Hooked

There were hundreds of moments when I wanted to bury this book deep inside folders within folders on my computer, like a little Russian doll. I would like to thank Jonathan Rabb, Ellen Horan, Martha Chang, Brendan Kiely, Esther Noe and Rob Weisberg for keeping me going. I’m also deeply grateful to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Erin Malone and Alexia Paul for their early insights and support, and to Polly McCall for her bottomless well of encouragement. My heartfelt thanks go to my agent, Alice Tasman, and to my editor, Stephanie Lane Elliott, for their willingness to ride the bumps with my characters and to ask the prickly questions I might otherwise have avoided. Thanks also to Krista Vitola and Jen Strada for their watchful eyes and to Hilary Weekes for her kind help. I’m forever indebted to Julie Moore, who set me free to write this by looking after my kids with amazing dedication and love. And finally, thank you to Richard d’Albert, my husband. When I give it my best shot it’s always with you in mind.

part one

I met Will Weston during a fire drill on a gray, freezing February Monday, a few days after I turned seventeen. I was in metal shop when the bells went off, and had to go outside in my smock. Why didn’t they have fire drills during homeroom, when we still had our coats? I hid behind a tree to block the wind, and as I studied the gloomy, red-bricked façade of the school for any signs of real fire, I spotted him. Will was leaning against the stone wall, hugging himself in a thin, black sweater. He was tall and he had large, square, hulking shoulders that reminded me of Frankenstein—an aberration in a sea of boys with shoulders so narrow you could lift them off the ground by grabbing their knapsack straps together in one hand. This guy looked too old for high school. His chin was ducked toward his chest and he stared at me forever, and it was clear that he didn’t care that I noticed. I remember looking around, wishing there was someone to talk to, but I was surrounded by the dicks from metal shop. Metal shop was the great dick-alizer—we all behaved like we were in preschool, cutting each other in the soldering lines, hogging the drying shelves, all for the easy As Mr. Blake was famous for doling out. It was not lost on me that an A from Blake would finally kick my average up to an A-minus, a longtime hurdle. Anyway, one minute Will was undressing me from afar, and then he just appeared, as if in a blink.

“Blake or Dolan?” he asked, peering into my face.

“Uh … Blake,” I said, cursing my telltale gingham smock.

“I had him. A girl in my class lost her eye.”

“You were in Lisa Kwan’s class?” I asked, marveling.

“I was.” He nodded modestly.

“What happened? He told us she poked it out.”

“Her vise was loose,” he said. We both tried not to smile. “You don’t use them anymore, vises. Right?”

“No, everything’s on the table,” I explained. “He helps you when you need to make a cut. He’s sick of me. I’m always recutting.” I realized then that there was something weird about
his
eyes: the left eye was looking at me, but the right eye drifted off toward the Hudson River. It was both off-putting and death-defyingly hot. It also somehow made him seem too smart for me. I wondered if he was a brainiac, like everyone else at Stuyvesant High School, where I’d somehow landed like an alien on the wrong planet. In math and science, at least, which Stuy held sacred above all else, I was the opposite of a brainiac. Not quite a dumbass, but close. I felt like I was working twice as hard to do half as well as anyone else.

“You’ll get an A,” he said, rubbing his forearms for warmth. “Don’t worry. Has he shown you his oliver?”

“His what?” I asked, thinking, He has the most beautiful hair: brown, wavy, and longer than I initially thought.

“His oliver.”

“Oh God. Don’t tell me. Another pervy—”

“Go on, ask him to see the oliver,” he said. “He’ll love you if you ask him.”

“What is it?”

“You don’t want to be surprised?” he teased.

Part of me did, but I shook my head.

“It’s his silver tin of green olives,” he whispered, so that the metal-shop dicks couldn’t hear. “He keeps it in his pocket for martinis. ‘Always keep your oliver on your person.’ That’s what he used to say. You’re a junior?”

I nodded.

“I had him freshman year. He’s toned it down since then. I think he’s a less-happy drunk these days.”

“Aren’t we all,” I said.

“Settle down there, Dorothy Parker.” He held out his hand. “I’m Will Weston.”

“Thea Galehouse,” I said.

“I know.” He smiled proudly.

“How do you know?”

“That yearbook picture of you, sleeping on the desk. Your name was in the caption. ‘Thea takes a breather’ or something stupid like that. Was that during a class? Or homeroom?”

“Homeroom, I think. I was tired.”

“No shit. I could never sleep like that. In the middle of everyone. I wish I could. You have the same hair still. Like wet grass stuck to your face.” He pushed a clump of loose hair into my cheek with his thumb as people started to stream back into the building. “Anyway, don’t stress about Blake.” Will took the steps two at a time, so I did too. “He skews it to the pretty ones.”

We got inside the double doors and I faced him. “Do I look stressed out?”

“Little bit.”

I hate offhand comments about my moods. My mother still makes them constantly. But the way he said it made me think, Maybe I
am
stressing out about stupid freaking metal shop.

“You know,” Will said, “ever since I saw that picture of you, all schlumped out all over that desk, I’ve wanted to meet you. Do you like burgers?”

“Love ’em,” I said.

“Have a burger with me, then.”

He said it in the nicest way. It was one of the shining moments of my life. A total shock and yet right as rain.

The huge oil painting of peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant, our school’s namesake, loomed over Will by the staircase. School, the place where we spent so much of our time, was so deathly dreary at that moment. It was like Will put it all—the gray walls pockmarked with painted-over thumbtack holes, the gummy stair railings that made your hands smell like spit—into relief. He glanced at a short girl in clogs walking by. She almost stopped to talk, then didn’t. He looked back at me and I got the first jolt. The first java jolt. The first whiff of desire for his big, scary, manly-man body. And the desperation to be included in his thoughts. Me, Thea.

We made a plan to meet Friday.

I tried to think of some cool exit, but I ended up smiling and doing my weird secret-wave thing that my best friend, Vanessa, always makes fun of me for.

“Ask to see the oliver!” he called. I looked back at him. He stood there smiling at me, the sea of people jostling past him.

When I pointed Will out to Vanessa during lunch, he was standing outside between two parked cars, talking to an Asian guy in a ski jacket.

“I see what you mean, kind of,” she said, twirling her long brown curls behind her shoulder.

“What do you mean,
kind of
?” I asked, annoyed at her.

“I like his little slump,” she said, appeasing me, “like he can’t hold up all that tall, like it’s a real burden. Poor thing. He has a nice smile.”

I stared down at the ripped, stepped-on backs of Vanessa’s long jeans, afraid to look. “What’s his deal?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, he is so not a hipster, but I’ve seen him hang
out with them. He almost has an anti-look, it’s so nondescript. Midcentury Gap. White T-shirt–ville.” She looked at me. “It’s fine, though. Completely inoffensive.”

“Do you think he looks like he’s just met someone?”

“Someone meaning you?” Vanessa continued staring blatantly. “I think he went out with Judd Lieberman’s sister.”