by Robin Benway
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
chapter 1 - “I know too much already.” april
chapter 2 - “I’ve spent my whole life getting ready for this.” may
chapter 3 - “I remembered. Oh boy, did I remember.” june
chapter 4 - “I heard the crack and saw the spark.” april
chapter 5 - “You have no idea how fast things can change.” may
chapter 6 - “It turns out that being a mindreader does have its upsides.” june
chapter 7 - “That’s, like, Superhero 101!” april
chapter 8 - “Even when you can disappear, the hurt doesn’t go away.” may
chapter 9 - “I’d take excitement over easy any day.” june
chapter 10 - “I should be wearing yellow CAUTION tape, I’m that bonkers.” april
chapter 11 - “What’s the point of crying if you can’t even see the tears?” may
chapter 12 - “I can’t see anything.” june
chapter 13 - “This was a MacGyver-style mission.” april
chapter 14 - “There are few things worse than being all alone in a crowd.” may
chapter 15 - “You have got to be kidding me.” june
chapter 16 - “This isn’t make-believe! This is it!” april
chapter 17 - “A liar is a liar is a liar.” may
chapter 18 - “The inmates were running the asylum.” june
chapter 19 - “The red lights attacked every part of me.” april
chapter 20 - “We’ve gotta go right now.” may
chapter 21 - “This was a very, very bad idea.” june
chapter 22 - “There’s been an accident.” april
chapter 23 - “Suddenly I was invisible and running.” may
chapter 24 - “I couldn’t imagine ever letting them go.” june
chapter 25 - “You drove like a bat out of hell.” april
chapter 26 - “Promise you won’t freak out.” may
chapter 27 - “Then I defy you stars!” june
chapter 28 - “I’m just really gonna miss you.” april
Acknowledgements
Praise for Robin Benway’s first novel, Audrey, Wait!
“Anyone who’s felt the slightest smidgen of sympathy for Britney Spears
will enjoy this humorous, energetic and intelligent coming-of-age story.”
—LOS ANGELES TIMES
“A first novel with a voice that sings.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)
“You know that song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen? And you know
how that song is so fun, but it’s really hard to figure out which part is the
most fun? Audrey, Wait! is just like that!”
—JAY ASHER, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF
THIRTEEN REASONS WHY
“Awesomely funny, fresh, and true! I adored this book!”
—RACHEL COHN , CO-AUTHOR OF
NICK & NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST
“I loved, loved, loved Audrey, Wait!”
—MEG CABOT , NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF
RUNAWAY AND THE PRINCESS DIARIES SERIES
“A fun, fast read that had me laughing out loud.”
—WORD FOR TEENS
“I will say this first … I knew I was going to love this book. I just knew it.
I could feel it. And man, did I love this book.”
—RUNNING FOR FICTION
“I loved Audrey, and I loved James. I even loved to hate Evan!”
—PRINCESS BOOKIE
“Audrey is a girl you’ll fall in love with!”
—MS. JAMGOCHIAN’S INFINITE PLAYLIST
“Audrey … has the most awesome voice!”
—ONCE UPON A BOOKCASE
“Absolutely fantastic.”
—THE BOOK OBSESSION
“Full of life, humor and unforgettable characters.”
—READ THIS BOOK !
“Audrey, Wait! is an addicting read that appears to [have been]
written while drinking approximately 38954505 coffees
and eating 982348 candy bars.”
—SARCASTIC HUMOURAND CHEWED UP PEN CAPS
“Audrey, Wait! is insanely fun, amusing, and awesome. If there’s
anyone out there who hasn’t read it yet (do such people exist?),
I suggest you pick it up.”
—FRENETIC READER
“Audrey [is] a fantastic character: witty, funny and smart. Totally
would want her as a friend.”
—SUNSHOWER STYLE
The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May & June
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
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Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Copyright © 2010 Robin Benway
All rights reserved
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“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”
—RAY BRADBURY
“There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in …”
—LEONARD COHEN , “Anthem”
For all the extraordinary ordinary girls
chapter 1
“I know too much already.” april
I hate being the oldest.
