Crushed Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1 - Something Happening

  Chapter 2 - Tatesters

  Chapter 3 - To Do

  Chapter 4 - Barter

  Chapter 5 - Ally

  Chapter 6 - Address in Hand

  Chapter 7 - House

  Chapter 8 - The Distance Between Them

  Chapter 9 - Passersby

  Chapter 10 - Schrödinger’s Cat

  Chapter 11 - The Yellow Paper

  Chapter 12 - Strangeness

  Chapter 13 - Dr. Yates

  Chapter 14 - Messages Written and Not

  Chapter 15 - A Vow

  Chapter 16 - Another Candidate

  Chapter 17 - Excellent

  Chapter 18 - Three Girls in a Car

  Chapter 19 - Little Dragon

  Chapter 20 - Audrey’s Father

  Chapter 21 - Knoll Talk

  Chapter 22 - Another Point of View

  Chapter 23 - Transported

  Chapter 24 - Two Brief, Unsettling Conversations

  Chapter 25 - A Single Droplet

  Chapter 26 - The Return of the Spaghetti-Strap Dress

  Chapter 27 - Sifting

  Chapter 28 - Audrey, Courtside

  Chapter 29 - Clyde’s Ride

  Chapter 30 - Enter Audrey and Wickham

  Chapter 31 - Episode at Table 9

  Chapter 32 - What Wickham and Audrey Did

  Chapter 33 - A Door to the Past

  Chapter 34 - Within the Snow Globe

  Part Two

  Chapter 35 - Alternating Currents

  Chapter 36 - Top Collar

  Chapter 37 - Forewarned

  Chapter 38 - Ignominy

  Chapter 39 - Discovering the Yellow Man

  Chapter 40 - Mrs. Leacock

  Chapter 41 - People vs. Wickham Hill

  KILLER FROM CAROLINA. WHO CREAMED THE CREAMER GIRL?

  Chapter 42 - Two Birds

  Chapter 43 - Transportation Services

  Chapter 44 - Start-up

  Chapter 45 - The Visiting Hour

  Chapter 46 - Bearbaiting

  Chapter 47 - How Come

  Chapter 48 - To Help His Mother Out

  Chapter 49 - Take-out

  Chapter 50 - Breaking the News

  Chapter 51 - See Me

  Chapter 52 - Something Wrong

  Chapter 53 - A Situation, Colonel

  Chapter 54 - The Commodore

  Chapter 55 - Wickham’s Version

  Chapter 56 - Is That You?

  Chapter 57 - Dark and Stormy

  Part Three

  Chapter 58 - What’s with the French Music?

  Chapter 59 - Interesting

  Chapter 60 - Extra, Extra

  Chapter 61 - A Sighting

  Chapter 62 - Said the Spider to the Fly

  Chapter 63 - A Parley with Theo

  Chapter 64 - The Wishing Minutes

  Chapter 65 - No Longer in Service

  Chapter 66 - “Okay in There?”

  Chapter 67 - The Yellow Man

  Chapter 68 - In Which the Three Maids Cease to Sing

  Chapter 69 - Over Cucumber Sandwiches

  Chapter 70 - The Place I’m Going

  Chapter 71 - What’re You Doing? Where’re You Going?

  Chapter 72 - Safely Under His Arm

  Chapter 73 - Firebird

  Chapter 74 - A Choice

  Chapter 75 - The Arrival of a Present

  Chapter 76 - Awakening

  Chapter 77 - Ash

  Chapter 78 - An Unexpected Visitor

  Chapter 79 - “Happy to Meet You”

  Chapter 80 - Resilience

  Acknowledgments

  ALSO AVAILABLE: - Zipped

  Crushed - A Readers Guide

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  IN THEIR OWN WORDS - A CONVERSATION WITH LAURA AND TOM McNEAL

  A CONVERSATION WITH LAURA AND TOM McNEAL

  READERS CIRCLE BOOKS

  ALSO AVAILABLE: The Decoding of Lana Morris

  ALSO AVAILABLE: - Crooked

  About the Author

  Also by Laura and Tom McNeal

  Copyright Page

  For Sam and Hank,

  and in memory of Christine

  Besides, there was truth in his looks.

