Never Ever

by Sara Saedi

  Thank you additionally to my favorite book club ladies: Alison Asaro (yeah, you just got thanked twice), Agnes Chu, Anne Trench, Daya Berger, Emily Brough, Gabrielle Ebert, Jen Kleiner, Jihan Crowther, Karin Nelson, Lani D-Barrett, Toby Lowenfels, and Valentina Garcia-Loste for reminding me that books (and mimosas) are my first love.

  For me, the relationship between the Dalton siblings is the heartbeat of this story. Thank you to my sister Samira Saedi Abrams and my brother Kia Saedi for being my best friends and biggest inspirations. You have endured many of my career twists and turns and you’ve never stopped encouraging me. You are the most generous, compassionate, and funny people I know. If I ever move to a magical island, I’m taking you both with me. Thank you also to Jacob Abrams for being the older brother I’ve always wanted. You’re totally invited to the island, too. I love you guys.

  To my kind and curious nephew and nieces, Mazin, Ella, Keira, and Cameron. I hope once you’re old enough to read this book you will permanently refer to me as your “cool aunt.”

  A very special thank-you to my incredible parents, Ali and Shoreh Saedi. You changed your entire lives so your kids could have better opportunities and no form of gratitude will ever be enough. Your love and support mean the world to me. Thank you for never asking me if I had a backup plan, for always believing in me, and for making me feel like I was meant to be a writer. Thank you also for reading the book in its earliest incarnation when you had a million other things keeping you busy. You are the kind of parents a kid wants to make proud. I love you so much.

  Is it weird to thank your dog in acknowledgments? What if your dog is an adorable pug named Mabel who sat on your lap during the writing of this book? Okay, in that case—thank you, Mabel, for filling my days with so much joy.

  Most importantly, thank you to my loving husband, Bryon Schafer. If it weren’t for your confidence in me, I would never have had the guts to quit my day job. Thank you for never rolling your eyes during my frequent bouts of self-doubt, for reminding me to laugh at myself, and for your unwavering support. Also, thanks for marrying me, because a) companionship and b) I had the idea for this story on our honeymoon. You are the best life partner a girl could ask for. Everything is better with you by my side, and there’s no one I’d rather grow old with. I love you.

  Read the first chapter of

  The Lost Kids,

  the sequel to Never Ever!

  PROLOGUE

  “phinn, are you listening? Where’s Wylie Dalton?”

  Dead.

  Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean.

  Permanently trapped in the folds of my mind.

  Tucked away in the corner of my heart.

  All of the above.

  “You have a chance to do the right thing here. Answer the question.”

  A fan buzzed overhead. The steady beeping of the heart monitor made Phinn insane. He missed the pop-pop of parvaz flowers and the whir of teenagers flying above him. He missed the melodies of the island. Hell, he missed blue sky.

  “Where’s Wylie Dalton?”

  The question had haunted Phinn from the moment he heard Wylie plummet into the ocean, and now it was being asked of him with about as much urgency as someone looking for a set of missing keys. All he wanted was to see Wylie again, to hold her and tell her that the moment he’d met her, he’d given up on making her part of his intricate revenge plot.

  Phinn’s plan had always been to befriend Joshua. The son in trouble with the law seemed the most vulnerable of the Dalton siblings. But all that changed when Wylie came into Phinn’s line of sight. She’d been on the dance floor, surrounded by friends, but had somehow created the illusion that she was alone. From where Phinn had sat that night, he’d barely been able to make out the emerald shade of her irises, but he’d seen a trace of pain behind her eyes. On that rooftop in Brooklyn, he’d forgotten about her dad and all the reasons he’d manipulated a run-in with the Dalton kids. Their future didn’t feel premeditated anymore. It felt inevitable.

  “If I knew where she was, don’t you think I would have found her?” Phinn finally responded.

  “What did you do to her?”

  I lied to her. I broke her heart into a million pieces. I held her captive.

  “Nothing. I didn’t do anything to her. I want to go home.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen.”

  Phinn did the math. He’d been here for seven days. That meant two hundred and eighty-eight more days to spare before he’d turn eighteen.

  “How old were you when your parents died?”

  “What do you have on that little clipboard?” Phinn asked. “A list of every upsetting question you could ask me?”

  “This will go a lot more easily if you cooperate.”

  “Five. I was five when my parents died.”

  “And how did they die?”

  He’d thought that it was just an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, that, when he found them, they were only pretending to be asleep. He’d yanked his mother’s hair, screaming at her to wake up. He’d scraped her skin with his fingernails as Lola’s family pulled him away.

