Life After Juliet
Page 1
Table of Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Act First
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Scene Eight
Scene Nine
Scene Ten
Scene Eleven
Scene Twelve
Act Second
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Scene Eight
Scene Nine
Scene Ten
Scene Eleven
Scene Twelve
Scene Thirteen
Scene Fourteen
Scene Fifteen
Scene Sixteen
Scene Seventeen
Scene Eighteen
Scene Nineteen
Act Third
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Scene Eight
Scene Nine
Scene Ten
Scene Eleven
Scene Twelve
Scene Thirteen
Scene Fourteen
Scene Fifteen
Act Fourth
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Act Fifth
Scene One
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Discover more Entangled Teen titles… Bring Me Their Hearts
Hiding Lies
Never Apart
Other Breakable Things
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Shannon Lee Alexander. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
2614 South Timberline Road
Suite 105, PMB 159
Fort Collins, CO 80525
rights@entangledpublishing.com
Entangled Teen is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
Edited by Heather Howland and Jenn Mishler
Cover design by Lousia Maggio
ISBN 978-1-63375-324-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition July 2016
For those who can see the Thestrals—carry on, always
You may think you know me,
but you don’t. I am yet to be made
Prologue
[A funeral]
It’s a small church. Everything in this town is small—everything but the mountains that frame it. Those are giants bowing before the sky. But the church is small, and everything feels too close. I can see every brush stroke on the painting of The Last Supper hanging above the altar. I’m choking on the scent of the lemony polish that’s been used on the great oak doors at the back of the church. And I feel as though I could reach out and touch Charlotte where she’s lying in her coffin. I could take her hand in mine. I could hold it. But I don’t. Don’t really want to because while the body in the coffin may look just like my best friend, I know it isn’t.
The fingertips of that body are free of charcoal residue and ink stains. The lips on that body are smiling—too pretty, too perfect. Charlotte’s smile was always a little crooked and almost always accompanied by laughter. The raven-hued curls on the girl before us are all in place. My Charlotte’s curls were a beautiful mess.
But the biggest hint that we’re all being deceived is that the body lying in this coffin is much too still to be Charlotte. Much too still. In the short year that I knew her, I never saw her be so still. Charlotte moved like the wind, pushing and pulling whatever was in her path, bending life to her whims.
Charlotte’s body was alive. This one is not.
The woman at the altar asks if anyone else would like to say a few words. I look at my older brother out of the corner of my eye. Charlie’s tall frame is squashed beside me, his knees pressing into the back of the pew ahead of us. His head is bent so low that his chin rests on his chest, a golden blond lock of hair across his forehead. He’s concentrating on a difficult task—holding himself together. I think he has counted every thread in the weave of his dress slacks. His jaw tightens, and I know that he will not be saying a few words.
He’s barely said anything since day one, the day we had to start over, the day Charlotte died. That day he had words to say, but I think he was on autopilot, an adrenaline rush, shock, whatever you want to call it. It’s not every day a boy gets a phone call in the earliest hours of morning telling him that his girlfriend is dead.
He’s said four words today. “We’ll be okay, Becca.” Then he hugged me before opening my car door.
Thank goodness Charlie’s friends James and Greta rode along with us for the funeral. Charlotte will be buried here in the mountains, in her old hometown, four hours away from where we live. Four hours is a long time to survive on only four words.
No, Charlie won’t be saying anything at this funeral.
“Anyone?” the woman asks again.
Around us, the small crowd shifts in their seats. I have something to say. I’m just not sure I have the courage to speak. I lean forward in my seat. I take a deep breath. My heart flies, and my fingers feel electric. I have something to say.
When I stand, Charlie glances up. His eyes, underlined with dark circles, search my face. I touch his shoulder as I step over him. He watches me down the aisle. I’m doing it. I have something to say, and I’m going to say it.
But when I get to the coffin, I falter. This body is not Charlotte. This body is—I look at the woman standing to the left of the coffin. Her hands are loosely gripping the podium. She’s so calm. She smiles at me, and I know it’s meant to be encouraging, but a flicker of rage dances inside my chest.
How can she be so calm? This body is all wrong. This body is a joke. This body is not Charlotte. It is nothing.
I’m choking on the syrupy sadness in my throat. Behind me, someone is crying. I move away from the coffin with the too-still body and take the three steps up to the podium. The woman welcomes me, opening her arms to me, embracing me before stepping away so I can say my few words.
From here I can watch the sea of sadness as it rolls in waves across everyone’s faces. My brother is no longer counting threads. He is sitting tall, watching me, his golden hair catching fire in the red light from one of the stained glass windows. He has things to say, too, but no way to say them. I will say the things. I will be brave.
For Charlotte.
But when I open my mouth, nothing comes out.
