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  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Advance Reader’s e-proof

  courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Contents

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title

  Dedication

  Part 1: Violet Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part 2: Celine Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 3: Goose Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 4 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  About the Author

  Also by Alex Flinn

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Dedication

  [dedi tk]

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  PART 1

  Violet

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  1

  1982

  I was a strange child. Strange looking, for certain, with buck teeth, red hair (and matching invisible eyelashes), a hooked nose, and barely the hint of a chin. My classmates at Coral Ridge Elementary teased me about these defects as if it was their God-given right. Maybe it was. After all, if I wanted to fit in, wouldn’t I just act more normal?

  But even if I could change my hair, my nose, my chin, I couldn’t perform plastic surgery on my soul. Some secret part of me remained stubbornly different—brought egg salad when everyone else knew it was gross or used vocabulary words like whimsical, words no one else understood.

  And shortly after my tenth birthday, I learned I was different in another way.

  A special way.

  That day, a rare, cold January day in Miami, I was walking alone on the playground. I had a jump rope. But when I’d asked the two girls who sat behind me, Jennifer Sadler and Gennifer Garcia, if they wanted to jump with me, they’d turned to each other with perplexed looks.

  “Jump rope?” Jennifer’s blond ponytail swung from side to side as she shook her head. “Who jumps rope anymore?”

  “We do in PE.” It was the only sport at which I excelled.

  Jennifer rolled her enormous blue eyes. “Yeah, for a grade.”

  “We could do something else then,” I said. “Kickball?” The Jennifers were part of a kickball game that included most of our class. I was never invited.

  “Sorry, I think the teams are set.” Gennifer Garcia wrinkled her perfect nose.

  As I trudged away, trailing my red-and-white-striped rope, I heard Jennifer say loudly, “You are too nice to that girl. It just makes her think she can talk to us.”

  Gennifer laughed, then said softer, but still loud enough for me to hear clearly, “You can’t just tell people they’re freaks.”

  “Why not? It would help her to know.”

  Did being beautiful make you cruel? Were they really being cruel if I was so defective? And, if I were suddenly pretty, would I be mean too? Not that that would ever happen.

  So I sat alone, shivering on a swing, looking at the toes of my navy Keds against the lighter blue clouds, when I spied a cluster of kids gathered around something. Ordinarily, I avoided unsupervised groups of my peers, but this particular group included, at its outskirts, one Gregory Columbo, a sensitive boy with coal-black hair and the warmest brown eyes I’d ever seen. Though he wasn’t exactly nice to me, he wasn’t mean. He was quiet, more the type to read a book than to play baseball. Now, he wiped at his eyes with his gray sweatshirt sleeve. And something else made me gravitate toward the group, something I didn’t quite understand.

  I jumped off the swing and went before I could chicken out.

  “What’s everyone looking at?” I wanted to ask Greg why he was crying, but probably, he was pretending not to.

  Greg turned away, touching the side of his face with his fingers.

  “Greg?”

  “Leave us alone, ugly.” Jennifer smirked. “It’s just a stupid, dead crow.”

  Greg turned and I caught sight of his face. His cheeks and eyes were mottled red, like blotchy, red glasses, and I had a distant memory of him and a woman—his mother—standing outside his house, filling a blue bird feeder. Greg’s mother had died the year before.

  The crowd was dispersing except for two boys, Nick and Nathan, who stood over the bird, poking it with a stick. I hated them. Hated. I could see the crow now, shiny and black as Greg’s hair against the dappled greenish-brown grass, one black bead of an eye staring at me. I stooped beside it.

  “Eww!” Gennifer said. “Are you going to touch it?”

  I glanced back to see if Greg was still there. Nick hovered over me with his stick. I fixed him with a stare.

  “Don’t touch that. It’s disrespectful of the dead.” I remembered my mother saying something like that. Nick laughed and began to respond, but I said, “Go away.” I heard violence in my voice.

  He backed away. “It’s dumb anyway.” Nathan and the Jennifers followed him off.

  I reached down and touched the bird. It was not cold, not yet at least. But it lay as still as the airless day. Its licorice-black wings caught the light, reflecting green and purple. I felt the ground move with the thumping of my enemies’ retreating sneakers. I shivered, then slid my hand underneath the bird. It felt like leaves. I turned my back to Greg. Then, I placed my other hand over it and picked it up. It was larger than both my hands, but it weighed less than air. I remembered someone, Greg maybe, saying in class that birds’ bones were hollow so they could fly.