I hate it because I’m the one who has to experience everything first. And even if I haven’t, my sisters still think I know everything. Which I sort of do, but that’s not the point. At least, not right now.
It’s just like when my youngest sister June, on the night before the first day at our new school, sat me down on the edge of my bed (which made me wrinkle the comforter) and quizzed me about high school like it was a category on Jeopardy!
“Where do the cool kids eat?” she asked me, blowing her bangs out of her eyes so that they just resettled across her forehead. “Is it okay if I can’t drive yet? Are they going to haze me just because I’m a freshman?”
/> “June,” I had to tell her. “I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. I’ve never been to this school either, remember?”
“But what if I’m wearing the wrong outfit? Or it’s foggy and my hair frizzes? Do you think they’ll be all judge-y?”
Our middle sister, May, stuck her head into my room from the hallway. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in what June would call “a complete mess.” I didn’t blame May, though. It was too hot outside to worry about things like hair. “Yes,” she said to June. “Forget ever having a date for the next four years. We’ll call you Loser for short.”
“Just because you’ve never had a date,” June glared at her. “Loser-squared.”
May rolled her eyes and waved her black iPod at me. “I need my headphones back so I can drown out the whining.”
“On my desk,” I told her. “And June, seriously? Unless a pack of wild dogs are released into the halls tomorrow—”
“We hope, we pray,” May muttered as she dug around on my desk, searching for her headphones and knocking over a pile of hardcover books in the process.
“—then you’ll be fine. And do you mind, May?” I restraightened my books and glared at her. “A little respect for the written word, please.”
“Only you,” May said with a sigh, “would actually read the books on the summer reading list.”
“Are there wild dogs out here?” June asked. “I know there are coyotes.”
“There might be a spider,” I told her.
“Or seven,” May added.
I sighed. “Can you both get out of my room so I can pretend I’m an only child?”
I missed them after they left, though. It was weird the way I wanted them there, and when they were there, I wanted them to leave. We had only moved into our new house two weeks earlier, coming from Orange County out to the Valley because our parents divorced and our mom got a job here and because our dad took a new job in Houston and was moving there in a few weeks. At least, that’s why my mom said we were moving. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure that it had something to do with the fact that May got trashed the night our parents announced they were splitting up. No one’s really talking about it, least of all May, and even if we did talk about it, I’m not sure what I would say. “Way to be a cliché?” “So what’s it like starring in your own afterschool special?” June, being the youngest at fourteen, didn’t have a clue about May’s night of debauchery. All she knew was that a lot of Disney Channel stars lived in the Valley, so she was excited about the move. All I knew was that no one asked me or my sisters what we wanted, so we went along with it. I’ll tell you this, though. If I had known we were going to end up here, I would’ve spoken up a long time ago. The Valley at the beginning of September is ridiculously hot.
So we had this new home now, with this jacaranda tree, whose purple flowers permanently stained the sidewalk outside, and eucalyptus trees in the backyard. It was pretty, but it didn’t feel like home. It was just a house that we were living in, and if I listened really hard at night, I could hear traffic on the 101 freeway. “It’ll be like an adventure,” my mom had said when we moved in, and she had smiled so hard that my sisters and I just smiled back, like we hadn’t already spent the past three months on an adventure, watching our family reshape itself. I might have been the only one who was shaking on the inside; I don’t know. I don’t even want to know. I know too much already.
But things calmed down, and it was okay as it would ever be. We started school, and on the first day, I got lost four times because the campus was way bigger than our old school, with giant cement poles every ten feet or so and winding paths that made me trip twice. I knew that pretty soon, life would be normal and I would forget what it used to be like, but that didn’t make me feel any better when I wound up in the freshman-year geography class instead of junior-year anatomy by accident.
I tell myself that a lot now. You’ll forget what it used to be like.
June, like 99.9 percent of the freshman class, made absolutely no impression on anyone. May kept to her normal sophomore routine of shuffling around in her black Converse and ignoring people, while I just kept going along with the junior crowd. After all, why swim upstream? All that happens is that you get tired and die faster. Go with the flow, I say.
Or I used to say.
That was before I woke up seeing red.