  Phinn looked into the eyes of his interrogator and waited until he was certain he wouldn’t cry.

  “They killed themselves.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  sleepless nights

  the water was still for once. Lying on the floorboards of the boat, Wylie felt almost as if she was back on dry land. After three weeks trapped on this vessel, she was finally getting used to the cold dankness. The surrounding abyss of ocean no longer left her overwhelmed. The days of motion sickness slowly retreated into the past. Despite all she had grown accustomed to, sleepless nights continued to torture her, and tonight was no exception. It didn’t matter that every joint and limb was weak from hours of exercise—Wylie’s mind refused to slow down. She spent every night searching for constellations and counting stars, but nothing seemed to lull her to sleep.

  It had been twenty-one days since she’d last seen her brothers. The Daltons had never spent that much time apart. Here, on this boat, she had no parents and no siblings. She was an orphan. The lost kids were her only family now. She sat up and looked at all the sleeping bodies sprawled in every direction. Charlotte snored loudly next to her, as she did most nights. Wylie tried to shut out thoughts of smothering her with a blanket. It wasn’t Charlotte’s fault that she could fall asleep anywhere she laid her head down.

  “I love sleeping,” Charlotte explained to her. “Every night when we go to bed, we wake up one day closer to taking the island back. One day closer to going home.”

  Home. Wylie wasn’t sure where that was anymore. The lost kids meant the island, but Wylie had no desire to live there without her brothers. She wondered if Micah and Joshua had made it back to their Manhattan brownstone. For all she knew, they were sitting on the fire escape together right now, wondering if they’d ever see their sister again. If she closed her eyes long enough, she could make believe she was back in her old bed, wrapped in worn-out flannel sheets. What she would give to wake up in the morning and brush her teeth in a normal sink and take a hot shower in an actual bathtub.

  The snores were even louder now. Wylie gently tapped Charlotte’s shoulder.

  “Charlotte,” she whispered. “You’re snoring.”

  Charlotte groaned and turned on her side. The rumbling subsided for a few minutes, until it started back up again. After three weeks of insomnia, Wylie wasn’t sure what tormented her more: sleep deprivation or Phinn.

  She’d finally conquered it last night as she’d let her mind drift off to the party at Vanessa’s and remembered what it felt like to see Phinn across the rooftop. She’d recalled how everyone else melted away except for them. Before the memories could turn dark, before she could remind herself that Phinn was a monster, she’d fallen asleep. But tonight, the very thought of him made her restless mind eve
n more alert.

  Wylie stretched out her legs and quietly pulled herself to her feet. She grabbed the thin blanket that barely kept her warm and wrapped it around her shoulders. She’d perfected the art of moving without disturbing others in their sleep. Her feet knew every floorboard to avoid and every sleeping body to step over in the pitch dark. All they had to do was follow the soft sounds of guitar strumming to the bow of the boat.

  “Couldn’t sleep again?” Hopper asked as she tiptoed toward his regular spot.

  “Nope.”

  “What about last night? You were sleeping like a baby.”

  “Charlotte must’ve been snoring less.”

  “No way. I bet they could hear her all the way on the island.”

  “Mind if I hang out here for a while?” Wylie asked, lying down before he answered.

  “Not in the slightest.”

  Hopper hadn’t always been this nice to her. During her first few days on the boat, he’d mostly ignored her or given one-word responses to every question she’d asked him. And he’d never asked any questions in return. He’d be terrible on a date, Wylie had thought.

  “He doesn’t like most humans,” Lola explained at the time. “Don’t waste your time trying to win him over.”

  Perhaps it was boredom that made Wylie determined to be his friend—or maybe she needed a challenge. After their daily training sessions on the boat, the lost kids spent the rest of the day fishing and sharpening their spears. Most of them filled the hours rehashing every bad thing Phinn had done to them. Wylie grew bored with the same conversations, so she turned her attention to Hopper. It was like her secret game: Person who doesn’t like most humans, I will make you like me.

  It wasn’t an easy pastime. In the beginning, all of Wylie’s sarcastic quips and witty jokes had gone over like lead balloons. Hopper would respond with a blank stare, mutter an excuse under his breath, and walk off to another corner of the boat. Try to find something you have in common, Wylie told herself. Their mutual hatred of Phinn seemed like an obvious starting point, but Hopper never engaged in her verbal tirades against her ex. Wylie got the sense that he wasn’t quite convinced she was over him. And then, when Wylie mustered the courage to ask if she could pass the evenings with him while he played guitar, Hopper said he preferred to be alone.