  Without knowing w
hy, really, I raised the bird to my face, opened my hands, and blew.

  The bird blinked.

  No, it hadn’t. It was dead.

  I stroked its smooth feathers. Behind me, Greg stood silent, but I could hear his breath. I found a tiny wound under the bird’s wing. When I touched it with my finger, it seemed to disappear.

  The bird blinked again. This time, I was certain it had.

  “Are you okay, then?” I barely whispered.

  It cocked its head toward me. Behind me, I heard a gasp. Greg. I did not, could not look at him. I whispered, “Are you ready to go now?”

  Again, the bird closed then opened its black bead eye, and in my head, I thought I heard it say, “Do you want me to?”

  “Whatever you like. Your family is probably worried, though.”

  “It was a boy,” the bird said, “the one with the stick. He threw a rock. It hurt. It killed me.”

  “It didn’t kill you. You’re alive.”

  The bird twitched its head. “It killed me. I was dead.”

  I couldn’t understand this. “Hmm, maybe you should get away from him.”

  “I guess so!” said the bird. “Can you help?”

  “How?” I drew in a deep, shaky breath.

  “Just . . . raise me up.”

  I nodded, then stood, still holding the crow in both hands. I lifted it high above my head.

  It rose, shifting first to one clawed foot, then the other. It spread its black wings toward the graying sky. They gleamed purple and green in the strained sunlight. It fluttered, then lifted into the air. I watched it until it was merely a small, black speck against the clouds. I turned toward school.

  “Hey,” a voice said behind me. “That bird was dead.”

  Greg. I looked up to where the bird had been. “No, it wasn’t. It flew away.”

  “But it was dead.”

  “No.” It seemed, now, very important for me to impress this upon him. After all, I could barely believe what I’d done myself. It couldn’t have happened, but it had. “No. It was only scared. Nick hit it with a stick. It’s okay now.”

  Greg glanced at the ground. I did too and saw an irregular puddle of blood, mixing with the dusty dirt. “Okay,” he said finally.

  “We’re going to get in trouble,” I said.

  “I’ll tell Ms. Gayton what happened, that you helped the bird.” His eyes were just nice looking, the way his eyebrows came down in the center, all concerned.

  I shook my head. “She won’t believe you.”

  “She will. Teachers like me. They feel sorry for me because of—”

  “Your mom.” I was thinking they liked him because he was so cute, those big eyes.

  He nodded. “I can get away with anything.”

  “They hate me.” It was true. Even though I aced every test, teachers had no smiles for me. They liked the prettier girls, the ones who didn’t care about learning but only copied one another’s homework.

  “I’ll tell her you were helping me then,” he said.

  I thought about it. “Okay.”

  We began to walk. As we did, my hand brushed Greg’s. I wanted to grab it, but I didn’t.

  He said, “That was pretty cool.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You did.”

  “No.” I said it too loudly, too emphatically, then regretted it. I sounded like I was lying. “I’m sorry, but the bird was probably just shaken up or something. I mean, it flew away like nothing.”

  I remembered the wound under its wing, the wound that had closed. How had it?

  Greg shrugged. “Okay.” He started up the stairs to the school building, taking them two at a time, keeping ahead of me. He thought I was weird, though I’d tried so hard to prevent it, though I wanted him to like me so much. I’d have done anything to make him like me. Anything.

  I didn’t speed my step. What would be the point? As I trudged along, I felt something, like a pair of eyes, peering at me through the trees. I looked back and saw a shadowy figure dressed in green like the leaves. Or maybe it was the leaves. I shivered, remembering what my mother had said about perverts who lurked on playgrounds, waiting for children alone.

  “Hello?” I said.

  No answer except a riffle of wind across the grass and my own footsteps.

  I stopped, glanced back. No one there. A caw, maybe the same crow, echoed from the treetops. I felt each individual hair on my arms stand on end. My feet planted on the ground.

  Finally, I ran after Greg to the school building.

  Nothing unusual happened for a year or so. Maybe I made nothing happen. But then, one day something did. Something that changed everything.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  2

  1985

  From that day on, Greg and I became friends. Sort of. We didn’t really talk much at school, but if a teacher assigned a group project, we chose each other as partners. We’d work at my house or usually Greg’s, making brochures to entice people to move to the Colony of Delaware, or a travel poster for Mars. I loved going to Greg’s house. His father was always building something like a flower box or a huge tree house, and he let Greg and me help. Once, when we were in seventh grade, it was a birdhouse.

  “Violet loves birds,” Greg told his dad.

