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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter One

I don’t think I ever had it easy as a kid. My dad left when I was only eight. He might not have been the best father, but at least I had one. He and my mom were party people. I was mostly just in the way of their fun. Their madness.

In her darker moments, my mom admitted that she wasn’t much of a mother. She had her own demons.
Plenty of them. Looking back, it seems that she could have pulled herself together, but every time she planned to clean up her act, something would surface that would drag her down. She had tried her share of drugs. Mostly different pills. I was never sure which were the worst. Painkillers sometimes. Antidepressants. But it wasn’t like she got them from a doctor.

It got worse over the years. I tried to get her to ease off. She tried to quit a few times, but by the time I was sixteen, I guess I knew it wasn’t going to stop. It was wrecking her health. I worried about her all the time. I tried to help. I really did. But it didn’t do any good.

And then it happened. It was on a Wednesday a week after school was out for the summer. I woke up in our rundown apartment and the sun was shining in. I could hear pigeons out on the window ledges. My mom seemed to
be sleeping in, but that wasn’t unusual. But by eleven o’clock I went into her room to check on her. I’d had nightmares about this a million times, but they were never as bad as the real thing.

She was gone, and there was no bringing her back. End of story.

Or, in this case, beginning of story.

It’s hard for most people to imagine my life. Not many people were as alone in the world as I was. I was trying to “protect” my mom up until then. I was trying to keep her going. I did the cooking. I paid the bills. We had welfare money coming in—not much, but enough to squeak by. When it came time to meet with our social worker, I got her cleaned up. I made us look respectable. Or at least like we were doing okay. I was a good cover-up artist. I knew that if they wanted to, the social workers
could have me sent away to a group home. I couldn’t let that happen.

Mom went along when I took charge like that. That was my part of “protecting us”—that is, keeping everyone from seeing what basket cases we were. Because of my cover-up, I didn’t really have any friends. And there were no relatives who wanted anything to do with us. Aside from social assistance, we were on our own.

But now my mom was gone. I was truly on my own. And it really sucked.

Chapter Two

Picture this.

It’s five days after my mom’s death. A warm, sunny summer day. But I feel, like, terrible. How can I feel any other way? When my mom died, our social worker, a nice but frazzled woman named Emma, took over. She handled the cremation and organized a funeral. And now I was walking down the street
on my way to that funeral service. Emma said it was the right thing to do for my mom. Not that we ever had anything to do with a church. The people who would be there would not be family or friends. They would be members of that church. The minister there did these services for welfare families when someone died.

I hated the idea. I didn’t want to go. My mom was dead, and this would be a bunch of strangers trying to do a good deed by showing up for me—Josh Haslett, poor teenage boy who lost his mother to drugs and bad health. Screw them.

I had almost decided not to go to the service at all. It would only make me feel worse. I was trying not to think about my options. Well, I really didn’t have much in the way of options. I didn’t want to think about my future.
Maybe I had no future outside of being placed in a group home. Screw that.

But then this strange thing happened.

This girl walked up to me out of the blue. “Great day,” she says. “I love this weather.”

Girls don’t usually stop me on the street and strike up a conversation about weather. What was with that? I just stared at her.

“Sorry. Sometimes I freak people out. I was just trying to be friendly.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Yeah, that’s okay. Sorry. I was a little preoccupied.”

“I’m Lindsey.”

“I’m Josh.”

“Short for Joshua?”

“I guess.” Nobody had ever called me Joshua that I could recall, except for my mom when I was really young.

“Lindsey is short for Lindsey. The name has something to do with a tree on an island. Scottish, I think.”

Why was she telling me this? I wondered. Maybe she was a nutcase. I was thinking of walking away. But I suddenly realized that for the first time since my mom died, I wasn’t thinking gloomy thoughts.

“What kind of tree?” I asked, feeling foolish even as I said it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I should look it up sometime. I just picture this beautiful, big tree on a small island in the ocean.”

She had a big smile now, this cute and friendly nutcase of a girl.

“So?” she asked.

“So what?”

“Where are you going on a beautiful day like this?”

I almost told her, but I held back. “Nowhere in particular.”

“Can I walk nowhere in particular with you?”

“If you want,” I said, realizing how stupid that sounded. But I think I smiled just then.

“That’s good. At first I thought you couldn’t smile. I thought maybe you had something wrong with your mouth.”

“I don’t have anything wrong with my mouth,” I said.