It happened on the second Monday of the school year. I wish I could say that’s all I remember, but I remember everything about that day. It was the day our dad was moving to Houston—he had already sort of moved there, but he was coming over after school to officially say goodbye. He had shown us pictures of his new condo—it looked like every other condo in America—and May, June, and I had just looked at the pictures and said, “Cool,” because really, what could we say?
I remember that it was foggy that Monday morning and that it smelled like mint tea downstairs. I can even tell you that I was wearing a pair of May’s socks because all of mine were in the wash, but that’s not really a useful detail. And please don’t tell May. She has this thing about sharing socks. I don’t know—she’s weird like that.
I woke up early, even before June’s alarm went off in the room next to mine. At first I thought I was still dreaming because all I saw was bright red swimming past my eyes. And then I thought that it was just the sun behind my eyelids, reminding me to wake up.
You know, as if I could have somehow forgotten to do that.
But when I finally opened my eyes, the room was still dark. There was no sunlight anywhere, just the quiet pink sky and gray fog coasting past my bedroom window, and I felt this weird surge of fear and adrenaline, like when you’re going up the rollercoaster and suddenly realize that it was very bad judgment to strap yourself into a rickety car and plummet down a track without asking about safety inspection records or at least wearing a helmet.
I thought it was nothing at the time, though. “You’re just nervous,” I said out loud to myself, watching the fog start to burn off. “That’s all. You’re just nervous.” I said it until I believed it, even though there was nothing to be nervous about, and then June’s alarm rang. I heard May sleepily yell at her to turn it off, and the day began, like nothing and everything had already happened.
“I’m going to be popular,” June announced on the way to school that morning. She was in the backseat of our mom’s old minivan, also known as my new car. June refused to ride in the front seat of the “mom-mobile” whenever we went to school, and May said she didn’t care where she sat because we were going to school, so it’s not like anything was going to make that better. (She’s not an optimist, my sister May.)
May and I didn’t even turn around at June’s announcement. “How wonderful,” I said, watching in my rearview for cops. I am very proud of my no-ticket record, and I didn’t want it ruined.
“April, it’s the pedal on the right,” May grumbled from the passenger seat. She was slumped down with her black hoodie pulled over her dirty blonde hair. “Maybe you could press that pedal and we could go faster.”
“Excuse me, but I have a no-ticket reco—”
“I said,” June interrupted from the backseat, “that I’m going to be popular. That’s my goal for this year. New school year, new school life.”
“You’re, like, the freshman girl cliché crossed with Oprah,” May sneered, and I didn’t have to see her face to know that she was wrinkling her nose. It’s so annoying when she does that. “Why don’t you try being unique for a change?”
“Oh, yeah,” June said, “because being unique has worked so well for you. And what’s wrong with being popular? Gandhi was popular.”
“Gandhi starved himself for world peace and was eventually assassinated by his archrival,” I informed her. “Is that who you want to emulate?” I watched the traffic go past the mini-mall as we sat at the red light, watched as people lined up at the Starbucks across the street. If I went a block in any direction, the view would still be the same.
May calls our new neighborhood “the land that diversity forgot.”
“Do you even know who Gandhi was?” May asked June now, finally turning around to look at her as the light turned green. I could see June in the rearview mirror, looking frustrated as she smoothed her hands over her dark hair, trying to keep the frizz at bay. She has this long brown hair and a perfect fringe of bangs across her forehead that she spends forever straightening. She also has big blue eyes, but please don’t tell her that because then she’ll go all doe-eyed and start batting her eyelashes and it’s just embarrassing to witness. But yeah, my youngest sister’s really cute.
It sucks.
“Yep, that’s what I thought,” May said, turning back around. “April, I swear to God, you’re going so slow that I think we’re going backwards.”
May, on the other hand, isn’t what I would call cute. Woodland animals are cute. June is cute. May is something else entirely. She’s so thin that everything is exaggerated on her. Even her elbows look like they’re about to tear through the thin skin on her arms. When she’s not glowering at you, you can tell that she’s actually pretty. She might even be beautiful, if her cheekbones didn’t look like they were made of knifeblades.
Overall, May has that sort of appearance that says, “Don’t make me have to cut a bitch.” That might explain why her friend count is up to zero.