But all of that competition is moot now, and at least I’m not worried about Francesca picking on me. I remember her face as she came down those stairs in tennis whites, and then when I was almost throwing up in the bathroom.
She isn’t as cruel as Greta was. She’s not going to give me any trouble.
The first bite of my hamburger is heaven.
I am chewing when I hear the sound of a bunch of chairs being pushed back all at once, their feet scraping and squeaking over the linoleum floor.
I don’t pay the noise any attention—
When my table is suddenly surrounded, I brace myself and keep my head down. On reflex, I pick up my tray to leave, my read of Francesca clearly misinformed.
Except then I look up… and recognize the field hockey team’s first string of players. And they all have their trays with them.
“Hey, Taylor,” Strots says as she sits down next to me. “What’s up.”
Every one of the athletes parks it along with her, even though they have to pull up an extra chair. Keisha is on Strots’s right.
“Um… nothing?” I say as I glance at the other girls.
They’re relaxed, and they start talking about nothing in particular, picking up the strings of conversations that had been briefly interrupted by their relocation. I glance at Strots. She’s making a joke with Keisha. The other girl starts to laugh, and their eyes meet for a moment. And then linger.
“Liking that hamburger?” Strots says to me when she refocuses on her own food.
“It’s really good.”
“I’m glad.”
“Ah… me, too.”
As the presence of these girls sinks in, I feel an unfamiliar sensation in the center of my chest, especially when the one to my left asks me about my history test, and then tells me she’s impressed, but not surprised, that I was at the head of the curve on it.
“You’re really smart,” she announces. Like it’s a fact so indisputable, it doesn’t need to be spoken aloud. “Like the smartest girl in the school.”
I have no idea what to reply to that.
Instead, I retreat into my own mind.
I go back to the boiler room, where I sat across from my illness and watched that version of me shake my own head. Then I think of the morning after Nick Hollis killed himself, when the truth came out in all the newspapers and on TV… the truth that he had been having an illicit affair with Greta Stanhope, and she’d gotten pregnant, and he’d killed her—and then, a few days later, hanged himself from guilt in his apartment.
I remember my illness shaking my head at me.
I know now that when it was doing that, it wasn’t deriding me with its power. It was telling me that I got my version of events wrong. I wasn’t the one who killed Greta, no matter how keenly I could envision me doing the deed.
Nick Hollis killed her.
With a white-handled knife that he’d taken out of the cafeteria.
That was found on his kitchen counter, right next to his body as it swung from the hook in the beam over the chair he’d knocked out from under himself.
And it is a tragedy.
“Isn’t that right, Taylor,” Strots says.
I look over at my roommate. I don’t have a clue what she’s spoken, but I trust her as much as she trusts me. Which is to say, completely.
“Absolutely it is,” I reply as I go back to finishing my burger. “That’s exactly right.”
While I eat my lunch with my new group of friends, I realize what the sensation behind my sternum is. It’s the banked warmth that comes with being accepted, by people who will circle around you when you need it. It’s the sense of belonging you get when you know, no matter what happens, you’re not alone.
This is the reality I’d have created for myself if I could have. Instead, it’s unexpectedly been given to me by others. Which is a kind of magic, isn’t it?
Then again, I knew Ellen Strotsberry was going to change my life from the moment she first walked through our door.
Still, in all my flushed, private happiness, I’m not ignoring the fact that very grown-up events have marked this semester—and I know that this moment of contentment, this personal Mountain Day summit of mine, will not last forever. Life is complicated by things large and small, and what has complicated the St. Ambrose campus is as big as it gets, two people dead… and three people knowing about a cover-up. As far as we are aware.
None of that is the kind of thing you walk away from scot-free. I’ve read enough books by masters to know that sins stain the soul, and what is easily swept under the rug in the first stages of “moving on” often haunts the nights of later years. But I’ll take this deep breath, thank you very much.
Plus it’s funny. I never expected to leave any kind of legacy behind at St. Ambrose. I never expected to even make it through my first semester. But as I glance over at my roommate sitting next to the girl she loves, I feel like I might have changed the world a little.
And I’m very satisfied with my choices.
author’s note
I wasn’t looking for Sarah M. Taylor when she came and found me four years ago. I have a fantastic day job penning books about vampires, and that takes up pretty much all of my time. Some stories are too compelling to ignore, however, and Sarah’s was one of them.
I’m not sure what other writers do, but for me, I have pictures that play in my head, and my role is to record what I see. As long as I follow the images, and am faithful to them, the reels keep running and everybody, especially me, is happy. Sarah, and her world at St. Ambrose, was so incredibly vivid and compelling that I couldn’t leave her unexpressed. From the moment I saw her and her mother in that old car going under the gates of the school—and I heard her mom talking about the lawn—I knew that I was in for a ride.
And then I saw what she was affected by. I was immediately aware that her bipolar disorder diagnosis and symptoms were something that had to be treated with the utmost respect. They couldn’t be a plot device or depicted in a cartoonish or one-dimensional kind of way. I proceeded to extensively research the subject and speak to people who have received that diagnosis. I also made sure early on that the book was read by individuals with personal, relevant experience, to ensure that things were correct. However, I think it is very important to acknowledge that I have no direct personal experience or background with being bipolar. I really hope that the care with which I approached the mental health aspects of this book comes through. It is not my intention to hold myself out as an expert, and any mistakes are solely my own.
I want to thank an entire crew of people, starting with my editor, Hannah Braaten, who has championed this book from the start. When it comes to my vampire series, I’m pretty much a solo operator with the content part of things. With Sarah, though, I needed help and guidance to make sure the story came across properly and with the best resonance. Hannah walked me through everything, a number of times, performing a vital service with such good humor and grace. Meg Ruley, Rebecca Scherer, Liz Berry, and Jennifer Armentrout were my first readers, and they provided critical input in the early stages when things were quite rough and I needed to get my feet under me before we even showed it to Hannah. Charlotte Powell has been a sounding board and constant source of guidance in so many ways, not just with this book, but my others, and I am, as always, so thankful to her. I am also very grateful to the incredible team at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster for their support, not just with Sarah’s story, but with all my efforts that they publish so well; Jennifer Bergstrom and Jennifer Long, and everyone there, have been a total joy to work with for all these years, and I owe them so much. And thank you to Jamie Selzer, who is an incredible partner for me in production （and who puts up with my incessant, voluminous edits with fine banter and aplomb）。 Finally, thank you to Lisa Litwack and Chelsea McGuckin, who do all my covers and are phenomenal artists.