with a specific message, and wait for a response. Replies could take days, months, sometimes years.

Sometimes they never came at all.

Mary took in the unobstructed view of the East river through her large office window. The new decorator had painted the walls an expensive shade of slate. The floors were polished to a high shine. The archives securely protected by both manual lock and digital code. Fingerprint and voice 79

recognition had been installed, and Mary delighted in the ease of inserting her finger and saying her name versus the cumbersome use of key and code.

These precautions were there for a reason, and she had nothing but the greatest respect for protocol. But Mary was tired of waiting. Someone’s life was in danger.

As she made her daily journey across the river to All Saints Hospital, Mary fidgeted. One of the biggest alignments in centuries was just around the corner. The legacy of The Seven Rays—an inevitability that was promised before promises existed—was finally about to play out. She peeked out the back of her chauffeured Town Car, hoping the sunlight would relax her. Mary didn’t get giddy. But this excitement was positively overwhelming to her.

Nothing short of everything was at stake. Mary needed Sara to hang on.

All Saints Hospital was not renowned for its successes. A small, private hospital serving up third-rate care, it employed an underpaid staff and dissatisfied patients. The facility had faced bankruptcy on more than one occasion. All Saints didn’t fit anyone’s idea of first-class, and it showed.

Which is why it was so surprising when the cancer ward started releasing cancer patients. Without cancer.

Word about the “miracles” at All Saints spread quickly through the Catholic community. Some claimed there was a weeping Madonna in the mosaic tiles, others said it had been built on a sacred burial ground. Some said it was the nun in the plain brown habit who sat with Sara David every day.

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81

Beautiful When thirteen-year-old Cassie moves to a suburb of Seattle, she is determined to leave her boring, good-girl existence behind. She chooses some dangerous new friends and is quickly caught up in their fast-paced world of drugs, sex, secrets, and cruelty. Cassie’s new existence both thrills and terrifies her. She embraces the numbness she feels from the drugs, starts sleeping with an older boy, and gets pulled into a twisted friendship triangle that is tinged with violence and abuse. Cassie is trapped in a swift downward spiral, and there’s no turning back.

Amy Reed was born and raised in and around Seattle, where she attended a total of eight schools by the time she was eighteen. Constant moving taught her to be restless and being an only child made her imagination do funny things. After a brief stint at Reed College (no relation), she moved to San Francisco and spent the next several years serving coffee and getting into trouble. She eventually graduated from film school, promptly decided she wanted nothing to do with filmmaking, returned to her original and impractical love of writing, and earned her MFA from New College of California. Her short work has been published in journals such as Kitchen Sink, Contrary, and Fiction. Amy currently lives in Oakland with her husband and two cats, and has accepted that Northern California has replaced the Pacific Northwest as her home. She is no longer restless. Find out more at amyreedfiction.com.

(one) I don’t see her coming. I am looking at my piece of pizza. I am watching pepperoni glisten. It is my third day at the new school and I am sitting at a table next to the bathrooms. I am eating lunch with the blond girls with the pink sweaters, the girls who talk incessantly about Harvard even though we’re only in seventh grade. They are the kind of girls who have always ignored me. But these girls are different than the ones on the island. They think I am one of them.

She grabs my shoulder from behind and I jump. I turn around. She says, “What’s your name?”

I tell her, “Cassie.”

She says, “Alex.”

She is wearing an army jacket, a short jean skirt, fishnet stockings, and combat boots. Her hair is shoulder length, frizzy and green. She’s tall and skinny, not skinny like a model but skinny like a boy. Her blue eyes are so pale they don’t look human and her eyelashes and eyebrows are so blond they’re almost white. She is not pretty, not even close to pretty. But there’s something about her that’s bigger than pretty, something bigger than smart girls going to Harvard.

It’s only my third day, but I knew the second I got here that this place was different. It is not like the island, not a place ruled by good girls. I saw Alex. I saw the ninth grade boys she hangs out with, their multicolored hair, their postures of indifference, their clothes that tell everybody they’re too cool to care. I heard her loud voice drowning everything out. I saw how 83

other girls let her cut in front of them in line. I saw everyone else looking at her, looking at the boys with their lazy confidence, everyone looking and trying not to be seen.

I saw them at the best table in the cafeteria and I decided to change. It is not hard to change when you were never anything in the first place. It is not hard to put on a T-shirt of a band you overheard the cool kids talking about, to wear tight jeans with holes, to walk by their table and make sure they see you. All it takes is moving off an island to a suburb of Seattle where no one knows who you were before.

“You’re in seventh grade.” She says this as a statement.

“Yes,” I answer.

The pink-sweater girls are looking at me like they made a big mistake.

“Where are you from?” she says.

“Bainbridge Island.”

“I can tell,” she says. “Come with me.” She grabs my wrist and my plastic fork drops. “I have some people who want to meet you.”

I’m supposed to stand up now. I’m supposed to leave the pizza and the smart girls and go with the girl named Alex to the people who want to meet me. I cannot look back, not at the plate of greasy pizza and the girls who were almost my friends. Just follow Alex. Keep walking. One step. Two steps. I must focus on my face not turning red. Focus on breathing. Stand up straight. Remember, this is what you want.

The boys are getting bigger. I must pretend I don’t notice their stares.

I cannot turn red. I cannot smile the way I do when I’m nervous, with my cheeks twitching, my lips curled all awkward and lopsided. I must ignore 84

the burn where Alex holds my wrist too tight. I cannot wonder why she’s holding my wrist the way she does, why she doesn’t trust me to walk on my own, why she keeps looking back at me, why she won’t let me out of her sight. I cannot think of maybes. I cannot think of “What if I turned around right now? What if I went the other way?” There is no other way. There is only forward, with Alex, to the boys who want to meet me.

I am slowing down. I have stopped. I am looking at big sneakers on ninth grade boys. Legs attached. Other things. Chests, arms, faces. Eyes looking. Droopy, red, big-boy eyes. Smiles. Hands on my shoulders.

Pushing, guiding, driving me.

“James, this is Cassie, the beautiful seventh grader,” Alex says. Hair shaved on the side, mohawk in the middle, face pretty and flawless. This one’s the cutest. This one’s the leader.

“Wes, this is Cassie, the beautiful seventh grader.” Pants baggy, legs spread, lounging with arms open, baby-fat face. Not a baby, dangerous. He smiles. They all smile.

Jackson, Anthony. I remember their names. They say, “Sit down.” I do what they say. Alex nods her approval.

I must not look up from my shoes. I must pretend I don’t feel James’s leg touching mine, his mouth so close to my ear. Don’t see Alex whispering to him. Don’t feel the stares. Don’t hear the laughing. Just remember what Mom says about my “almond eyes,” my “dancer’s body,” my “high cheekbones,” my “long neck,” my hair, my lips, my breasts, all of the things I have now that I didn’t have before.

“Cassie,” James says, and my name sounds like flowers in his mouth.

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“Yes.” I look at his chiseled chin. I look at his teeth, perfect and white.

I do not look at his eyes.

“Are you straight?” he says, and I compute in my head what this question might mean, and I say, “Yes, well, I think so,” because I think he wants to know if I like boys. I look at his eyes and know I have made a mistake. They are green and smiling and curious, wanting me to answer correctly. He says, “I mean, are you a good girl? Or do you do bad things?”

“What do you mean by bad things?” is what I want to say, but I don’t say anything. I just look at him, hoping he cannot read my mind, cannot smell my terror, will not now realize that I do not deserve this attention, that he’s made a mistake by looking at me in this not-cruel way.

“I mean, I noticed you the last couple of days. You seemed like a good girl. But today you look different.”

It is true. I am different from what I was yesterday and all the days before that.

“So, are you straight?” he says. “I mean, do you do drugs and stuff?”

“Yeah, um, I guess so.” I haven’t. I will. Yes. I will do anything he wants.

I will sit here while everyone stares at me. I will sit here until the bell rings and it is time to go back to class and the girl named Alex says, “Give me your number,” and I do.

Even though no one else talks to me for the rest of the day, I hold on to “beautiful.” I hold on to lunch tomorrow at the best table in the cafeteria. Even though I ride the bus home alone and watch the marina and big houses go by, there are ninth grade boys somewhere who may be thinking about me.

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Even though Mom’s asleep and Dad’s at work, even though there are still boxes piled everywhere from the move, even though Mom’s too sad to cook and I eat peanut butter for dinner, and Dad doesn’t come home until the house is dark, and the walls are too thin to keep out the yelling, even though I can hear my mom crying, there is a girl somewhere who has my number. There are ninth grade boys who will want it. There are ninth grade boys who may be thinking about me, making me exist somewhere other than here, making me something bigger than the flesh in the corner of this room. There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don’t know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm.

She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.

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(two) When we get to my house, I take Alex straight to my room. I don’t show her Mom asleep on the couch or the boxes piled around the apartment or the orange carpet in my parents’ room or their one small window that lets in no light, the bathroom with peeling linoleum, the kitchen that smells like mildew, the deck that barely fits our barbecue and a couple of plastic chairs. I just take her to my room that I went to work on as soon as we got here, the room I could not sleep in until everything was put away, until the posters were all put up straight, the books alphabetized on the bookshelves and sectioned into subject matter and country of origin, the bed made, the clothes folded and tucked into drawers, and everything exactly the way it should be. That was two weeks ago, but there are still boxes everywhere and Mom’s still putting the living room together even though she has nothing to do all day except watch TV and play video games.

