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Authors: Rachel Ward

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“There’s nothing there, Carl. There’s nothing there.” She grabs my hand and leads me forward again.

She’s wrong, though. The past is down there — memories that will never go away. And somewhere there’s a locket. A silver locket that used to belong to a woman called Iris and a chain that once bit into Neisha’s neck.

She squeezes my hand. “Don’t look down. Look up. Look all around you. Look up, Carl, and keep walking.”

I make myself lift my head up. The sun’s creeping up into the sky now. What was white is now silver, transformed by light. The trees, the bushes, the lake itself.

I slide my feet around so I’m facing Neisha. I kiss her and she kisses me back, then I put my arms around her waist, lift her up, and start spinning around. She holds on tight and laughs and I’m laughing too now, the sort of laughter
that’s next to tears. Don’t cry, keep spinning. Keep spinning and spinning and never stop.

Everything starts to blur. The sun’s in my eyes and the sky is full of light. The world is full of ice crystals and every one of them is a diamond now, and there are millions and millions of them all around us.

RACHEL WARD
is the author of the internationally bestselling Numbers trilogy.
The Drowning
is her fourth novel. She lives in Bath, England, with her husband and their two children. Visit her website
www.rachelwardbooks.com
and follow her on Twitter @RachelWardbooks.

Text copyright © 2014 by Rachel Ward

All rights reserved. Published by Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.,
Publishers since 1920
.
CHICKEN HOUSE
,
SCHOLASTIC
, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
www.scholastic.com

First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Chicken House, 2 Palmer Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 1DS.

John Steinbeck,
Of Mice and Men
(Penguin Classics, 2000), copyright © 1937 by John Steinbeck; copyright renewed John Steinbeck 1965.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ward, Rachel.
The drowning / Rachel Ward. — First American edition.
pages cm
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Carl Adams awakens beside his drowned brother, unable to remember anything about himself, the incident, or the girl who rides with him in the ambulance.
ISBN 978-0-545-62771-9
[1. Amnesia — Fiction. 2. Drowning — Fiction. 3. Brothers — Fiction. 4. Family problems — Fiction. 5. Conduct of life — Fiction. 6. Near-death experiences — Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W215576Dro 2014
[Fic] — dc23
2013025788

First American edition, May 2014

Cover art & design by Christopher Stengel with image by annedde/iStockphoto

e-ISBN 978-0-545-62772-6

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.

BOOK: The Drowning
6.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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