Dedication
For A.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Back Ads
About the Author
Books by Hilary T. Smith
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
ON THE FIRST DAY OF NOE, the raspberries are always ripe. The sprinkler makes a gentle phut-phut-phut in the backyard, spraying misty rainbows over the grass. When I hear Noe’s footsteps on the gravel, I get up from the computer and rush down the stairs. I catch the first glimpse of her out the window: Noe striding up the driveway, feet wedged into flimsy sandals, a neon-pink Band-Aid on her knee, a flossy bracelet, or several, piling up on her wrists like offerings on a shrine. I burst through the door, her name rushing out of my mouth. We collide in a spinning hug, and for those seconds we become a dervish twirling as one body on the gravel.
“Annabeth!” she sings.
“Noe!” I squeal.
And we hurry down the street without breaking contact for a second, as if our bodies have as much to say to each other as we do. We walk, and she tells me about her summer teaching back flips to the ponytailed nine-year-olds of Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo, the counselor intrigues and minor maimings. We cut across the soccer field, and I tell her about my summer scooping ice cream at the Botanical Gardens—the lady off the tour bus who got trapped in a bathroom stall, the boy who got a beesting on his tongue and almost died. We thread our way through the crowded school parking lot and trade rumors about the upcoming year, whether it was true that Mr. Harrison and Ms. Bean were getting married, if they were really putting a frozen-yogurt machine in the cafeteria.
We sit on the bleachers and pull out Noe’s phone to watch the circus videos she wants to show me and listen to the music she’s planning to use for her latest gymnastics routine.
We talk about all the things we’re going to do when we’re eighteen: save up and travel to Paris, get matching dandelion tattoos, open a restaurant where the food is sold by the ounce and eaten with tiny silver spoons.
Her friendship was a jewel I guarded like a dragon, keeping it always in the crook of my hand.
I didn’t know who I would be without the shape of it pressing into my palm, without its cool glitter to light my way.
It was the first day of senior year, and Noe was striding up my driveway.
“Noe!” I called.
“Annabeth!” she screamed.
My outstretched arms found hers, and I was home.
2
MY SCHOOL, E. O. JAMES, SAT at an intersection across from a Burger King, an EasyCuts hair salon, and a funeral parlor. There was a girl in my grade whose parents owned the funeral parlor; every year on Career Day, her dad gave the same jokey speech about the perks of being a mortician. I wasn’t sure why they kept bringing him back. By the time we’d graduated college and were ready to consider such career paths, technology would have advanced such that most people would probably be turned into nanopellets and shot into outer space.
The first day of school wasn’t really school, more like a cut-rate carnival that got more exhausting and pointless every year. In the morning, they made us play team-building games on the soccer fields. The team-building games largely consisted of throwing basketballs at people you despised. Occasionally, you were also supposed to capture a flag or form a human pyramid; I never figured out when or why.
After the team-building games, there was an all-school barbecue where teachers who would stare past you with glazed eyes for the rest of the year smiled and handed you an Oscar Mayer wiener instead.
After the barbecue, there was a motivational speaker, who was invariably a not-quite-famous cyclist who lost a leg to cancer and discovered the true meaning of determination.
The motivational speaker was supposed to get us excited about life, but I always ended up lost in daydreams about having cancer and dying and not having to be myself anymore. Noe loved the motivational speakers and always lined up to get their autograph, and I would hang behind her, lost in fantasy, imagining the cancer spreading through me, which would be so much better than having to clock another seventy years as Annabeth Schultz, Deeply Flawed and Reluctant Human.
It was weird to know that this first day was going to be our last one ever. When Noe and I got to school, the Senior Leaders had set up tables where you were supposed to pick up your name tag and get assigned to a team. They were wearing bright purple T-shirts with E. O. James on the front. The whole point of Senior Leaders was to make the school a friendlier place, but despite their best intentions they ended up terrorizing as many kids as they helped. If you got confused and didn’t go where they pointed, they shouted and blew their whistles in a way that could give you a lifelong case of PTSD.