Alex hasn’t said anything about the posters on my wall, the ones of cool bands I’ve never even listened to but made Mom buy me at the mall. She doesn’t notice the incense burner or candles or the magazine cutouts of rock stars who look like drug addicts. All she does is laugh and say, “You still have stuffed animals?” and I laugh and say, “I’ve been meaning to get rid of them,” and I shove them in the garbage can even though they don’t fit and I have to keep pushing them in while Alex walks around and touches everything. She pulls books out of my bookshelf and does not put them back in alphabetical order.

“This one’s fucking thick,” she says.

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“It’s one of my favorite books,” I tell her. “It’s about the French Revolution when all the poor people rebelled against the government and this guy who used to be a criminal escaped from prison and became good and—” “You are such a nerd,” she says with a look on her face like she is starting to think she made a mistake about me. She turns around and keeps looking through my shelves until she finds my photo album and says, “Ooh, what’s this?” and I tell her nothing because there is nothing I can say except lies.

She takes it out and sits down and stops talking to me. I sit on my bed, not breathing, waiting for the discovery, waiting for the serious look on her face to change and turn into laughter.

I can hear my mom shuffling around in the living room. Something crashes and I hear her say “Shit.” Alex laughs but she does not look up.

“Why are you in those classes?” she says as she continues to flip through the photo album of the girls who were never my friends.

“What classes?”

“The ones for smart kids.” She pulls out a picture of Angela from back home, the most popular girl in school. Angela’s wearing a cashmere sweater and skirt. Her hair is blond and perfect and she has a look on her face like anything is possible. I am suddenly embarrassed for her, embarrassed for her confidence and the sun shining on her hair, embarrassed for her soft pink skin. She has no idea there’s a place like here, a place where she is nothing.

There are a lot of photos of her in my album, taken at the sixth grade picnic, at the school play when she was the star, at elementary school graduation.

There are no pictures of me. I am always behind the camera. I am always somewhere no one can see me.

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Alex tears the picture in half, then in half again. I think it must be a joke, that it was only a piece of paper she tore. The picture must be somewhere still whole.

“Why’d you do that?” I ask her.

“I don’t like her,” she answers, and I look in her hands, and Angela is torn into four jagged pieces. “Tell me why you’re in the smart classes,” she says.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you smart?” she says, like she’s asking if I’m retarded.

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She is tearing the picture into even smaller pieces. She is looking at me while she does this, tearing slowly and smiling.

“Did your parents make you take those classes?”

“Yes,” I say, even though it’s not really true, and the answer seems to satisfy her.

“I wish we had classes together,” she says, holding up another picture.

“Me too,” I say. I cannot look upset about the picture. I must act like I know it is funny. I must act like I care about nothing.

“Who’s this?” she says.

“That’s Leslie,” I tell her, and for some reason I add, “She’s my best friend.” She wasn’t as popular as Angela, but she was always my favorite. She was the nicest one in the group, not as rich as the others and kind of quiet.

“We’re at the sixth grade picnic and we’re at the beach on the weekend before the end of school and Derrick Jenson just kicked the ball into the water and—” “Let’s burn her,” Alex says.

90

“What?” She is crumpling up Leslie in her hand.

“Let’s burn all of them. They’re not your friends anymore, are they?”

“Why not?”

“You live here now.”

“We can still be friends.”

“No you can’t. They’re on Bainbridge.” She says the name of the island like I should be ashamed of it, like it’s beneath her, like anything from there is not welcome here. And even though it’s only on the other side of Seattle, I know that I will never go back. There is nothing there for me, nothing for my mother or father. There is a lake and land and salt water between us.

There is a bridge and a ferryboat and trees and dirt roads. There is a whole other world with an entirely different version of me, a me that is not pretty, a me that no boys want, a me she would never talk to. The truth is far worse than she thinks. I am something worse than a preppy girl from an island. I am an ugly girl from an island. I am a girl who can’t talk. I am a girl with a photo album full of people who don’t even know who I am.

I don’t want Alex seeing any more of the pictures. She is right. They are not real. They are not my life. This is my life now and it is better than the pretend one. Alex is better than Leslie and Angela and all the other girls who never existed as anything except snapshots taken in secret, backs walking away, distant echoes of giggles. They are gone. They do not exist. They never existed.

“I’m your friend now, right?” she says.

“Yes.” “So you don’t need them.”

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“No.” Alex tells me to tell my mom we’re going for a walk. She puts the photo album in her backpack. Mom is putting framed pictures on top of the fake fireplace, the same ones that used to be on top of our old, real fireplace. There is a picture of her holding me as a baby when she was skinny and beautiful.

There’s one of my dad when he still had a beard, sitting in a big chair I don’t recognize. There’s one of all of us standing by the Christmas tree, my mom’s hands on my shoulders with a big smile like she’s the happiest she’s ever been, like she doesn’t even notice that I look scared and my dad looks angry like he always does.

We walk up the hill to the train tracks behind my apartment building.

We can see Lake Washington and the whole city from up here, but it looks different from when I saw it from the island. All of the buildings are backward.

We sit down on the train tracks and Alex hands me a lighter and says, “Burn them.” She starts tearing the pictures out of the album and handing them to me, one by one. I hold them in my hand, the girls I watched for years, the girls I dreamt of being, the good girls, the girls who will never know me. They are over water, through trees. They are not my friends. She is. Alex is. She is my only friend.

I am surprised how easily they burn, how quickly their faces turn to gray ash in my hands. When we are done, there is a pile of charred remains by my feet. They are ghosts of people I never knew, which the rain will wash away.

Alex throws the empty album into the bushes. The sun is starting to set 92

and the bridge twinkles with commuters from Seattle. One of them could be my dad. But he’s probably still at the office. I will probably not see him tonight.

“What time’s your curfew?” Alex asks as she stands up.

“I don’t really have one.” I don’t tell her it’s because I’ve never needed one. I don’t tell her it’s because I’ve never had anywhere to go.

“Do you have any money?” she says.

“Eight dollars.”

“That’s good enough.”

We walk down the hill and along the waterfront where Canada geese are squawking and crapping on the grass. We walk past the burger place, where we can see families eating through the windows. “Look at those assholes,” Alex says.

I say, “Yeah.”

There’s a store that sells supplies to make your own wine. There’s a restaurant with a menu in the window, where the salads cost fifteen dollars.

We walk past these places to the corner with the 7-Eleven and the video arcade. There are no families here. This is where the town ends. There are little boys inside the arcade. There are big boys outside.

“Most of them are high schoolers,” Alex tells me. They are smoking and drinking out of paper bags.

I have never done anything interesting in my life, but I am going to. I am going to be one of them. I am going to do things.

There’s a fat guy sitting in the middle of the sidewalk with a rat crawling 93

across his shoulders and down his back, over his lap and up his chest. It settles on top of his head and looks at us with the same beady eyes as the boy. The rat is purple like the fat boy’s hair. It settles in like camouflage.

“Purple Haze,” says Alex.

“What do you want?” he says. His voice is high and nasal. His face is greasy and pockmarked.

“Four hits,” she says, and I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“Heard anything from your brother?” the fat boy says.

“He’s in Portland.”

“I know that,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“He’s got a good job.”

“No he doesn’t.”

“Yes he does.”

“He’s a junkie who lives in a warehouse and beats up fat people for fun,” the fat boy says, like it’s the funniest thing he ever heard.

“No he doesn’t.”

“He’s in a gang against fat people.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Classified information.”

“Give me a cigarette,” Alex says.

“Only if your friend will kiss me.”

She looks at me. I shake my head.

“Just give me a cigarette.”

He pulls one out and hands it to me. “My dear,” he says, and offers to light it. I put it in my mouth and suck like I’ve seen my mom do.

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“Can we have the acid now?” says Alex.

“Do you have money?”

“She does.”

He looks me up and down and the fat under his chin wiggles like Jell-O. “I’ll give it to you for free if you two make out,” he says, and the smoke from the cigarette goes too far into my lungs and I start coughing.

“I’m not a dyke, fucker,” says Alex.

“She’s not inhaling,” says Purple Haze, and points at me.

“What?”

“Your pretty friend. She doesn’t know how to smoke.”

Alex looks at me like I’ve done something terrible. I hand her the cigarette, and my face burns.

“Look, she’s blushing,” says Purple Haze. “Isn’t that cute.”

“Just give us the acid,” Alex says, exhaling smoke like she knows what she’s doing. Everyone is watching. I know they’re thinking about what a fool I am. They’re thinking I don’t belong here. They’re thinking, Go back where you came from, little girl.

“Have you ever taken a shit that was so good it was better than an orgasm?” says Purple Haze. “Like those really fat long ones that last forever and it feels like you lost like ten pounds?”

“Give him the money,” Alex says to me. I open my purse and take out my wallet. My hands are shaking.

“Easy, girl. Sit here next to me.”

I look at Alex. She nods.

I sit down even though my skirt is short. I put my purse in my lap to 95

hide the place that is not covered. Purple Haze leans over and whispers in my ear, “Take it out slowly and reach over and put it in my pocket.” I do what he says. His jeans are too warm and slightly moist. He smells like salami.