  —from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

  Part One

  The north wind doth blow

  And we shall have snow

  And what will the robin do then, poor thing?

  —Traditional rhyme

  Chapter 1

  Something Happening

  The door opened, and a tall boy Audrey Reed had never seen before entered the room. It was early November, clear and mild—the season’s first snow wouldn’t fall for another two weeks. Through the windows of the second-story classroom, the midmorning sun lit up Audrey’s fingers and the edges of her book, and when the boy stepped into this light, it gave his face an artificial radiance.

  He had dark hair, a little on the long side and wavy, and he wore a heavy black sweater and faded khaki pants, the whole look loose and slouchy but in a put-together kind of way. He was so different in appearance and yet so at ease with himself that Audrey wondered if he was a foreign exchange student from some place like France or Italy, or wherever it might be that people grew up feeling okay about themselves. He wasn’t embarrassed by his tallness or his newness, the very things Audrey herself had been embarrassed by when she’d enrolled as an incoming junior at Jemison High two months earlier.

  Mrs. Leacock twisted the ring on her left hand, stared at the documents the new boy handed her, and let a look of weary exasperation cross her face. She was one of those adults Audrey could least imagine becoming, a middle-aged woman with hair-sprayed curls in a style that belonged exclusively to old women. Whether she was reading announcements or passing out tests, the creases in her face made her look like she was scowling. She began going through her file drawer for a series of papers that she handed the boy, one after another, while speaking to him in a low, businesslike tone. The boy stood easily, without any of the impatience to find a seat to sink into that Audrey herself would have felt. He merely stood there and nodded at Mrs. Leacock, and smiled, and lazily scratched the back of his neck.

  Audrey glanced up at the wall clock, then opened her green composition book. In its back pages, where she put notes to herself, she wrote: 11:13 a.m., Nov. 2. Something happening. Something definitely happening.

  She put her pen down. Up front, Mrs. Leacock twisted her ring and gave the room a long scan before fixing her gaze on the empty desk behind Audrey, and suddenly the boy was looking her way, too.

  Audrey lowered her eyes, and a few seconds later felt his approach and saw his shoes pass by—soft leather loafers a man would wear—and took in the faint, sugary smell that swept along behind him. She wasn’t sure what the smell was, but it reminded her of Christmas. She heard the boy slip into the metal desk behind her and shuffle some papers. A few seconds later, Mrs. Leacock walked up the aisle to give him a worn copy of their physics textbook.

  “Chapter seven,” Mrs. Leacock said in a low, tired voice. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Heisenberg?”

  The boy let out an easy chuckle and said, “Oh, you’d be surprised the folks we manage to hear about down there in South Carolina.” He spoke in a low, gentle, bemused drawl that Audrey suddenly craved hearing again.

  Mrs. Leacock seemed to feel differently. “It would behoove you not to guess what might surprise me, Mr. Hill,” she said stonily, and without waiting for a reply returned to her desk.

  As she went, the boy drawled under his breath, “It would also behoove me not to think you’re a peab
rain, lady, but there it is.”

  Audrey found herself grinning, not because Mrs. Leacock was peabrained—she wasn’t—but because she was rude to students and indifferent to anything not strictly related to her lectures. Audrey liked the idea of someone having the spunk to say that tall, rigid, imposing Mrs. Leacock was peabrained.

  In a stage-whisper drawl and to no one in particular, the new boy then said, “So who the hell is Heisenberg?” and Audrey—she couldn’t help herself—let slip a small laugh.

  At the Tate School, where Audrey had spent the previous four years, a new student was cheerfully introduced to the entire classroom, and then (the Tate School was hopelessly and, to Audrey’s mind, endearingly fogyish) the new student was assigned an “Honorary Helpmeet” to initiate him or her into the Tate School’s intricate ways. But that was Tate, and this was Jemison.