“That’s good,” Lindsey said.

So we walked. And we talked about silly things. And I knew I was going to be late for the funeral, but right then I didn’t care.

If you are with me so far, you are thinking, Hey, this is like some really cheesy Hollywood film about a messed-up kid who meets a beautiful girl on the street who changes his life.

Well, it is and it isn’t.

After some more walking, and her running commentary about birds, clouds, trees, oceans, faraway places
and hairstyles, she suddenly stopped. “I gotta go now,” she said. “But I’m hoping we can do this again. Can I give you a hug?”

I smiled but didn’t say a thing.

And she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. It felt really, really good.

And then she grabbed my hand and said my name once—“Joshua.” Then she turned and walked away with a bouncy kind of walk.

And so I ended up standing there. Smiling like an idiot.

A few seconds more of feeling stunned and then I took a deep breath and remembered where I was going. I took a few more steps before I realized my wallet was missing.

Chapter Three

I stopped dead in my tracks as it sunk in. That girl had stolen my wallet when she hugged me. What a totally rotten thing to do. I should have known there was something wrong, really wrong, with the way she came on to me. I felt anger welling up inside.

I sat down on a low wall to try to sort out all the weird feelings pulsing
through me. Then a voice inside me tried to calm me down. What had I really lost? A wallet with all of five dollars in it and my high school id. Nothing much at all.

And then I remembered what else.
Damn her
.

I got up and started running in the direction I had come from. If it took all day, I would find her.

At first I thought there would be no way for me to track her down, but it turned out she wasn’t far from where we had met. I found her as she was walking out of a corner store. She saw me running toward her and turned to go back into the store.

I went in and confronted her. “Why did you do that?” I snarled, having a hard time catching my breath.

“Do what?” she asked.

The guy behind the counter was looking at us now. “Hey. Take it outside.”

Lindsey walked back outside, and I followed her. I half expected her to run, but she didn’t. She stopped on the sidewalk and looked me directly in the eyes.

“You stole my wallet,” I insisted.

Then she did a strange thing. She smiled. “You mean this?” she said, holding it up.

I grabbed it from her. “How could you do that?”

“Sorry, it’s what I do.”

I flipped it open and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “I only had five dollars.”

“I know,” she said. “Poor you.”

“Yeah, poor me. But I don’t care about the money.”

“What do you care about?”

I didn’t want to show her at first, but then I realized I needed to tell her what she had stolen from me. I wanted to show her how nasty her actions were. I fumbled with the wallet, lifted a leather flap and pulled out the crinkled,
yellowed photograph. “My mom,” I said. “This is the only picture of my mom that I own.”

“You must really like your mom,” she said, still acting like this was all a joke.

“Screw you. My mom’s dead. She only died a few days ago.” Just saying those words made the pain of her loss much more real, much more awful.

Everything about Lindsey changed then. She looked down at the sidewalk. Then she looked up at me. “You’re not joking, are you?”

“It’s no joke. I was on my way to her funeral service at a church I’ve never set foot in before.”

“No way.”

“I didn’t want to go. I don’t want to be there. But I was trying. I thought it was the right thing to do.”

“Then you need to be there. Look, I’m so sorry I did that to you. I wouldn’t have if I knew what was going on.”

“But why would you do it to anyone?” She looked away. “I could explain. But not now. Look, you need to go to that church.”

I felt crappy. “I’m not going. Not now.”

“You have to go.”

I wanted to smack this girl. I really did. It wasn’t just her. It was the whole rotten mess I was in. I must have been holding my breath, because I suddenly let out a big sigh. “Forget it,” I said. “Just forget it.” And I started to walk away. Lindsey just stood there.

I was maybe ten feet away when she ran up from behind. “Josh,” she said. “You’re going to that funeral. And I’m going with you.”

Chapter Four

“I’ve never been to a funeral before,” I told her as we walked.

“Neither have I,” she said, but I wasn’t sure she was telling me the truth. “We’re like funeral virgins.”

I scowled at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll get serious.”

We were late for the service. There were maybe twenty people in the
church pews. I didn’t recognize anyone except for my social worker, Emma. She noticed me coming in, walked back and led us to seats near the front as people sang a slow, sad song.

Lindsey sat down beside me on the empty wooden bench. The song ended and the minister began to read from the bible. My mom had never been religious. We’d never once gone to church, so this seemed very odd, very wrong. For a second I considered getting up and walking out of there. Or running.