From his other pocket, he pulls out a makeup compact. He takes out two tiny cellophane packets with his fat fingers and puts them in my hand.

“Have a nice trip, ladies.” I stand up and dust off my skirt. I am trying not to shake. They’re thinking, Go home, little girl. I don’t look at Alex or Purple Haze as I start walking. I don’t look at any of the high school boys even though their eyes burn holes into me. Go home.

“She doesn’t talk much,” I hear Purple Haze say behind me, even though I’m already halfway down the block.

“Wait,” yells Alex. I keep walking. I am still too close. If I stop walking, I will start crying and everyone will see me.

“What’s your problem?” she says when she catches up to me.

“I just wanted to leave.”

“You have to wait for me,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

She stops walking and so do I. She is looking me in the eyes. She is looking at me like she hates me. “Don’t do it again,” she says. Her voice is hard, not like a girl’s. I look at the ground and feel my body crumbling, turning into small, invisible pieces.

“Sorry,” I say. I look up and expect her to be gone, but she is still there, smiling like nothing happened. I am solid again. She takes my hand and pulls it gently.

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“Let’s go in here,” she says.

We slide between a closed boutique and a fancy cheese store. In the shadows Alex says, “Where’s the acid?” I hold out my hand with the two little cellophane packets. “You take one and I’ll take two.” She opens a packet and licks it. The two tiny white paper squares stick to her tongue.

She opens the second packet and presses her finger inside. One square sticks and she points it at me. “Here,” she says.

“What?” I say.

“Eat it.”

I lick her finger and it is salty.

“Am I supposed to swallow it?”

“Just let it dissolve.”

“Where are we going now?”

“James’s house.”

I say “Shit,” and it sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth.

“You look good,” Alex says. “Don’t worry. He already wants you.”

She walks fast and I try to keep up, but I am dizzy with “he wants you.”

It is good that she’s so far ahead, that she can’t see the stupid smile on my face.

“It’s only about a mile,” she says, and we don’t talk until we get there.

We walk along the lake, on the sidewalk made for joggers and mothers with strollers. It’s strange how different the shore is here, all perfect and straight. Instead of sharp rocks, instead of seaweed and barnacles and other live things, this beach is flat and sandy and barren, marked only with goose crap and the occasional piece of litter.

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Here I am with the first friend I’ve had in forever. Here I am on my way to meet a boy who wants me. My life on the island is over. I have a new face and a new body and new clothes. I have a new friend and nothing will ever be the same again.

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99

The Hollow When Abbey’s best friend, Kristen, vanishes at the bridge near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, everyone else is all too quick to accept that Kristen is dead and rumors fly that her death was no accident. Abbey goes through the motions of mourning her best friend, but privately, she refuses to believe that Kristen is really gone. It only makes things worse that everyone now treats Abbey like either a freak show or a charity case. Thank goodness for Caspian, the gorgeous and mysterious boy who shows up out of nowhere at Kristen’s funeral, and keeps reappearing in Abbey’s life. Caspian clearly has secrets of his own, but he’s the only person who makes Abbey feel normal again... but also special. Just when Abbey starts to feel that she might survive all this, she learns a secret that makes her question everything she thought she knew about her best friend. How could Kristen have kept silent about so much? And could this secret have led to her death? As Abbey struggles to understand Kristen’s betrayal, she uncovers a frightening truth that nearly unravels her—one that will challenge her emerging love for Caspian, as well as her own sanity.

Jessica Verday wrote the first draft of The Hollow by hand, using thirteen spiral-bound notebooks and fifteen black pens. She is currently hand-writing her second novel, the continuation of Abbey and Caspian’s story, from her home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. Find out more at jessicaverday.com.

I reached out and touched the casket lid. It was cold. So cold that I immediately snatched my hand away. It almost felt like it had burned me.

I just stood there. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. . . . Not out loud at least. But a thousand thoughts raged inside my head, while a thousand feelings raged inside my heart.

The weather mimicked my emotions. A fierce wind rattled by, howling in outrage. The edges of the plastic awning flapped angrily against the aluminum poles holding it up, and made a horrible ringing sound. Even the rain pounded harder, lashing out its bitterness.

And that was when I felt someone watching me.

I looked out over the rows of tombstones, memorial plates, mausoleums, and crypts. Past trees and bushes. There, standing next to a huge mausoleum built into the side of a hill, was a boy.

He was dressed in a black suit, with a white shirt and a black tie, and his hair was so pale that it almost looked white. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I saw he didn’t have a raincoat or an umbrella. The rain had completely soaked him through. I couldn’t see what color his eyes were, he was too far away for that, but he looked right at me, and his gaze held mine.

Who was he? Did he know Kristen? Or was he here for someone else?

The wind continued to howl around me, and the rain pounded on the scant shelter overhead. Whoever he was, he was crazy to be standing out there. Before I could even think it through, I found myself taking a couple of steps out from underneath the awning. I should go talk to him, I thought.

Find out if he was here for Kristen. Find out why he was staring at me. Tell him he was nuts for getting soaked out there.

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But the wind drove me back. The fierceness of it was so sudden that I staggered backward and had to grasp on to the nearest awning pole for support. The rain didn’t relent either, and it streamed down my face, leaving the same type of tracks that tears would have.

Head held high, grasping on to that pole for all I was worth, I stared back at the stranger. Daring him to come closer. Demanding that he not look at me with pity in his eyes.

The wind ruffled the edges of his clothing and blew his hair into his face, but he stood where he was. Then he bowed his head slightly.

Something told me that he meant it as a sign of respect, so I nodded back. Then I turned to take one last look at the casket behind me. Meeting him would have to wait. Today I had different things to think about.

The rain started letting up a little as I walked farther away from the grave site. I spotted my parents talking to Reverend Prescott on the stone steps of the church, and I definitely didn’t want to get caught up in any of that.

I moved quickly to the car as I took my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and dialed Mom’s number.

She reached into her purse and glanced at her phone before taking a small step away from the Reverend. “Abbey?” she answered distractedly.

“I’m just going to walk home from here, okay, Mom?” Even at a distance I could tell she didn’t like that idea. A look was forming on her face.

“I think you should come with us to the Maxwells’, Abbey. They went through a lot of trouble to arrange a gathering, and since Kristen was your friend, it’s only appropriate that you be there.”

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“Mom,” I sighed. “I’m really not in the mood to be around a whole bunch of people right now. I just want to be left alone.”

“You should come, Abigail.” The use of my proper name was not a good sign. Not at all. “You can have all the time you need to yourself afterward.”

“But, Mom—” “It’s being catered, Abigail!” The sudden click of her phone being shut made my mind up for me. My mother lived for catered events, and obviously that meant I had to as well.

“Fine, whatever, Mom,” I grumbled to myself as I trudged over to the church steps. I waited impatiently for them to hurry up and finish their conversation with the reverend. They took their time, of course.

After an agonizing ten minutes of small talk, they finally said their good-byes to the reverend and we left the cemetery.

It was a short drive over to the Maxwells’ house, but there were already cars lined up around the block when we got there. Dad dropped Mom and me off at the front door, while he went to go find a parking spot. Mom only took three steps inside the house before she was stopped by someone.

I heard her laughter drifting behind me as I kept moving past the hordes of milling people and headed straight for the kitchen.

I found Kristen’s mom in there. She had her back turned, and both arms were buried in a sink full of detergent suds. As I stepped closer, I could see there were only two mugs and a couple of plates in the sink. Hardly enough to worry about washing when you had a house full of guests.

Then I saw her shoulders shaking. I didn’t want to interrupt her grief, so I quietly made my way back out to the hallway.

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A beverage table had been set up nearby, and I grabbed a clean mug to pour some hot water into. Dropping in an herbal tea bag, I waited for a minute, and then stirred in a little milk and sugar. The warmth of the mug felt comforting in my grip as I picked it up and sipped slowly, blocking out everything and everyone around me.

But my moment of peace was shattered when someone abruptly bumped into my shoulder, causing me to grasp the cup tightly.

“S-sorry,” the person stuttered.

I turned with a scowl on my face and saw curly brown hair in front of me.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, Brad.”

He picked up a mug too, and then struggled with opening a tea bag.

“Actually, it’s, uh, Ben. I’m in your class at school.”

Right. “Okay then, see you around.” I was so not in the mood for conversation right now. All I wanted was to be alone.

I contemplated going up to Kristen’s room but decided against it. It didn’t really feel right, for some reason, being in her room without her there. So I chose the basement instead. There was a faint, musty odor, which I breathed in as soon as I started walking down the stairs. Upstairs had felt like a stranger’s house with all the extra people around, but down here, it was just like I remembered. I was relieved to step into familiar surroundings once again.

A battered desk lamp sitting on an old coffee table had been left on, and it cast a weak yellow glow, leaving most of the room cloaked in darkness.

This room had always felt so safe and warm to me in the past that the dark didn’t bother me at all. I walked over to an old rocking chair sitting partially 104

in the shadows, and I settled in, balancing my cup of tea. Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes as I slowly rocked back and forth and thought about old memories.

“It looks terrible, Abbey! I’m never coming out again.”