  Finally, Wylie remembered his manifesto. There was no email on this boat and no texting, but Hopper himself had admitted he communicated best on paper. So Wylie wrote her own manifesto. She told her story, in her own words, and confessed how stupid she felt about having fallen for Phinn.

  She folded the sheet of paper into a rectangle and slipped it under the strings of Hopper’s guitar. He never mentioned reading it, but the following day, he meandered over to her as she tried in vain to fish for her dinner. They both knew she never caught anything.

  “If you can’t sleep tonight, you can come hang out with me.” He said it casually, as though the ocean hadn’t shifted from the invitation.

  Now, every night since his overture, she snuck over to his tiny corner of the boat and listened to him clumsily play guitar. Thanks to Tinka, he’d lost three of the fingers on his right hand and was still teaching himself to use his right hand to press down on the frets. The chord changes were slow and unsteady, but Wylie hummed along to distract him when he got frustrated.

  “Maybe she has a deviated septum,” Wylie said.

  “Who?” Hopper asked.

  “Charlotte, obviously. What if we pinned her down, plied her with vodka, and did surgery to fix the thing? You hold her arms and I’ll go in with a knife.”

  Hopper’s face broke into a smile at the suggestion. It felt like such a victory when Wylie could get him to shift from his usual scowl.

  “You’re such a weirdo,” Hopper said.

  “A weirdo you’re stuck on a boat with.”

  “I know. I should have left you on that rock.”

  Wylie tugged one of his curls playfully. She hadn’t expected to get used to his appearance. Phinn was chiseled and clean cut, but Hopper was neither of those things, though it was hard to know what his face really looked like under his beard. Back in New York, he’d look like a homeless person. Most days, he smelled like one, too. Good hygiene wasn’t really an option on a small boat filled with a dozen sweaty kids.

  “I would give anything to go to sleep,” Wylie replied.

  “How about when we go back to the island, after we do the whole, you know, overthrowing Phinn bit, we’ll go to the Forbidden Side and pick a bunch of rahat flowers and sleep for days.”

  Wylie felt like an imposter whenever Hopper talked about Minor Island. He always made references to plants or landmarks she wasn’t familiar with, but she hadn’t lived there nearly as long as he had. She felt like one of those people who called themselves New Yorkers after spending only a year in the city.

  “No one ever told me about rahat flowers,” Wylie admitted.

  “Good. I like getting to be the one to tell you about stuff. They’re red, almost burgundy. They’re twice as big as parvaz, but they don’t make any sound when they grow. Phinn never liked people taking them. But they made me feel . . . invincible. Aldo and Patrick gave them to me to help with anxiety, but if you take enough, they make you sleep for hours.”

  Wylie remembered spying the plant he was describing through the bars of her cage, just out of reach. Lola had mentioned there were herbs that were native to the Forbidden Side, but she’d never mentioned rahat flowers. Wylie wondered what else about the island she’d never get a chance to discover.

  “I could have used a few of those when Phinn had me locked up,” Wylie said.

  “I used to beg him for them, especially after they chopped off my fingers, but he wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Well, he won’t get a say now.”

  Aside from the guitar, Hopper’s favorite pastime was fantasizing about life on Minor Island without Phinn, and Wylie always indulged him. They talked about how they’d get rid of all the cages on the Forbidden Side. Hopper promised he would personally nail down the floorboards to the panic room and would never make anyone hide out in the dark. The girls would no longer be herded into the clinic, forced to take birth control. Everyone could use their preferred form of contraception.

  “Condoms are kind of a drag though, you know,” Hopper joked.

  “It’s a good thing no one in their right mind would have sex with you,” Wylie replied.

  The conversation turned, as it nearly always did, to Wylie’s thoughts about her brothers. Tonight, Hopper struggled with a few minor chords on the guitar and told her not to worry so much about them. Wylie rolled her eyes. She was starting to grow frustrated with only children who told her not to be so concerned about Micah and Joshua.

  “If they’re not on the island, I’ll sail to New York and bring them back,” Hopper promised.

  Wylie closed her eyes and listened to a melody slowly forming on the guitar. Hopper said it was out of tune, but she didn’t know the difference. The thoughts in her mind slowly swirled and the rooftop in Brooklyn came into view.

  Don’t think about Phinn, she told herself as she saw his face, and drifted into sleep.

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