by Lisa Sandell
And the last words Nate said to me were, “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya, loser!” to which I very maturely responded, “Up yours, jerk!”
I had the last word.
But those words banged around and echoed in my head as the screen door banged shut. When the hospital or police, or whoever it was, called, those words thrashed around and rang in my head some more. In fact, they haven’t stopped knocking and pounding in my head these last six months and twenty-three days. If there is one thing besides the certainty of all the houses and trees and creeks and streets that lie right outside the front door, I am certain of the fact that I cannot forget those angry, careless words.
In four days’ time, I’m supposed to start at Lincoln Grove High, where my brother should have been entering his senior year. Nate Bradley made sure that every student, teacher, and administrator at LGH knew who he was. He was the Juvie D of LG. Always getting in trouble, getting detentions, getting arrested for stealing and trashing and tagging and generally being where he shouldn’t. Nate never did anything really terrible, but he sealed his seat in infamy by sneaking into the teachers’ lounge and spray painting the walls with the postulates and theorems of geometry. He picked up all of the fallen street signs along a two-mile length of the county road that were knocked over during a storm, and kept them. He pried the placard off the principal’s office door and rehung it on one of the stalls in the second-floor boys’ restroom. He talked back to teachers, forgot homework, flunked quizzes, sped in his car, violated his probation, and then started all over again.
I had grown used to the constant fighting between Nate and our parents. But I couldn’t get used to the terrible anger that seemed to have taken hold of him after his fourteenth birthday. From then on, he was a stranger to me, to all of us, I think. I never really figured out where the older brother whom I used to follow dutifully on bike trips across town to the Wyatt cornfields where we would play spies, or whom I would trail to the creek, watching in awe as Nate hopped from stepping-stone to stone, sweeping up minnows and toads in his mesh butterfly net, went.
So I must start high school, where Nate’s friends and teachers and ex-girlfriends will all be. If he had still been alive, I might have had a fighting chance at being able to distance myself from him, but now there is no escape — I will be known as Nathaniel Bradley’s little sister. It’s bad enough being the daughter of parents whose son died, every single minute of every single day, trapped in the house with their overpowering sadness. Now I’ll be the girl whose brother died.
Lisa Ann Sandell is the author of A Map of the Known World, of which Publishers Weekly wrote in a starred review, “Sandell’s…fluid phrasing and choice of metaphors give her prose a quiet poetic ambience.” She also wrote Song of the Sparrow, which Publishers Weekly called “unique and eloquently wrought” in a starred review. Lisa works as a children’s books editor and lives in New York City with her family. Please visit her online at www.lisaannsandell.com.
Also by
LISA ANN SANDELL
The Weight of the Sky
A Map of the Known World
This book was originally published in hardcover by Scholastic Press in 2007.
Copyright © 2007 by Lisa Ann Sandell. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First Scholastic paperback printing, August 2008
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
Cover photograph © Ryan McVayl
e-ISBN 978-0-545-36106-4
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
1 from the Historia Brittonum, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/nennius-full.html