Her voice drifted out to me from the crack at the bottom of the bathroom door. I thought I heard a sniffle, and then came the unmistakable sound of nose blowing.

“Come on, Kristen. Open the door,” I pleaded. “Let me see what it looks like. It can’t be that bad. Just open up.”

“Oh, it’s bad. Very, very bad. I should probably shave my head. Do you know how much wigs cost? Or maybe I could get full extensions put in.”

“You are not going to shave your head, Kristen,” I replied loudly. “And do you know how expensive extensions are? If it’s really that terrible, we’ll just dye it another color. That’s an easy fix.”

“What about hats?” she countered. “Would it look weird if I wore a different hat every day?”

Even though she couldn’t see it, I shook my head at her and was just about to use the if-you-won’t-come-out-then-I’m-coming-in tactic when the lock clicked and the door slowly opened inward.

I took three steps inside and tried very hard not to let the shock show on my face. “What did you . . . do?”

“I don’t know!” she wailed, holding up a badly colored piece of hair. “I was just so tired of having a flaming red bush on top of my head! I thought black dye would help tone it down a little. I know it looks terrible.”

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She was close to tears again.

“Hey, Kris, it’s not that bad. Let me see it for a minute.” Stepping close, I inspected her still-wet hair. The black dye had covered up all the red in certain spots, but in others it had completely missed.

“Why don’t you dry it, and then we’ll see if it looks any different,” I suggested.

“Okay.” She sighed sadly and grabbed the blow-dryer from a cabinet under the sink.

“Why didn’t you wait for me?” I yelled over the blower noise when she turned it on high. “I would have helped you.”

“I don’t know,” she yelled back. “I guess I wanted it to be a surprise. Let you see it when it was all done, you know? Well, done right, of course.”

“You’re crazy.” I made a circular motion with my hand by my head and grinned. She laughed, and I sat on the edge of the tub while I waited for her to finish. Ten minutes later her hair was completely dry, and looking more streaked than spotted.

I stood up. “Now let’s take a look at this again.”

She grabbed a brush and ran it through her hair, parting it to the side like she always wore it.

“See?” I said, rearranging, fluffing, and then patting down a couple of stray pieces. “If you wear it this way, it looks good. Like you totally meant to do it.”

“Really?” She turned from side to side in front of the mirror. “Do you really think it looks okay? You would tell me if it didn’t, right?”

“Of course I’d tell you, Kristen, that’s what friends are for. Honestly, 106

though, it looks good this way. Almost like you dyed it black and added a couple of red highlights.”

She took another glance at the mirror. “I don’t know, Abbey.” Her eyes were worried.

“It looks good.” I reassured her. “Really.”

Then inspiration hit.

“Hey, what if I put red highlights in my hair? We’ll tell everyone that we had our hair done together. What do you think?”

Her eyes lit up. “That’s a great idea. Thanks, Abbey. We can go get the stuff now, and then I’ll do your hair after dinner.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I grabbed a small washcloth from the towel rack next to her and started wiping off stray hair dye splatters on the sink. “Mom and Dad have a meeting at the Horseman’s Haunt tonight anyway, so it’ll be an empty house for me.”

Her smile was a mile wide. “I’ll go tell Mom that you’re staying for dinner.” She started to walk out of the bathroom but stopped short and turned back with a sheepish look on her face. “Would you put the blowdryer away for me?”

I nodded, and smiled to myself as I heard her yell down to her mom that she wanted lasagna and garlic bread for dinner.

My favorite meal.

Yeah, that’s what friends are for.

It was a soft sound that made my eyes fly open and my head snap forward.

I scanned the room, certain that I’d heard footsteps.

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I almost missed him.

Even though he was sitting a couple feet away from me, his black suit blended in completely with the shadows. Only his hair gave him away.

The white-blond color glowed in the dark room. It was the boy from the cemetery.

I felt him looking at me, and I swear my heart started beating faster. I didn’t know what to do, what to say . . . but I had to ask him something. I spoke quietly, trying to calm my racing pulse. “Did you know Kristen?”

I waited for his answer. The space of two heartbeats went by . . . and then another. My question hung in the room between us.

There was no reply.

I raised my voice slightly, in case he hadn’t heard me. “So, um, how did you know Kristen Maxwell?” I shifted in my chair, and the squeak it made echoed through the room. I took a small sip of tea to distract myself.

“Sorry, did you say something to me?” He spoke so softly that at first I wasn’t sure if I had imagined his response.

I was taken aback by the question. Had he really not heard me at all?

“I wanted to know if you knew Kristen.” I grew bolder with each word.

“I saw you at the funeral today and was just wondering how you knew her.”

“You were wondering how I knew Kristen,” he repeated, still speaking softly, almost to himself. Then his voice grew louder, and he leaned toward me. “I’ve seen her . . . around.”

But I’d never met him before. Was he some type of secret admirer or something? I tried to examine him closer, but he was still hidden by the 108

shadows. His voice sounded older. Maybe he had been a friend of her brother’s?

“Did you know Thomas?”

“Thomas?” He sounded puzzled. “No, I don’t know any Thomas.”

“Kristen’s brother?” I prompted, waiting for his reply.

“No, I didn’t know she had a brother.” His voice was louder now. Like he was getting closer, but I hadn’t seen him move at all. That made me slightly nervous. Here I was alone with a stranger who had come to Kristen’s house and down to her basement, yet he didn’t really seem to know her, or her family. It was all very strange.

I covered up my nervousness with a small laugh. “Oh, okay. Well, I’m going to go upstairs to see if they need any help cleaning up.” I abandoned my tea at the foot of the rocking chair and stood up, heading for the stairs.

I made it up four steps before I realized that the stranger had followed me.

I turned.

He stood at the bottom of the staircase, obscured in darkness. “You don’t have to be afraid of me, Abbey. I’m actually here because of you.”

“How do you know my name?” I gripped at the stair railing. My question came out in a squeak. “Who are you? What do you mean you’re here because of me?”

“Don’t worry, Abbey. I’m a friend.” He leaned forward, placing himself in a pocket of light so that I could see him clearly.

Shock hit me first. Followed by a feeling of . . . something else. He was gorgeous. A total hottie.

I almost laughed at myself for thinking that at a time like this.

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His hair was the first thing I noticed, up close this time. The pale color was unusual but it had a sharp streak of jet black that angled across his forehead. His eyebrows were dark too, and he had a very straight nose and full lips. But his eyes were what really struck me. They were such a clear, shocking green that I felt a shiver dance along my spine as he gazed at me.

His eyes were stunning. And they looked kind.

“You’re Kristen’s best friend, right?” His voice held a soothing, calm quality now, and he looked up at me with such interest that I felt some of my nervousness vanish. “Tell me about her.”

I looked away for a moment, flattered that he was paying me any attention, and then angry at myself that I even cared. My eyes fell on the corner of the room where Kristen and I had spent so much time together, and I started talking about it to distract myself from my turbulent emotions.

“Do you see that corner over there, by the bookcase?” I leaned over the railing to point, and he nodded. “When we were little, Kristen and I used to come down here on rainy days. Her mom would take a couple of sheets and string them up around the bookcase to make a tent. Then we’d grab some books and a flashlight and go sit inside, and read stories to each other.

Her mom always brought us cucumber and peanut butter sandwiches with all the crusts cut off while we were in there.”

I laughed at the memory. “We went through a real cucumber and peanut butter phase. I have no idea why.”

Then I found myself confessing even more. “It was almost like Kristen had this secret place in her basement that we could go to whenever it rained.

I used to call it my magic rain castle, and I thought it was the coolest thing 110

ever.” My cheeks reddened from the story and how much I had revealed. “I don’t know why I told you that. It’s pretty silly, huh?”

He had an amused look on his face. “I don’t think it’s silly. Every kid should have a place like that to play in. I wish I would have had one of those. It sounds like fun.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling back at him. “That was a good memory. . . . I needed that.” The silence in the stairwell grew, and I became aware of how loud and fast my breathing sounded. I concentrated on regulating it, trying to breathe more normally.

He spoke quietly, and I had to lean forward to catch his words. “If you ever decide to build your magic rain castle again, Abbey, let me know. I’ll have to stop by for a visit.”

My breath caught on those words, and my heart skipped a beat at the implication behind them. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. My mind raced frantically, thinking about all the questions I had for him.

The jarring ring of my cell phone interrupted us. I glanced down at the screen and grimaced when I saw who it was. “Sorry, but I have to go take this. It’s my mom.”

I walked up to the top of the stairs and answered the phone. “Uh, hi, what do you want—I mean, what’s up, Mom?” I glanced over my shoulder.

I could still see his bright green eyes. He was staring intently at me, so my response to my mother was a bit distracted. “Yeah, um . . . okay.”

Her voice echoed loudly through the phone, and I looked away. “I’m almost ready too. I was down in the basement. . . . Yes, I know. Of course I’ll tell the Maxwells good-bye. I’ll see you in five minutes.”

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I looked back over my shoulder and mouthed the word “Sorry” as I stepped out the basement door. He nodded and disappeared into the shadows below while I headed to the kitchen to find Kristen’s mom.

She was still there, now drying dishes, and I hesitantly crept closer. She appeared calmer, and glanced over her shoulder when she heard me coming.

