Dead to You
I WATCHED, HORRIFIED, AWED.
My parents huddle together behind a podium, crying, pleading for my return. And there’s Blake, four years old and scowling at the sun in his eyes. Mama begs for the abductors to bring me back, no questions asked as long as I’m safe. There’s a reward.
When it ends, I just stare at the screen. After a minute, Cami turns it off and I ask, quietly, “Can I watch it again?”
She peers at me. Pulls off her mitten and touches my cheek. Her finger comes away wet, shiny. “You sure?”
“Yes,” I breathe.
I WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN.
SOME MEMORIES ARE BETTER LEFT UNTOUCHED.
E
than was abducted from his front yard when he was just seven years old. Now, at sixteen, he has returned to his family.
It’s a miracle . . . at first.
Then the tensions start to build, and his family starts falling apart all over again. If only Ethan could remember something, anything, about his life before, he’d beable to put the pieces back together.
But there’s something that’s keeping his memory blocked.
Something unspeakable . . .
A JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD SELECTION
0212
Photograph © 2012 by Allison Massie
LISA M
C
MANN
is the author of the New York Times bestselling Wake trilogy, Cryer’s Cross, and the middlegrade dystopian fantasy series The Unwanteds. She lives with her family in the Phoenix area. Read more about Lisa and find her blog through her website at
LisaMcMann.com
or, better yet, find her on Facebook (
facebook.com
/mcmannfan) or follow her on Twitter (
twitter.com
/lisa_mcmann).
A
LSO BY LIS
A
McMA
NN
Jacket designed by Cara E. Petrus | Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Getty Images
SIMON PULSE |
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DEAD TO YOU
ALSO BY
LISA McMANN
Wake
Fade
Gone
Cryer’s Cross
FOR YOUNGER READERS
The Unwanteds
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
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First Simon Pulse hardcover edition February 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Lisa McMann
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Designed by Mike Rosamilia
The text of this book was set in Janson Text.
This book has been cataloged with the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4424-0388-8
ISBN 978-1-4424-0390-1 (eBook)
For MB
Many thanks to my amazing husband, Matt, for doing everything in the history and future of the universe so I can traipse around the country and write books and books and more books—you are AWESOME and I love you.
Thank you to my fantastic editor, Jennifer Klonsky, for believing in this book; to Michael Bourret for knowing me so well and sending me the article that inspired this story; and to my early readers, Kilian McMann, Kennedy McMann, Joanne Levy, Bethany Harowitz, and Barry Lyga for the early critiques. Thanks to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for the information provided. Any procedural inaccuracies or errors in the story are mine due to incompetence or artistic license. And thanks also to Michele Thomas of the Minneapolis Public School System for the answers about school procedure.
Most of all, thank
you
, dear reader, dear bookseller, dear librarian, dear teacher, dear parent, for supporting this book. I am grateful.
DEAD TO YOU
There are three of them. No, four.
They step off the Amtrak train into the snowy dusk, children first and adults after, and then they hesitate, clustered on the platform. Passengers behind them shove past, but the four—Blake, Gracie, Dad, Mama—just move a few more steps and stop again, look around. Their faces are an uneasy yellow in the overhead light from the station. Mama looks most anxious. She peers into the darkness under the awning where I stand, just twenty feet away, as if she knows instinctively that I am here, but no confirmation registers on her face. I am still invisible in the shadows.
Invisible, but cornered. Backed up against the station wall, next to a bench, the woman from Child Protective Services who I met this afternoon standing beside me. It’s too late to stop this now. Too late to go back, too late to run away. I press my back into the wall, feeling the tenderness of a recent bruise on my right shoulder blade. I wet my chapped lips and break into a cold sweat.