The Yearbook (15 page)

And now I’m finished. I have included everything. Ariana has awakened and helped me remember. We’ll head down soon. The smoke is clearing, and there is movement. Sound. Life.

We will decide what to do when we get there. We’ll save this journal. I don’t know what we’ll do with it.

But whatever we do, well do it together.

That is the only thing in my life I’m sure of.

I
T’S AFTER MIDNIGHT.
W
ALTER
Ojeda is snoring.

Mark flicks on his night-light. He reaches into the box and pulls out the yearbook marked 1991.

He sees his dad as a freshman, lumped in with his homeroom class. He looks a little nerdy, but his face is clear. None of those scars left by the plastic surgeon who had done such a lousy jobs on that bone disease.

Mom’s in another class, and she looks gorgeous and confident.

Neither of them had the disease then. Mark has always thought they’d met at the doctor’s office, fallen in love because of the neurofibromatosis they had in common.

He finishes the book and puts it down. Then he picks up their senior book. The important one. 1994. Twenty-two years ago.

But there is no yearbook inside. The pages
h
ave been ripped out. In their place is a stack of brown-edged legal papers.

He picks up the top one and reads his dad’s writing:

My name is David Kallas.

I am in trouble.

I do not know how long I will live.

My only possessions are the clothes I’m wearing and my backpack, which contains this pen and pad.

I do not know if my mother and my house still exist.

What’s more, I have a splitting headache.…

M
ARK STEPS OUT OF
the elevator. He walks into the basement of the Wetherby Chemical plant.

In his hand is a sheet of paper. At the top is written the name WALTER OJEDA. Below it is line after line of crossouts, ending with another name, in angry black letters:

JOEL DEWAART.

Mark walks into the darkness. The mist is beginning to swirl, but he expects that.

And he is not surprised to see the four silhouettes emerging from the vapor. He barely notices the stooped black man, the ancient white guy holding the soda can.

But he can’t help staring at the other two. The man and woman whose distorted faces are streaked with tears, whose smiles border on joyous madness.

The words push through his parched lips: “Mom … Dad?”

David and Ariana Kallas open their arms.

Mark runs toward them. Their embrace takes away the pain, the snakelike grip that has smothered him most of his life.

“We … had to leave you,” David says, his voice choked with emotion.

“I know,” Mark replies. “I read what you wrote.”

Mark knows everything now. That the infections became a kind of cancer. That his parents would have died if they hadn’t returned to Pytho
—
to be preserved in her healing sleep, to be reclaimed at the awakening. It was just as the monster had warned them.

But Mark also knows that Pytho sent him a test. She sent him DeWaart.

She wants Mark, too.

Mark sees the cloud swirl around them. He knows it’s time.

Fear grips him, fear that his parents have been transformed.

But their eyes tell him something else. Pytho does not have them.

Not yet.

“I don’t know if we can fight back this time,” Ariana says wearily.

Mark looks toward the smoking gash. “There are three of us now.”

“Five,” says the old police chief behind them. Mr. Sarro grunts in agreement.

They move together and hold hands tightly. The smoke circles them, taking their breath away, pushing them apart.

But Mark will not let go.

None of them will.

Ever.

Peter Lerangis (b. 1955) is a bestselling author of young adult fiction; his novels have sold more than four million copies worldwide. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lerangis began writing in elementary school, inventing stories during math class—after finishing the problems, he claims. His first piece of published writing was an anonymous humor article for the April Fools’ Day edition of his high school newspaper. Seeing the other students laughing in the corridors as they read it, planted the idea in his head that he could be a writer. After high school he attended Harvard University, where he majored in biochemistry and sang in an a cappella group, the Harvard Krokodiloes. Intending to go on to law school, Lerangis took a job as a paralegal post-graduation. But after a summer job as a singing waiter, he changed his path and became a musical theater actor.

Lerangis found theatrical work on Broadway, appearing in
They’re Playing Our
Song, and he toured the country in such shows as
Cabaret
,
West Side Story
, and
Fiddler on the Roof
, acting alongside theatrical greats such as Jack Lemmon, John Lithgow, Jane Powell, John Raitt, and Victor Garber. During these years, Lerangis met his future wife, Tina deVaron, and began editing fiction, a job that would eventually lead him to writing novels of his own.

Lerangis got his start writing novelizations under the penname A. L. Singer, as well as installments of long-running series, such as the Hardy Boys and the Baby-sitters Club. He eventually began writing under his own name with 1994’s
The Yearbook
and
Driver’s Dead
, two high-school horror novels that are part of the Point Horror series of young-adult thrillers.

In 1998, Lerangis debuted Watchers, a six-novel sci-fi series, which won Children’s Choice and Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers awards. The first book in the Abracadabra series,
Poof! Rabbits Everywhere
(2002), introduced Max, an aspiring magician who struggles to keep a lid on the supernatural happenings at his school. Lerangis followed that eight-book series with the immensely popular Spy X novels, about a pair of twins drawn into international espionage.

The stand-alone novel
Smiler’s Bones
(2005), based on the true story of an Eskimo brought to New York City in 1897, won critical acclaim and a number of awards. Most recently, Lerangis has collaborated with a group of high-profile children’s authors on Scholastic’s the 39 Clues, a sprawling ten-novel adventure series.

At times, Lerangis’s life has been as thrilling as one of his stories. He has run a marathon, rock-climbed during an earthquake, gone on-stage as a last-minute replacement for Broadway legend Alan Jay Lerner, and visited Russia as part of a literary delegation that included First Lady Laura Bush. He lives with his family in New York City, not far from Central Park.