“Abbey, hi.” Her voice was soft, and her eyes were slightly reddened, but her smile was encouraging.

Reaching out for a hug, I remembered belatedly that I had left my cup downstairs in the basement. She didn’t say anything while she hugged me back, but I didn’t need to hear the words. I knew what she was feeling.

“Do you want me to stay and help you clean up?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, don’t worry about it, honey. I’ll take care of everything. It’ll give me something to do.” Her voice broke slightly on the last sentence, but I pretended not to notice.

“You’ll call us if you need anything, right? Anything at all.”

“Sure, sweetie.” She tried to give me a brave smile, but it didn’t work.

“Tell your parents good-bye for me.”

“Okay,” I replied. “I will. Take care of yourself.” She nodded, and I squeezed her hand once before I left the kitchen.

Mom was waiting for me out in the hallway.

“I’ll be right back, and then I’m ready to go,” I told her. At a nod of agreement, I turned around and headed back toward the basement. I had one more good-bye to say.

But when I got down there, he was gone.

“Hello?” I called out, walking over to the rocking chair to pick up my 112

cup. I felt stupid for not asking him what his name was. I flipped on a nearby switch, and the room was instantly flooded with eight bulbs of sixtywatt fluorescent lighting.

It only confirmed what I already knew. He wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to get the chance to say good-bye, or find out his name. I didn’t even know if I’d ever see him again.

Flipping the light switch one more time on my way back out, I paused for a moment in the dark. “Thank you,” I whispered over my shoulder to the empty room.

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114

Nothing Like You When Holly loses her virginity to Paul, a guy she barely knows, she assumes their encounter is a one-night stand. After all, Paul is too popular to even be speaking to Holly and he happens to have a long-term girlfriend, Saskia.

But ever since Holly’s mom died six months ago, Holly has been numb to the world, and she’s getting desperate to feel something, anything—so when Paul keeps pursuing her, Holly relents. Paul’s kisses are a welcome diversion and it’s nice to feel like the kind of girl that a guy like Paul would choose. But things aren’t so simple with Saskia around. Paul’s real girlfriend is willowy and perfect and nothing like Holly. To make matters worse, she and Holly are becoming friends. Suddenly the consequences of Holly’s choices are all too real, and Holly stands to lose more than she ever realized she had.

Lauren Strasnick grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, now lives in Los Angeles, California, and is a graduate of Emerson College and the California Institute of the Arts MFA Writing Program. She wrote her first short story, “Yours Truly, The Girls from Bunk Six,” in a cloth-bound 5x4 journal, in the fifth grade.

Nothing Like You is Lauren’s first novel. Find out more at LaurenStrasnick.com.

1.

We were parked at Point Dume, Paul and I, the two of us tangled together, half dressed, half not. Paul’s car smelled like sea air and stale smoke, and from his rearview hung a yellow and pink plastic lanyard that swayed with the breeze drifting in through the open car window. I hung on to Paul, thinking, I like your face, I love your hands, let’s do this, let’s do this, let’s do this, one arm locked around the back of his head, the other wedged between two scratched-up leather seat cushions, bracing myself against the pain while wondering, idly, if this feels any different when you love the person or when you do it lying down on a bed.

This was the same beach where I’d spent millions of mornings with my mother, wading around at low tide searching for sea anemone and orange and purple starfish. It had cliffs and crashing waves and seemed like the appropriate place to do something utterly unoriginal, like lose my virginity in the backseat of some guy’s dinged-up, bright red BMW. I didn’t really know Paul but that didn’t really matter. There we were, making sappy, sandy memories on the Malibu Shore, fifteen miles from home. It was nine p.m. on a school night. I needed to be back by ten.

“That was nice,” he said, dragging a hand down the back of my head through my hair.

“Mm,” I nodded, not really sure what to say back. I hadn’t realized the moment was over, but there it was—our unceremonious end. “It’s getting late, right?” I dragged my jeans over my lap. “Maybe you should take me home?”

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“Yeah, absolutely,” Paul shimmied backwards, buttoning his pants. “I’ll get you home.” He wrinkled his nose, smiled, then swung his legs over the armrest and into the driver’s side seat.

“Thanks,” I said, trying my best to seem casual and upbeat, hiking my underwear and jeans back on, then creeping forward so we were seated side by side.

“You ready?” he asked, pinching an unlit cigarette between his bottom and top teeth.

“Sure thing.” I buckled my seat belt and watched Paul run the head of a Zippo against the side seam on his pants, igniting a tiny flame. I turned my head toward the window and pressed my nose against the glass. There, in the not-so-far-off distance, an orange glow lit the sky, gleaming bright.

Brushfire, I thought. Perfect.

“Remind me, again?” He jangled his car keys.

“Hillside. Off Topanga Canyon.”

“Right, sorry.” He lit his cigarette and turned the ignition. “I’m shit with directions.”

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2.

Topanga was burning.

Helicopters swarmed overhead dumping water and red glop all over fiery shrubs and mulch. The air tasted sour and chalky and my eyes and throat burned from the blaze. Flaming hills, thick smoke—this used to seriously freak me out. Now, though, I sort of liked it. My whole town tinted orange and smelling like barbecue and burnt pine needles.

I was standing in my driveway, Harry’s leash wrapped twice around my wrist. We watched the smoke rise and billow behind my house and I thought: This is what nuclear war must look like. Mushroom clouds and raining ash. I bent down, kissed Harry’s dry nose, and scratched hard behind his ears. “One quick walk,” I said. “Just down the hill and back.”

He barked.

We sped through the canyon. Past tree swings and chopped wood and old RVs parked on lawns. Past the plank bridge that crosses the dried-out ravine, the Topanga Christian Fellowship with its peeling blue and white sign, the Christian Science Church, the Topanga Equestrian Center with the horses on the hill and the fancy veggie restaurant down below in their shadow. That day, the horses were indoors, shielded from the muddy, smoky air. Harry and I U-turned at the little hippie gift shop attached to the fancy veggie restaurant, and started back up the hill to my house.

Barely anyone was out on the road. It was dusky out, almost dark, so we ran the rest of the way home. I let Harry off his leash once we’d reached my driveway, then followed him around back to The Shack.

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“Knock, knock,” I said, rattling the flimsy tin door and pushing my way in. Nils was lying on his side reading an old issue of National Geographic. I kicked off my sneakers and dropped Harry’s leash on the ground, flinging myself down next to Nils and onto the open futon.

“Anything good?” I asked, grabbing the magazine from between his fingertips.

“Fruit bats,” he said, grabbing it back.

I shivered and rolled sideways, butting my head against his back.

“You cold?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Just a chill...”

He rolled over and looked at me. My eyes settled on his nose: long and straight and reassuring. “You freaked about the fire?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“They’ve got it all pretty much contained, you know. ’Least last time I checked.”

I grabbed a pillow off the floor and used it to prop up my head. Harry was sniffing around at my toes, licking and nibbling at my pinkie nail. I laughed.

“What?” said Nils. “What’s so funny?”

“Just Harry.” I shook my head.

“No, come on, what?”

I grabbed his magazine back. “Fruit bats,” I squealed, holding open the page with the fuzzy flying rodents. “I want one, okay? This year, for my birthday.”

“Sure thing, princess.” He moved closer to me, curling his legs to his chest. “Anything you say.”

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Nils is my oldest friend. My next-door neighbor. This shack has been ours since we were ten. It was my dad’s toolshed for about forty-five minutes—before Nils and I met, and took over. The Shack is its new name, given a ways back on my sixteenth birthday. Years ten through fifteen, we called it Clubhouse. Nils thought The Shack sounded much more grown up. I agree. The Shack has edge.

“Have you done all your reading for Kiminski’s quiz tomorrow?”

“No” I said, flipping the page.

“Where were you last night, anyway? I came by but Jeff said you were out.”

Jeff is my dad, FYI. “I just went down to the beach for a bit.”

“Alone?” Nils asked.

“Yeah, alone,” I lied, dropping Nils’s magazine and flipping onto my side.

Nils didn’t need to know about Paul Bennett or any other boy in my life.

Nils had, at that point, roughly five new girlfriends each week. I’d stopped asking questions.

“Hols, should we study?”

“Put on Jethro Tull for two secs. We can study in a bit.” The weeks prior to this Nils and I had spent sorting through my mother’s entire music collection, organizing all her old records, tapes, and CDs into categories on a shelf Jeff had built for The Shack.

“This song sucks,” shouted Nils over the first few bars of “Aqualung.” I raised one hand high in the air, rocking along while scanning her collection for other tapes we might like.

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“Hols?”

“Yeah?”

“Your mom had shit taste in music.”

I squinted. “You so know you love it. Admit it. You love Jethro Tull.”

“I do. I love Jethro Tull.” He was looking at me. His eyes looked kind of misty. Don’t say it, Nils, please don’t say it, I thought. “I miss your mom.”

He said it.

I sat up. “Buck up, little boy. She’s watching us from a happy little cloud in the sky, okay?”

He tugged at my hair. “How come you never get sad, Holly? I think it’s weird you don’t ever get sad.”

“I do get sad,” I said, standing up. Dusting some dirt off my butt. “Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

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3.

School.