  “Do you?” His father’s eyes were brown like Greg’s, and he was tall, but not skinny. He had a belly, which seemed very dad-like. “So you’re a bird expert?”

  “Not an expert. But they’re pretty.”

  “Right, she’s not an expert,” Greg said, laughing. “The first time I spoke to Vi, she was holding a crow in the palm of her hand. Since then, I’ve seen them follow her.”

  I stared at him, startled. I didn’t know he’d noticed, but it was true. Birds seemed to gravitate toward me, animals too; even wild ones like possums and raccoons didn’t scatter as they did when others approached. I kept that quiet, though. It didn’t exactly make me seem normal.

  “I think they even talk to her sometimes.” Greg smiled. He had a dimple, just one, on the left side of his mouth.

  “Right, Greg. Sure.”

  Greg’s dad laughed along. “Well, if you could talk to the Carolina wrens, maybe ask them what’s the proper opening size for their birdhouse. Or you could just look it up.”

  “Is that really important? My mom just bought the birdhouse she thought was pretty.”

  “Do you see many birds in it?” Mr. Columbo asked.

  “No,” I admitted. “Never.”

  “If you look it up for me, I’ll build a birdhouse they’ll use—and I’ll make another one for your house.”

  “I think I’d rather come over and look at yours.” I wanted to be with Greg, always. The Columbos felt more like a real family than mine, even though it was just two of them. At home, it was just me and my mother, who spent more time on her nails than talking to me.

  Still, Greg and I went to the school library during lunch the next day. We looked up the information in a book, finding that the Carolina wren needed a hole between one and a quarter and one and a half inches. Mr. Columbo let me drill the hole myself and even, against my protests, made a second one for me. “You can still come over, Violet.” His eyes crinkled around the edges. “You’re welcome any time.”

  After that, Greg invited me over without needing a magazine project as an excuse. We walked home together, at least as far as his house, every afternoon and checked out the birdhouse. One day, we saw a small brown bird moving in. “Wow,” I said, “your dad’s going to be so excited.” There had been birds in my own birdhouse since the first day, but I didn’t tell Greg that.

  Greg grabbed my hand and squeezed it. His own hand was cool, d
ry, and I felt a jolt of electricity run up my arm. “We’ve never had a bird in our birdhouse before, no matter what he said. They came because of you.”

  “Right.” I could barely speak from concentrating on the moment, the dizzying tingle of his hand in mine.

  “You should stay, at least until Dad gets home.”

  I nodded and walked into the house. I thought I could hear one of the birds say Thank you, but when I looked over at Greg, he hadn’t heard anything. We spent the whole afternoon sitting side by side at the window, watching the wren build her nest, until Mr. Columbo called us in for dinner. Greg smelled of pencil shavings and Irish Spring soap, and even though he let go of my hand, I could still feel it against mine, far, far into the night.

  After that, I went to Greg’s house every day after school. We watched the wrens to see if there were eggs or babies, but we also sat on the sofa, eating brownies we made from a mix and watching Family Ties and The Cosby Show, shows about big, happy families like ours weren’t. People at school called us geeks in love, and while I pretended to cringe, I secretly enjoyed that people thought it possible. Greg wasn’t my boyfriend—not yet—but I wanted him to be.

  But the summer before eighth grade, Greg went to sleepaway camp for two whole months. “It’s like this really outdoorsy camp my dad went to when he was my age,” he told me. “I hate it. I think it’s supposed to make me a man.”

  “Sounds fun.” I rolled my eyes, thinking he was perfect as he was. In fact, I was hoping he’d invite me to the Halloween dance at school in the fall. Halloween was my favorite holiday because it let me be someone else, someone better. Or maybe someone worse. I was hoping maybe, costumed as a witch or vampire, I would have the courage to lean in, to will him to kiss me. But that was a long time away. “Can I write you?”

  “Sure. That’d be cool.” He smiled his cute, one-dimpled smile. “I know my dad won’t write that much, not like a mom would.”

  “I’ll write.”

  Once he left, the long, lonely summer stretched ahead of me, and I wanted to write every day. I didn’t, though. Some dim part of me knew that would look crazy, like I had no life, which I didn’t. I actually did things like an Everglades bird tour, just so I’d have something to write about. I worked on the letters every day but sent them once a week. Greg wrote back twice, then stopped. I told myself it was because he was busy, then because camp was almost over. I’d see him soon. But when he got back, he was always busy. In rushed phone calls, he said he had family in town one day, shopping for school another. So I didn’t see him until the first day of eighth grade.