Act First
Scene One
[A classroom]
I’m not sure how long I’ve been back in school. I don’t really do days anymore. Time is measured in pages. I’ve read 3,718 pages since Dad dropped me off on the first day. It’s been 108,023 pages since Charlotte died. I’ve read 150 pages since I stepped on the bus this morning. It’s been ten pages since I thought of Charlotte.
She’s not coming back, and I don’t know what else to do, so I keep turning the pages.
However long I’ve been back at Sandstone High, the advanced literature and composition tea
cher, Mrs. Jonah, informed me yesterday that I am no longer allowed to “sit like a bump on a log, reading books” in her class. I find this strange, but then, I don’t understand the real world. I’ve given up trying to make any kind of sense of it. Today in class, I am sitting like a bump on a log, staring out the window.
Sandstone is a typical high school, unlike the fancy math and science school on the other side of town that Charlie graduated from last spring. It’s the kind of building that’s been pieced together—add a wing here, convert a gym there, dump mobile units here—throughout the decades as the town’s population grew and it had to be quickly expanded. There’s no one defining style. It’s a mishmash. The kids who go here are also diverse, so it’s not hard for me to fade into the background.
Lit and Comp is a junior course. The guidance counselor signed me up for it at the end of last year. She described it as a lively class full of opportunities for personal and artistic growth. In other words, it’s my worst nightmare. I’ve decided growth is overrated.
Mrs. Jonah’s classroom is long and narrow, with a wall of windows down the side. She’s decorated the wide windowsill with spindly spider plants, stacks of books, empty vintage Coke bottles that catch the sunlight, and a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, which is strange since she’s not a science teacher.
Mrs. Jonah raps on her desk now to get our attention. She stands and brushes invisible lint off her black pencil skirt. Tall and unafraid of wearing high heels, she towers over everyone in the school, even the basketball coach. Her pixie haircut and makeup are always perfect. She’s the most with it human I’ve ever seen.
“Time’s up,” she says. “Please, pass your quizzes forward.”
I’ve been done with my quiz for what would have been about twenty pages, if reading were still allowed in Lit class. I pass my paper to the boy in front of me. He runs his hand through his choppy black hair and smiles. His lips are chapped, and the smiling pulls the raw skin too tight. It makes me wince. I instantly feel bad, because I remember this guy.
Max. He was in Mr. Bunting’s World History class with Charlotte and me last year. He was the only student at Sandstone who spoke directly to me after Charlotte died. He came right up to me in history, cleared his throat so I’d look up from my book and said, “Sorry for your loss.”
I remember I got up and left the room. It was either that or start crying.
He’s still looking at me now. I should say something, something nice, like “Thank you for your condolences.” Instead, I look out the window again.
Max sighs, soft like the riffle of book pages, as he turns around and passes our quizzes forward. I’m used to that sound. It’s the sound of my father when I refuse to put my book down and come join my mother and him. The sound of my mother when she realizes I’ve been listening to the book characters in my head instead of her. Lately, I’m really only safe lost in the pages of a book. Outside, in the real world, it’s like I’m walking around with no skin. Everything hurts.
“Okay, people,” Mrs. Jonah says, clapping her hands. The sound snaps my attention back into her classroom. “I’m going to assign your critique partners for this quarter. You’ll be partnering with this person on various writing assignments, sharing constructive criticism, ideas, and support throughout the writing process. Your job as partners is to help each other improve. My hope is that many of you will connect over your writing and that these partnerships will become valuable to you outside of the classroom, too. So for the remainder of class, I want you to get acquainted with your new writing buddies.”
The class murmurs and scuffles in their seats, excited that they’ll get to work with other people. If Charlotte were here, I would whisper to her, “Partners?”
Charlotte would roll her blue eyes at me. “Of course,” she’d mouth back.
But that’s not going to happen, so I turn back to the window to watch a gray-tinged cloud morph from a blob into a Volkswagen Beetle. No, that’s a silver Honda with a dented fender just like Charlotte’s. And despite not wanting to remember, I’m caught in a memory that won’t let me go.
“You remember how we met, don’t you?” Charlotte asks. My room is dark. I’d thought she’d fallen asleep. Her sleeping was so erratic then. “Remember?” she says, “Mr. Bunting assigned us that history project? I thought for sure it was going to be a disaster, until you looked up at me with those big old doe eyes of yours and this funny smile on your face, and I knew right then that we’d be friends.”
But I remember it differently. “I was so nervous I started babbling.”
Charlotte laughs, her wind chime laugh that makes the air around her shimmer. “That’s right. You said you didn’t want a partner—actually you kind of yelled, ‘NO’—but he insisted, and I stuck out my hand and said, ‘You can call me Charley.’ And then you said”—she waits for me to fill in the blank.
I laugh and bury my face in my pillow.
“Go ahead, Bec. What’d you say?”
I toss my pillow at her. “‘My brother’s name is Charlie and that would be weird.’ That’s what I said. Little did I know how weird it would get.”