7:44 a.m. and I was rushing down the hall toward World History with my coffee sloshing everywhere and one lock of sopping wet hair whipping me in the face. I got one “Hey,” and two or three half-smiles from passersby right before sliding into my seat just as the bell went ding ding ding.

Ms. Stein was set to go with her number two pencil, counting heads, “. . . sixteen, seventeen . . . who’s missing? Saskia? You here? Has anyone seen Saskia?” As if on cue, Saskia Van Wyck came racing through the door, clickity-clack in her shiny black flats, plopping down in the empty seat to my left. “I’m here, sorry! I’m right here,” she said, dragging the back of her hand dramatically across her brow. Adorable. I slurped my coffee.

“Take out your books, people. Let’s read until eight fifteen, then we’ll discuss chapters nine and ten. ’Kay?” I pulled my book from my bag and glanced to my left.

Saskia Van Wyck. Paul Bennett’s girlfriend-slash-ex-girlfriend. I barely knew her. I only knew that she was skinny, pretty, marginally popular, and lived in this old adobe house just off the PCH, wedged right in between my favorite Del Taco and the old crappy gas station on Valley View Drive. I’d been there once, in sixth grade, for a birthday party, where no more than four kids showed up, but I remembered things: her turquoise blue bedroom walls. An avocado tree. A naked Barbie and a stuffed brown bear she kept hidden under her twin wrought-iron bed.

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Saskia leaned toward me. “Do you have a highlighter or a pen or something I could borrow?”

“Yeah, okay.” I reached into the front pocket of my backpack and pulled out a mechanical pencil. “How’s this?” Suddenly I had a flash of that chart they show you in tenth grade Sex Ed—How STDs Spread: Billy sleeps with Kim who sleeps with Bobby who does it to Saskia who really gives it to Paul who sleeps with Holly, which makes Holly a big whore-y ho-bag who’s slept with the entire school.

“That’s great,” said Saskia, smiling. “Thanks.”

I nodded back.

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124

Stupid Cupid Felicity Walker believes in true love. That’s why she applies for a gig at the matchmaking company Cupid’s Hollow. But when Felicity gets the job, she learns that she isn’t just a matchmaker...she’s a cupid! (There’s more than one of them, you know.) Armed with a hot pink, tricked-out PDA infused with the latest in cupid magic (love arrows shot through email), Felicity works to meet her quota of successful matches. But when she bends the rules of cupidity by matching her best friend Maya with three different boys at once, disaster strikes. Felicity needs to come up with a plan to set it all right, pronto, before she gets fired and before Maya ends up with her heart split in three.

Rhonda Stapleton started writing a few years ago to appease the voices in her head. She lives in northeast Ohio with her two kids, her manpanion, and their lazy dog. Visit her website at rhondastapleton.com.

Chapter 1 “So”—Janet glanced down at my résumé—”Felicity. You’d like to be a matchmaker. Can you go into more detail why?”

Because my mom threatened bodily harm unless I get off my lazy butt and get a job. No, that wouldn’t do. Better to try for the more professional approach.

“Well, I believe in true love,” I replied. “I think everyone has a match out there—some people just need a little help finding that special person. I think it would be fun to do that.”

Janet smiled, her bright, white teeth sparkling in the soft light pouring from the window. “Good answer. That’s what we believe too. Here at Cupid’s Hollow we want to find true love for everyone.”

I nodded, trying not to fidget with the clicky end of my pen. This was my first real interview, and I was determined not to let my twitchy thumb get the best of me. After applying for a thousand jobs (and getting a thousand rejections), I’d found a tiny ad on the back page of Cleveland’s Scene magazine. teen cupids wanted for matchmaking company. call for interview.

It was a cute angle to advertise for employees in that way, so I called.

Two days later, here I was. In all my nervous, sweaty glory, working it as best as I could so I wouldn’t look or sound like a total idiot.

“So, you’re a junior,” Janet said. “And what school do you go to again?”

“Greenville High. Go, Cougars!” I cheered, then winced internally at 126

my dorkiness. Oh, man, that was way lame. Like she cared about our school mascot. I didn’t even care most of the time.

“Um-hm,” she said, her face unreadable. She flipped through the notepad on her lap and scribbled furiously on a page.

Crap, did I blow it already? Three minutes into the interview and I’d sunk my own battleship.

“And you’re available to start work . . . ?”

“As soon as possible,” I spilled out, heart racing. Maybe this could still work out.

“Have you ever used a BlackBerry or similar handheld technology before?”

“Well, my mom has one, and I’ve used it a little bit.” Okay, that was an exaggeration, as I’ve really only seen her use it, but I’m sure I could figure it out if I needed to.

Janet wrote more notes. “I assume you’ve never participated in or worked for a matchmaking service before?”

“Um, no.” I thought fast. “But I did help my brother set up his Match dot com profile.”

My brother is four years older than me and is a cop. Trust me, not a good combination. He’s insane. I can’t count the number of times he’s flashed his stupid badge at me in front of my friends, threatening to haul me in if I mocked his authority again. Total dork.

“Okay, last question. This job requires a certain level of . . . confidentiality.”

Janet looked straight into my eyes, her face serious. “Confidentiality for our clients, as well as for our own technologies and processes. You’d have to sign 127

a document promising never to share our information with anyone outside the company. Would that be a problem?”

I swallowed. What was I getting myself into here? Was this normal?

Geez, chill, Felicity. She wasn’t asking me to sew my lips together and join a convent. They probably just didn’t want other matchmaking companies to steal their ideas or customers.

I nodded and put on my most serious, trustworthy face. “Sure, no problem.” A thought popped into my mind. “Wait, I’m only seventeen. Is the contract legally binding?”

She shot me a smile. “Good question. It’s binding as far as our concerns go.”

“Okay, then.” Not that I’d be spilling any industry secrets, anyway, so I wouldn’t have to worry about that.

Janet finished writing, then uncrossed her legs and smoothed her prim, plum-colored skirt. She stood and stuck out her hand. “Well, we’d love to have you join our team. Welcome to Cupid’s Hollow, Felicity.”

I bit back my squeal and shook her hand. “This is so awesome. Thank you!”

She grinned. “Why don’t you come in tomorrow for the training session.”

I thanked her profusely, slipped on my thick winter coat, and left the office, turning back to give the building one last glance. The outside itself was nondescript, just an old brick exterior with lots of windows and a thin layer of late March snow perched on top. But the inside held the key to my working future.

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My first real job. I was so excited, I did a little booty shake in the parking lot. I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I knew! If I’d had a cell phone, I could have called my best friends Maya and Andy instead of waiting until I got home.

With a job, though, I would now be able to use my own money to buy one.

I hopped into my mom’s dark green Camry, cranked up the heat and the radio, and headed home, taking the long way through the suburbs instead of driving on Route 480. Mom had let me borrow the car for the interview, but made me swear a solemn oath that I would not go anywhere but to the interview and back, would not pick up any hitchhikers, and would stay off the freeway at all costs.

“Mom,” I said as soon as I threw open the front door, “I’m home. I got the job!” On the front porch I stomped the loose snow off my heels, then stepped into the foyer and gingerly slipped out of my boots. After tucking them into the corner of the tiled entryway and hanging my coat in the closet, I added, “And no, I didn’t track snow in the house.” I knew what she was going to ask, because it was the same thing every time.

Mom darted out of the kitchen, wearing a white apron over her dress pants. Other than a small smudge of flour on her cheek, she looked pristine and composed, as usual. “Congratulations!” she cried out. “I’m so proud of you.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

My mom is surprisingly domestic—she’s as assertive in the kitchen as in her workplace, where she’s in the accounting department. God help any of the company’s clients who are late on their payments, because my mom hounds them until they pay, just to shut her up. She runs our household the same way.

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When we were younger, my brother and I used to call her the House Nazi. Neither one of us was stupid enough to say it directly to her face, though—I liked my mouth right where it was, thank you very much.

“Thanks, Mom. What’s for dinner?” I asked. “I’m starving to death.”

“Fried chicken, but it’s not ready yet. You should go call Maya and Andy with your good news. They’ll be thrilled.”

“Yup, I’m heading up to my room now.” I tossed the keys on the small table in the foyer. “Thanks for letting me borrow the car.”

She winked. “Well, now you can save up and get your own, can’t you.”

Gee, I’d suspected she’d say that. Now that I had a real job, I could predict the answer for everything: Need new clothes, Felicity? Want to go see a movie with your friends? Well, it’s a good thing you’ve got a job now.

I darted up to my room, flung myself across my bed, and grabbed the phone off my nightstand, dialing Andy’s cell.

“Andy’s mortuary. You stab ’em, we slab ’em.”

Andy Carsen is my best friend. She and I have been close since kindergarten. Sometimes, though, I feel a bit jealous of her. Her folks aren’t as harsh as mine can be. And Andy, of course, has a cell phone, just like everybody else I know. I swear, I must be the only teenager in the free world who doesn’t have one. But now that I had a job, that was going to change.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“So . . . ?”

“I got the job!”

She squealed. “That’s awesome! Now you’ll finally have spending 130

money, and we can go shopping more and buy those cute jeans you wanted and—” “Whoa.” I laughed. “I haven’t even gotten a paycheck yet.”

“So, how does this gig work? Will you make those geeky videotapes of people, or is it an online dating thing?”

