DEDICATION

FOR DANIEL,

who asked which book I recommend he read on an airplane.

I finally have an answer: this one.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One: Lane

Chapter Two: Sadie

Chapter Three: Lane

Chapter Four: Sadie

Chapter Five: Lane

Chapter Six: Sadie

Chapter Seven: Lane

Chapter Eight: Sadie

Chapter Nine: Lane

Chapter Ten: Sadie

Chapter Eleven: Lane

Chapter Twelve: Sadie

Chapter Thirteen: Lane

Chapter Fourteen: Sadie

Chapter Fifteen: Lane

Chapter Sixteen: Sadie

Chapter Seventeen: Lane

Chapter Eighteen: Sadie

Chapter Nineteen: Lane

Chapter Twenty: Sadie

Chapter Twenty-One: Lane

Chapter Twenty-Two: Sadie

Chapter Twenty-Three: Lane

Chapter Twenty-Four: Sadie

Chapter Twenty-Five: Lane

Chapter Twenty-Six: Sadie

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Lane

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Back Ads

About the Author

Books by Robyn Schneider

Copyright

About the Publisher

EPIGRAPH

I didn’t want to kiss you good-bye—that was the trouble—

I wanted to kiss you good night—

and there’s a lot of difference.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice

and I’ll tell you a story.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

CHAPTER ONE

LANE

MY FIRST NIGHT at Latham House, I lay awake in my narrow, gabled room in Cottage 6 wondering how many people had died in it. And I didn’t just wonder this casually, either. I did the math. I figured the probability. And I came up with a number: eight. But then, I’ve always been terrible at math.

In fourth grade, we had to do timed tests for our multiplication tables. Five minutes a page, fifty questions each, and if you wanted to move on, you couldn’t make a single mistake. The teacher charted our progress on a piece of hot-pink poster board taped up for everyone to see, a smiley-face sticker next to our name for each table we completed. I watched as the number of stickers next to everyone else’s names grew, while I got stuck on the sevens. I did the flash cards every night, but it was no use, because it wasn’t the multiplication table that was giving me trouble. It was the pressure of being told two things: 1. That I only had a short amount of time, and 2. That I had to get everything right.

When I finally drifted off to sleep, I dreamed of houses falling into the ocean and drowning. The water swallowed them, but they rose up again from the black depths, rotting and covered in seaweed as they rode the waves back to shore, looking for their owners.

I’M AN ONLY child, so the prospect of using the communal bathroom was pretty horrifying. Which is why I set my alarm that first morning for six o’clock, tiptoeing down the hall with my Dopp kit and towel while everyone else was still asleep.

It was strange wearing shoes in the shower, being completely naked except for a pair of flip-flops. Washing my hair with shoes on, and doing it in a Tupperware container of a shower stall, felt so different from my normal Monday-morning routine that I wondered if I’d ever get used to it.

I used to sleep in at home, waiting until the last possible moment to roll out of bed, grope for a clean shirt, and eat a cereal bar on the drive to school. I’d listen to whatever songs were on the radio, not because I liked them, but because they were my tarot cards. If the songs were good, it would be a good day. If they were bad, I’d probably get a B on a quiz.

But that morning, standing at the window of my dorm room as I buttoned my shirt, I felt like an entirely different person. It was as though someone had taken an eraser to my life and, instead of getting rid of the mess, had rubbed away all the parts that I’d wanted to keep.

Now, instead of my girlfriend, and my dog, and my car, I had a pale-green vinyl mattress, a view of the woods, and an ache in my chest.

I’d gotten in late the night before. My parents drove me up, Dad clutching the steering wheel and Mom staring straight ahead as we listened to NPR for six hours with the windows down, not saying anything. Dinner was long over and it was almost lights-out by the time I’d opened my suitcase.

Latham still didn’t feel real. Not yet. I’d encountered it, tiptoeing around the corridors out of sync with the rest of its residents, but I hadn’t yet become one of them.

It was the end of September, and I was seventeen, and my senior year was taking place four hundred miles away, without me. I tried not to think about that as I waited for my tour guide outside the dormitory, in the early-morning chill of the mountains. I tried not to think about any of it, because I was pretty sure the full weight of my situation would crush me. Instead, I thought about wet flip-flops and math problems and my cell phone, which I’d had for a few brief hours in the car, and which had been taken from me upon arrival.

According to my information packet, Your First-Day Ambassador, Grant Harden, will meet you outside your dorm at 7:55 a.m. to take you to breakfast and help you find your first class.

So I waited for Grant to show up while everyone else streamed past me, shuffling toward the dining hall in a motley assortment of sweatpants and pajamas, like we were at summer camp.

Of course Grant was running late, so I stood there forever, getting more and more annoyed. It seemed ridiculous that I couldn’t just find my own way to breakfast, or to Latham’s one academic building, that I needed to be publicly escorted.

I glanced at my wrist: 8:09. I didn’t know how much longer I was reasonably expected to stand there, so I waited another few minutes, then gave up and walked to the dining hall.

It was easy enough to find the place, to pick up a tray and join the line of half-asleep teenagers. I was right; I hadn’t needed some kid to show me around after all. It was just a cafeteria line. I took a bowl of cereal and a little milk carton, noting that my old high school had carried the same brand of milk, featuring this weird, grinning cow’s head. How strange, for everything to shift so drastically, but for the milk cartons to stay the same.

I slid my tray along the counter, past the plates of eggs and muffins and toast. But it wasn’t until I heard someone yell for a friend to save him a seat that I realized my mistake: I was totally alone. I’d been so impatient to get to the dining hall that I hadn’t thought it through. Maybe, if I’d gone into the bathroom that morning along with everyone else, pitching myself into the chaos instead of avoiding it, I could have found someone to walk over with. Now, I didn’t even know who lived on my floor. And I was fast approaching the front of the line, without even a cell phone to rescue me from the total disaster of having nowhere to sit in a crowded dining hall.

I was thinking that I couldn’t have screwed this up worse when the nutritionist frowned down at my tray like I’d personally disappointed her with my choice of breakfast cereal.