PROLOGUE

June 12th

The school bus chugs up the long, sloping driveway. Excited teenage chatter bounces around me like a Super Ball. I sit by myself in the next-to-last row, head down, hands pushing into my pockets, holding my breath until my lungs start to singe and wishing this rickety old bus would succumb to a sudden death. Harsh, I know, but at least it would spare me the pain of what’s coming. When we finally reach the top, I lift my head slightly and let the burning breath out. The old wooden cabin rolls into sight. There’s no sign of anyone.

Quel relief.

She must still be inside.

I pull a hand out of my pocket and wipe away the film of sweat that’s beading my upper lip. My armpits are feeling sweaty too. I’m melting with nerves. Normally, Aunt Su’s shambly little cabin is my favourite place in the world. But on this sunny June day, I’m wishing I could be anywhere else on the planet. Solitary confinement in a dank, dungeonous, rodent-infested Columbian prison cell would be preferable.

Truly.

The bus wheezes to a stop and kids scramble into the aisles, eager to see the home of Big Bend’s one and only author. Yeah, my Aunt Su holds a bit of a freak-show status around these parts (which I’m sure must thrill her to no end). I guess writers are rare in hayseed towns like ours, kind of like tropical birds over the Nunavut tundra.

Last year, in the hopes of “inspiring a new generation of budding artists,” my teacher, Ms. Harris, asked me to arrange this class visit to Aunt Su’s home. After months of nagging, I finally set it up. Now that the day is here, I’m praying with every cell in my body that artists are the only things my teacher will find budding around the old cabin.

“We’re here, everybody out!” hollers our bus driver, a middle-aged man with a sagging pot-belly and a pair of matching dragon tattoos breathing fire out of each forearm. It’s a warm spring afternoon but that doesn’t stop a cool shiver of nerves from crawling over my skin as I imagine every cringe-worthy moment that might possibly take place in the next hour. Trust me, if you could peek into my brain right now, you wouldn’t blame me for being the last one out of my seat. By the time I gather the nerve to get my legs moving, our driver is already ambling down to the edge of the property for a cigarette. I shuffle my way out of the bus. I’m definitely not in any kind of a hurry to get the visit started. Believe you me. Don’t misunderstand; I love my Aunt Su like whoa. But other people just don’t get her like I do.

Outside, Ms. Harris huddles us together in the driveway like a flock of unruly sheep. “Class, please wait here a moment while I check to make sure Ms. Chase is ready for us.” She walks up the flagstone path toward the cabin. The second she’s gone, every eye in the group turns to yours truly. Questions fly at me like a swarm of hungry black flies.

“This is where your aunt lives?”

“I thought authors were rich.”

“Isn’t she worried the walls are going to fall down?”

“How can she stand living all the way out here on her own?”

“My dad says your aunt is nuts.”

It feels like there’s a small animal chewing its way through my stomach. Merde. Why didn’t I just play sick and stay in bed this morning? I duck my head away from the questions, close my eyes, and pretend to be invisible. A minute later, Ms. Harris is back. “Okay, people, she’s ready for us. We can go in.”

And suddenly, the small animal inside me is spinning around and crunching down on my spleen. I stagger forward through the pain. As my classmates file through the front door of the cabin, I send out a desperate series of silent, last-ditch prayers to the universe.

Please let her have some clothes on … please don’t let her be smoking anything … please don’t let me die of mortification …

Aunt Su is waiting for us in her living room. She’s dressed (thank you, universe!) in a flowing, lavender-coloured muumuu that trails behind her like some kind of elegant ball gown. She’s wearing her best faux feather earrings, and her long grey hair has been pulled up into a high, swingy ponytail. She grins widely and winks as soon as she spots me. Then she lifts her arms over her head and starts waving her hands frantically to beckon the rest of the kids closer. The room is cluttered with all her crazy stuff, so we all just stand in a wobbly circle and listen while she speaks. She talks for a few minutes about writing and passion and emotions. She shows us her overflowing bookcases and tells us about her love of reading. “Remember kids, every writer is a reader first.” It’s her favourite saying; I must have heard it a thousand times over the years. Then she plucks a dog-eared novel off the shelf and reads a passage out loud to us. It’s a really sad passage, and she injects her heart into each word. By the end, she has half of us entranced and the other half in tears. Me, I’m somewhere in between.