She fakes insult and hugs my pillow to her chest. “You mean how awesome it would get?”
I didn’t ask for my first real friend to start dating my older brother, but life is full of surprises.
Some of them more deadly than others.
“Quiet down, folks,” Mrs. Jonah says to the class now. The excitement about partner work has continued to build around me. “I’ll be assigning the partners.”
Everyone groans, and my insides bunch up thinking of Charlotte again. My fingers are getting tingly, my eyes sting, and my head feels too big. I realize I’m holding my breath. This is why the memories are so dangerous.
Mrs. Jonah pulls out a slip of paper and reads off the partner assignments. As names are called small bubbles of excitement burst around the classroom. There are four of us left, and we eye one another like we’re the final four tributes in the Hunger Games—the dark-haired Max, a blond guy with an unfortunate case of acne, and a girl whose purple fingernails match her purple cowboy boots. Her hands are fisted on her knees, and the tips of her ears are rosy. It reminds me of my brother Charlie. His ears go red whenever he’s embarrassed. But I don’t think this girl is embarrassed.
And then there’s me, fighting to keep the anxiety in my stomach curled into a nice, tight, controllable ball.
“Max,” Mrs. Jonah says, reading from a clipboard. He nods. “You and Brian will work together, and—”
“Mrs. Jonah,” Purple Boots interrupts.
“Yes, Darby?”
“Meggie and I work really well together and I thought maybe—”
“You’ll work with Becca.”
Darby of the purple boots looks once at the girl to her left—Meggie?—before sighing and unclenching her fists. “Yes, ma’am,” she says with a tight-lipped smile. When she glances at me, I notice a flutter of dread in her gray eyes.
I’m amazed at the strange power I now wield as the dead girl’s friend. My classmates may have never noticed me before Charlotte. But now that she’s dead, their eyes slide right off me like I’m wearing an invisibility cloak. They don’t want to see me. I make them feel things they don’t like. I get it. I feel lots of things now that I don’t like.
Mrs. Jonah addresses the class. “Now, with these last ten minutes, get together with your partners, get acquainted, and discuss your expectations and any ground rules for critique you’d like to establish.”
Whatever discomfort Darby felt a moment ago passes quickly. She has long dreadlocks, and she tosses them, whip-like, over her shoulder, and I’m struck by how different we are—like if we were books she’d be shelved with the thrillers and I’d be something like, I don’t know, candlemaking.
Instead of moving to meet with me, she glares at Mrs. Jonah, her purple boot tapping out an angry rhythm on the metal leg of her desk.
There is no way I’m getting up and approaching her.
It’d be akin to poking a pissed-off badger with sharp purple claws. The room hums as everyone shifts desks and chairs around. Max glances between Darby and me once before he moves to sit across from his partner.
Mrs. Jonah keeps looking at me. She’s noticed that we’re the only pair that hasn’t moved. She had to have known this was a bad idea. There should be a bulletin board in the teacher’s lounge with posters of troublemaker kids—like the wanted posters in the post office—so that teachers know what they’re getting before you walk in their doors.
Mine would say:
Wanted
For the obstinate refusal to work with others
Rebecca Jane Hanson
And it’d have my yearbook photo, the one where I look like the camera is a zombie about to eat my face off, smack-dab in the middle. I don’t know. Maybe they do have stuff like that. Maybe teachers just like to think they can change us. The way Mrs. Jonah keeps looking at me makes me think she believes she can get me to move with sheer will.
It’s creeping me out. Normally, I’d stuff my face in a book so I wouldn’t even notice her looking, but this is English class, and I’m not allowed to read in English so…
I don’t know what else to do. I force myself to stand and walk toward Darby, giving Mrs. Jonah my best when-she-maims-me-I’m-blaming-you look. My heart alternates between wedging itself in my throat and fisting itself into my stomach. Mrs. Jonah smiles.
I tell myself that Charlotte would be proud of me. I’m taking initiative. I’m putting myself out there. I’m walking through fate’s open door. I’m not paying attention to where I’m going, and now I’m tripping over the blond, acne-prone boy’s bag.
I gasp, and my hands do a flailing thing, like a fast-pitch softball pitcher throwing two balls at once. I stumble forward, my ankle trapped in one of the backpack straps, arms still flapping, and I face-plant into Max’s lap.
Hello, Max’s lap.
Max jumps because it’s obviously not every day that a girl’s face ends up in his lap.
That’s not fair. Maybe it is normal for him. I don’t know him. Either way, it probably doesn’t happen in class. So Max jumps up, swearing under his breath, but he manages to grab my head before my temple smacks into the desk beside him.
I’m not sure I’m painting this picture too well. I’m now on my knees. Max is standing and holding my head. Everyone is laughing. Except the acne kid, who is swearing because I’ve ripped the strap of his backpack.