Hm. I hadn’t even bothered to ask. “Actually, I don’t know. I was so excited I got the job, I just took off before she could change her mind.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You say that like you’re surprised. Anyway, tomorrow I’ve got training, so I’ll let you know.”

We hung up, and I dialed Maya Takahashi, my other BFF. Maya moved to Cleveland when we were in middle school, and though she’s completely unlike me or Andy in just about every possible way, we clicked. Maybe it was the way she quietly snarked on the preps her first day of school that made me instantly love her. From then on, the three of us have been nearly inseparable. “‘Lo,” Maya said into the mouthpiece, her mouth clearly full of food.

“Hey,” I answered. “I got the job!”

“That’s great. I knew you would.”

I heard her chew a few times, so I held the phone away from my ear to let her finish the bite without subjecting me to it. Delicate, she was not, but that was Maya for you.

“Sounds like you’re busy,” I said. “I’ll let you go.”

“Sorry, I’m totally stressing over here and trying to multitask by eating and doing homework at the same time. I almost bit off my pen cap! And then, after dinner, I need to practice my solo.”

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Maya’s a fantastic trumpet player, in addition to all her brain talents.

Though I’m not a huge fan of the school band—nerd alert, anyone?— Andy and I do support her and go see all her performances at the school’s basketball games. I know she’d do the same for us.

“Okay, hope you get it all done. Talk to ya later.”

After we hung up, I turned on my PC and logged on to my blog. I made sure to lock it so it was a VIP entry only—Andy, Maya, and I usually shared entries with only each other.

I’m so excited. Now that I’m a matchmaker, maybe I can even learn some tips to make Derek fall madly in love with me.

I sighed. Derek Peterson’s the hottest guy on the face of the earth. Every time I look at him, my heart squeezes up, and I forget how to speak. Not that he ever talks to me, anyway. He’s a smart jock who runs with the AP crowd (shame of all shame, I’m only in honors, not advanced), but we have art class together.

Of course, that’s my favorite class, even though I end up spending the whole time trying not to get busted for staring at him. Or drooling.

I bet half my blog was filled with his name. I’d been crushing on him since the first day of freshman year, when I saw him walking through the hallway at school. Not that he’d noticed me, but it didn’t matter. One look at his beautiful smile, and I was a goner.

Derek Peterson-n-Felicity Walker 4-ever 132

Mr. and Mrs. Derek Peterson Felicity Walker-Peterson Felicity Walker-Peterson, M.D. Felicity Walker-Peterson, President of the United States Felicity Walker-Peterson, America’s Next Top Model Well, that was fun. I saved and closed the blog, then quickly checked my e-mail (nope, nothing new, except from my spam buddies telling me I won the Irish lotto—lucky me!). Time to start my homework to avoid being grounded for getting anything below a C. The next day at the office, Janet handed me a hot-pink PDA. “Here ya go,” she said. “Your LoveLine 3000. Please take care of it. It’s the key to your job.”

Whoa. It was possibly the most tricked-out PDA I’d ever seen in my life. There had to be some serious dough coughed up for these puppies.

I sat in the plush green chair across from Janet’s cherry wood desk, flipping on the device and looking at all the buttons. “So, what’s this for?

Are we supposed to schedule the customers’ first dates or something?”

She tilted her head and gave me a funny look. “It has the e-mail addresses of everyone in your territory, which in your case is Greenville High.”

“Wait. I’m matchmaking my school?” I didn’t know yet if that was a good or a bad thing, so I tried to keep my voice calm and neutral.

“Absolutely. That’s part of the reason we’re hiring. We decided to try a new venture and let people matchmake their own peer groups. After all, who better to be a cupid for a teen than another teen?”

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“Good point.” Most of my classmates would die laughing if an adult tried to help them find a date. And with good reason. I mean, no disrespect to anyone, but “great personality” can only get you so far in high school.

For instance, look at me. I’ve got personality practically oozing out of my skin, but I’ve only had one boyfriend ever. And he dated me so he could get closer to Andy. I should have picked up the clue phone when he always wanted to do group things—with her tagging along, of course. And here I’d thought he was just getting to know my friends.

Andy, of course, has no problems getting a guy’s attention. She’s hot, smart, and funny, but she’s also extremely picky, so she doesn’t date a lot.

And she’s 100 percent loyal to her friends, so my ex’s strategy to get closer to her backfired, to say the least.

Poor Maya, on the other hand—the girl’s sharp as a tack, captain of the debate club, lead trumpet in the marching band, but can’t get a date to save her life. In fact, she can’t even get a guy to notice her. Not that she’d even admit to wanting a boyfriend.

And not that she isn’t cute enough, either. It’s just . . . she’s busy. And kinda shy. But still, I couldn’t exactly picture her signing up with a dating service for help. That just isn’t how it’s done.

Janet delicately cleared her throat. “Felicity, this is no small thing. It’s taken the company thousands of years to evolve and perfect our technology, but I like the way the PDAs work so far.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I must have misheard her. Maybe I needed to pay better attention to this training session instead of thinking about me and my friends’ dating disasters.

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“Trust me,” she continued, chuckling, “you’ll like using this much better than the bows and arrows of yesteryear. The misfiring possibility alone made the job more difficult than it needed to be. And the PDAs are far less cumbersome to carry.”

I swallowed hard. Okay, I hadn’t misunderstood. The lady was obviously a loony-bird.

And I was now employed by her.

I glanced at the door, trying to think of a polite way to get the hell out of there.

Janet paused, looking at me. “Are we on the same page here?”

I slid my eyes back to her face. “I—I’m guessing not.” Because I was on planet Earth, and Janet was obviously circling somewhere around Jupiter, floating on a pink cloud with rainbows, bunnies, and fluffy kitty cats. And a whole lotta bathtub-created meth.

No wonder they always warned us to stay away from drugs.

Janet spoke slowly. “You do understand you’re a cupid now, right?”

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Hush, Hush A sacred oath, a fallen angel, a forbidden love.

Nora Grey has had a rough year. Her father was murdered and as a result, her mother had thrown herself into work, leaving Nora alone most of the time in their secluded farmhouse. Despite this, she maintains her good girl image, never missing school, never even driving without permission.

But when the transfer student, Patch, gets assigned as her lab partner in biology, from the moment the two are together, there’s an inescapable magnetism that draws Nora deeper and deeper into his world. When she comes across the enormous V-shaped scars on his back, she discovers that there is a battle going on between the fallen and the immortal. And she’s the object.

The magnetism she feels now is more inescapable than ever.

Becca Fitzpatrick grew up reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden with a flashlight under the covers. She graduated college with a degree in health, which she promptly abandoned for storytelling. When not writing, she’s most likely prowling sale racks for reject shoes, running, or watching crime dramas on TV. HUSH, HUSH is her first novel.

Chapter One Coldwater, Maine Present day I walked into biology and my jaw fell open. Mysteriously adhered to the chalkboard was a Barbie doll, with Ken at her side. They’d been forced to link arms and were naked except for artificial leaves placed in a few choice locations. Scribbled above their heads in thick pink chalk was the invitation: WELCOME TO HUMAN REPRODUCTION (SEX) At my side Vee Sky said, “This is exactly why the school outlaws camera phones. Pictures of this in the eZine would be all the evidence I’d need to get the board of education to ax biology. And then we’d have this hour to do something productive—like receive one-on-one tutoring from cute upper-class guys.”

“Why, Vee,” I said, “I could’ve sworn you’ve been looking forward to this unit all semester.”

Vee lowered her lashes and smiled wickedly. “This class isn’t going to teach me anything I don’t already know.”

“Vee? As in virgin?”

“Not so loud.” She winked just as the bell rang, sending us both to our seats, which were side by side at our shared table.

Coach McConaughy grabbed the whistle swinging from a chain around his neck and blew it. “Seats, team!” Coach considered teaching tenth-grade 138

biology a side assignment to his job as varsity basketball coach and we all knew it.

“It may not have occurred to you kids that sex is more than a fifteen minute trip to the back-seat of a car. It’s science. And what is science?”

“Boring,” some kid in the back of the room called out.

“The only class I’m failing,” said another.

Coach’s eyes tracked down the front row, stopping at me. “Nora?”

“The study of something,” I said.

He walked over and jabbed his index finger on my desk. “What else?”

“Knowledge gained through experimentation and observation.” Lovely.

I sounded like I was auditioning for the audiobook of our text.

“In your own words.”

I touched the tip of my tongue to my upper lip and tried for a synonym.

“Science is an investigation.” It sounded like a question.

“Science is an investigation,” Coach said, sanding his hands together.

“Science requires us to transform into spies.”

Put that way, science almost sounded fun. But I’d been in Coach’s class long enough not to get my hopes up.

“Good sleuthing takes practice,” he continued.

“So does sex,” came another back-of-the-room comment. We all bit back laughter while Coach pointed a warning finger at the offender.

“That won’t be part of tonight’s homework.” Coach turned his attention back to me. “Nora, you’ve been sitting beside Vee since the beginning of the year.” I nodded, but had a bad feeling about where this was going. “Both 139

of you are on the school eZine together.” Again I nodded. “I bet you know quite a bit about each other.”

Vee kicked my leg under our table. I knew what she was thinking.