Before we can recover, she flips on some Mozart and shoos everybody over to the giant picture window that faces the lake. The sun is shining on the waves, and it sparkles like a field of diamonds as the notes of the symphony fill the room. One by one, we take turns describing to her what we see in the water. After that, she hands out pens and sheets of paper and leads us through a writing exercise. There’s nowhere in the cabin for twenty-one kids to sit and write, so Aunt Su has us stand in a big circle and lean forward so that our backs become desks for the person behind us. We bend our bodies and write through the hilariously ticklish pen scratches across our spines. By the time we’re done, the entire room is belly-laughing, even stone-faced Ms. Harris. With so many warm, happy bodies, the little cabin is quickly transforming into a makeshift sauna, and there isn’t a drop of air conditioning around for kilometres. Aunt Su skips over to her freezer, pulls out a giant box of grape-flavoured Popsicles, and ushers us out onto the lakefront porch for a snack. Ms. Harris suddenly turns stone-faced again.

“Excuse me, Ms. Chase, but are those peanut-free? Our school has a strict policy …”

Aunt Su snorts and passes the Popsicle box around the group. “Policy, schmolicy. It’s just frozen water! You’re in my home now, not school.”

Ms. Harris doesn’t even try to argue with that one.

The group volume lowers while we all suck on the Popsicles and enjoy the cool breeze blowing off the lake. Aunt Su flits over to my side, her crinkly smile creasing her face like a beautiful Chinese fan. “How’d I do, my Lily-girl? Hope I didn’t embarrass you too much.”

I give her a big hug and notice how, under the muumuu, her body feels thinner than usual. “You were great,” I say. And I mean it. She puts a hand on my cheek. Her palm is smooth and warm — like sunlight sliding over my skin. Her eyes narrow with worry. “You didn’t sleep last night after our phone call, did you?”

I shake my head. “Too much on my mind.” I don’t tell her the rest of the truth — how worrying about this class visit kept my brain from getting any rest. Seems silly, now that it went so well.

Pirouetting around, she extracts a book from a small cardboard box on the porch floor and hands it to me.

“My newest baby arrived in the mail this morning. Want to see?”

Nodding, I turn the book over in my hands and examine the glossy cover. A beautiful young couple is embracing in a swirling ocean as a dark, ominous sky looms above. The title reads LoveStorm.

“If you ask me, the font they used is all wrong,” she says, pointing at her pen name streaking across the cover in thick, black Times New Roman letters. “Not my personality at all. But I do like the picture they came up with. What do you think?”

“Except for the font, I like it. A lot.” If people were fonts, Aunt Su would definitely be wingdings.

(That’s wingdings, in case you don’t know enough about fonts to tell.) I hand the book back to her with a sigh that says, Just wish I could read it for myself.

I might as well have screamed the words out loud, because Aunt Su can see my thoughts as clearly as if my forehead was made of glass. She smiles sadly and tweaks my chin. “That’s something you have to take up with your mother, Lily-girl.”

My mother. Just the mention of her makes me squirm in my flip-flops.

As I’m bending down to put LoveStorm back in the box, Emma Swartz and her Siamese-twin-BFF Sarah Rein come up to me. “Your aunt’s really cool!” they swoon in unison. “How often do you come here? This cabin seems like such a great place to hang out.” These two girls never talk to me at school. Like, ever. So I’m guessing they must be genuinely impressed by Aunt Su. The little animal has long since stopped chewing on my stomach. Now there’s something else inside me … something warm and light filling my chest like a helium balloon. I think it might just be happiness. Or maybe pride. Or maybe both.

The visit is over. While Ms. Harris stays back to thank Aunt Su, the rest of us follow the narrow path up the side of the cabin to get back to the bus. I’m so chuffed about the way the afternoon went, I must stop thinking clearly. Because next thing I know, I’m leading the group right past Aunt Su’s herb garden. That’s when it happens. Todd Nelson breaks away from the path and kneels down in the garden, turning one of the tiny new spring plants over in his hands. My heart freezes the second I realize what he’s found. Todd’s family is in the gardening business. He happens to know more about plants than any other kid in Big Bend. “Oh my God,” he calls out to us. “She’s growing marijuana!”

Waves of shocked laughter slam into me from all sides, and in a flash of a second, I feel that happy little helium balloon burst apart inside me. My cheeks flare with an angry heat. Don’t laugh at my aunt, I want to yell at them. But I don’t. Instead, I tear away from the group, back to the bus, back to my seat in the next-to-last row, where I bury my face in the green vinyl bench, close my eyes, and pretend to be invisible. Again.