That he had no idea how much we knew about each other. And I don’t just mean the secrets we entomb in our diaries. Vee is my un-twin. She’s greeneyed, minky blond, and one pound over curvy. I’m a smoky-eyed brunette with volumes of curly hair that holds its own against even the best flat iron.

And I’m all legs, like a barstool. But there is an invisible thread that ties us together; both of us swear that tie began long before birth. Both of us swear it will continue to hold for the rest of our lives.

Coach looked out at the class. “In fact, I’ll bet each of you knows the person sitting beside you well enough. You picked the seats you did for a reason, right? Familiarity. Too bad good sleuths avoid familiarity. It dulls the investigative instinct. Which is why, today, we’re creating a new seating chart.”

I opened my mouth to protest. Vee scowled at Coach. She is famous for that scowl. It’s a look that does everything but audibly hiss. Apparently immune to it, Coach brought his whistle to his lips and we got the idea.

“Every partner sitting on the left-hand side of the table—that’s your left—move up one seat. Those on the front row—yes, including you, Vee—move to the back.”

Vee shoved her notebook inside her backpack and ripped the zipper shut.

I bit my lip and waved a small farewell. Then I turned slightly, checking out the room behind me. I knew the names of all my classmates . . . except one.

The transfer. Coach never called on him, and he seemed to prefer it that way.

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He sat slouched one desk back, cool black eyes holding a steady gaze forward.

Just like always. I didn’t for one moment believe he just sat there, day after day, staring into space. He was thinking something, but instinct told me I probably didn’t want to know what.

He set his bio text down on the table and slid into Vee’s old chair.

I smiled. “Hi. I’m Nora.”

His black eyes sliced into me and the corners of his mouth tilted up.

My heart fumbled a beat and in that pause, a feeling of gloomy darkness seemed to slide like a shadow over me. It vanished in an instant, but I was still staring at him. His smile wasn’t friendly. It was a smile that spelled trouble. With a promise.

I focused on the chalkboard. Barbie and Ken stared back with strangely cheerful smiles.

Coach said, “Human reproduction can be a sticky subject—” “Ewww!” groaned a chorus of students.

“It requires mature handling. And like all science, the best approach is to learn by sleuthing. For the rest of class, practice this technique by finding out as much as you can about your new partner. Tomorrow, bring a writeup of your discoveries, and believe me, I’m going to check for authenticity.

This is biology, not English, so don’t even think about fictionalizing your answers. I want to see real interaction and teamwork.” There was an implied Or else.

I sat perfectly still. The ball was in his court—I’d smiled, and look how well that turned out. I wrinkled my nose, trying to figure out what he smelled like. Not cigarettes. Something richer, fouler.

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Cigars.

I found the clock on the wall and tapped my pencil in time to the second hand. I planted my elbow on the desk and propped my chin on my fist. I blew out a sigh.

Great. At this rate I would fail.

I had my eyes pinned forward, but I heard the soft glide of his pencil.

He was writing, and I wanted to know what. Ten minutes of sitting together didn’t qualify him to make any assumptions about me. Flitting a look sideways, I saw his paper was several lines deep and growing.

“What are you writing?” I asked.

“And she speaks English,” he said while scrawling it down, each stroke of his hand both smooth and lazy at once.

I leaned as close to him as I dared, trying to read what else he’d written, but he folded the paper in half, concealing the list.

“What did you write?” I demanded.

He reached for my unused paper, sliding it across the table toward him. He crumpled it into a ball. Before I could protest, he tossed it at the trashcan beside Coach’s desk. The shot dropped in.

I stared at the trashcan a moment, locked between disbelief and anger.

Then I flipped open my notebook to a clean page. “What is your name?” I asked, pencil poised to write.

I glanced up in time to catch another dark grin. This one seemed to dare me to pry anything out of him.

“Your name?” I repeated, hoping it was my imagination that my voice faltered.

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“Call me Patch. I mean it. Call me.”

He winked when he said it and I was pretty sure he was making fun of me.

“What do you do in your leisure time?” I asked.

“I don’t have free time.”

“I’m assuming this assignment is graded, so do me a favor?”

He leaned back in his seat, folding his arms behind his head. “What kind of favor?”

I was pretty sure it was an innuendo, and I grappled for a way to change the subject.

“Free time,” he repeated thoughtfully. “I take pictures.”

I printed photography on my paper.

“I wasn’t finished,” he said. “I’ve got quite a collection going of an eZine columnist who believes there’s truth in eating organic, who writes poetry in secret and who shudders at the thought of having to choose between Stanford, Yale and . . . what’s that big one with the H?” I stared at him a moment, shaken by how dead on he was. I didn’t get the feeling it was a lucky guess. He knew. And I wanted to know how— right now.

“But you won’t end up going to any of them.”

“I won’t?” I asked without thinking.

He hooked his fingers under the seat of my chair, dragging me closer to him. Not sure if I should scoot away and show fear, or do nothing and feign boredom, I chose the latter.

He said, “Even though you’d thrive at all three schools, you scorn them for 143

being a cliché of achievement. Passing judgment is your third biggest weakness.”

“And my second?” I said with quiet rage. Who was this guy? Was this some kind of disturbing joke?

“You don’t know how to trust. I take that back. You trust—just all the wrong people.”

“And my first?” I demanded.

“You keep life on a short leash.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re scared of what you can’t control.”

The hair at the nape of my neck stood on end, and the temperature in the room seemed to chill. Ordinarily, I would have gone straight to Coach’s desk and requested a new seating chart. But I refused to let Patch think he could intimidate or scare me. I felt an irrational need to defend myself and decided right then and there I wouldn’t back down until he did.

“Do you sleep naked?” he asked.

My mouth threatened to drop, but I held it in check. “You’re hardly the person I’d tell.”

“Ever been to a shrink?”

“No,” I lied. The truth was, I was in counseling with the school psychologist, Mr. Hendrickson. It wasn’t by choice, and it wasn’t something I liked to talk about.

“Done anything illegal?”

“No.” Occasionally breaking the speed limit wouldn’t count. Not with him. “Why don’t you ask me something normal? Like—my favorite style of music?”

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“I’m not going to ask what I can guess.”

“You do not know the type of music I listen to.”

“Baroque. With you, it’s all about order, control. I bet you play . . . the cello?” He said it like he’d pulled the guess out of thin air.

“Wrong.” Another lie, but this one sent a chill rippling along my skin that left my fingers tingling. Who was he really? If he knew I played the cello, what else did he know?

“What’s that?” Patch tapped his pen against the inside of my wrist.

Instinctively, I pulled away.

“A birthmark.”

“Looks like a scar. Are you suicidal, Nora?” His eyes connected with mine, and I could feel him laughing. “Parents married or divorced?”

“I live with my mom.”

“Where’s dad?”

“My dad passed away last year.”

“How did he die?”

I flinched. “He was—murdered. This is kind of personal territory, if you don’t mind.”

There was a count of silence and the edge in Patch’s eyes seemed to soften a touch. “That must be hard.” He sounded like he meant it.

The bell rang and Patch was on his feet, making his way toward the door.

“Wait,” I called out. He didn’t turn. “Excuse me—!” He was through the door. “Patch! I didn’t get anything on you.”

Turning back, he walked toward me. Taking my hand, he scribbled omething on it before I thought to pull away.

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I looked down at the seven numbers in red ink on my palm and

made a fist around them. I wanted to tell him no way was his phone ringing tonight. I wanted to tell him it was his fault for taking all the time questioning me. I wanted a lot of things, but the truth is, I just stood there looking like I didn’t know how to open my mouth.

At last I said, “I’m busy tonight.”

“So am I.” He grinned and was gone.

I stood nailed to the spot, digesting what had just happened. Did he eat up all the time questioning me on purpose? So I’d fail? Did he think one flashy grin would redeem him? Yes, I thought. Yes, he did.

“I won’t call!” I called after him. “Not—ever!”

“Have you finished your column for tomorrow’s deadline?” It was Vee. She came beside me, jotting notes on the notepad she carried everywhere.

“I’m thinking of writing mine on the injustices of seating charts. I got paired with a girl who said she just finished lice treatment this morning.”

“My new partner,” I said, pointing into the hallway at the back of Patch.

He had an annoyingly confident walk, the kind you find paired with faded T-shirts and a cowboy hat. Patch wore neither. He was a dark-Levi’s-darkHenley-dark-boots kind of guy.

“The senior transfer? Guess he didn’t study hard enough the first time around. Or the second.” She gave me a knowing look. “Third time’s a charm.”

“He gives me the creeps. He knew my music. Without any hints whatsoever, he said, ‘Baroque. Often opera.’” I did a poor job of mimicking his low voice.

146

“Lucky guess?”

“He knew . . . other things.”

“Like what?”

I let go of a sigh. He knew more than I wanted to comfortably contemplate. “Like how to get under my skin,” I said at last. “I’m going to tell Coach he has to switch us back.”

“Go for it. I could use a hook for my next eZine article. Tenth-grader Fights Back. Better yet, Seating Chart Takes Slap in the Face. Mmm. I like it.”

At the end of the day, I was the one who took a slap in the face. Coach shot down my plea to rethink the seating chart. It appeared I was stuck with Patch.

For now.

147

Ellen Hopkins

Kate Brian

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148

Cassandra Clare

Lisa McMann