  Still, it didn’t mean you couldn’t be polite.

  Audrey composed herself as best she could, turned in her seat, and prepared to introduce herself. She wasn’t, however, prepared for what she saw. He’d looked handsome when he was at the front of the room, but seeing his face up close, she felt a little dizzy.

  In a low, shaky voice, she said, “Hi. I’m Audrey Reed.”

  In a whispery drawl, he seemed to say his name was Wiggim Hill.

  “Wiggim?” Audrey whispered. It was the oddest name she’d ever heard.

  “Wickham,” he said, and made a turned-down smile that seemed almost to imply the name was a mystery to him, too.

  Audrey didn’t know what to say next, but she knew she had to say something. She whispered, “Are you here for good?”

  This time he broke into a loose smile and fixed his eyes on hers. “As opposed to evil?”

  She laughed. She shouldn’t have, but she couldn’t help it.

  Chapter 2

  Tatesters

  Ten minutes later, Audrey was sitting with C.C. Mudd and Lea Woolcott, her best and only friends, as they ate their lunches where they always ate their lunches—on an isolated knoll far from the lunch quad. They were wearing their sweaters without coats, and Audrey could feel the faint heat of the sun on her back and the crown of her head. Audrey ate currants from a cardboard carton and looked up at the blue sky while Lea and C.C. talked about a teacher who’d made some mistake in class, one that Lea had wanted to correct but had decided not to.

  “Good thinking,” C.C. said. “Everybody already suspects we’re freaks. If we start correcting the teacher, it’ll only confirm it.”

  C.C. had thick, dark hair, black eyelashes, brown eyes, and what she called the body of an inflated gymnast. She had been short and narrow at eleven, short and voluptuous by thirteen. Audrey thought she was pretty, but C.C., of course, disagreed.

  Lea was the quietest of the three. She wore glasses but still seemed to squint, so that you didn’t notice, until you’d known her for some time, that her irises were faceted, and blue like quartz. Her face was fine-boned and recessively attractive, and she had a soft way of talking. Her hair was white-blond and utterly without interest to her—she wore it in a ponytail unless C.C. or Audrey insisted on fixing it for her.

  The three had been best friends since starting sixth grade at the Agatha Ingram Tate School, a tiny private school in Cazenovia, New York. C.C. had been the bold, flashy, wisecracking one; Lea had been the pale, bookish one with two parents; and Audrey had been the one who wanted to be a bold, wisecracking girl with two parents.

  The Agatha Ingram Tate School went through tenth grade—as far as its only teacher, Edie March, felt she could go in math and science. It was a one-room school with eight students, an upright piano, a parquet floor, and a fireplace. You couldn’t possibly get lost there. Whereas on Audrey’s first day at Jemison, she couldn’t find anything and was late to every class. The one time she’d asked for directions, a girl wearing a skimpy T-shirt with Hubba-hubba inscribed across her breasts said, “Like I would know.” No one knew who Audrey was, no one said hello, and when she’d searched for a place to eat at the lunch quad, three girls looked up at her, then looked at one another, and one of them said something that made the other two break into harsh, stinging laughter. Audrey had turned and staked out the remote, deserted knoll, where Lea and C.C. had found her.

  Their first morning had been as bad as Audrey’s, and as they ate their lunch together that first day, they were quiet for a long while. Then Lea had squinted at the massive cafeteria building and said, “We’re like pet rabbits released into the wild. This is supposed to be our natural habitat, but it’s not.”

  Since then, they had made the knoll their habitat. They met there at lunch to discuss whatever freakishness they had detected in others or had been accused of themselves, and to bolster one another for the rest of the semi-terrifying day.

  Today, Lea and C.C. had rearranged themselves so they were sitting back to back, like bookends, grilling each other for a trig quiz. Audrey had closed her eyes and was thinking idle Wickham Hill thoughts when she sensed that someone was looking at her. Wickham Hill, she hoped (preposterous as she knew that was), but when she flicked open her eyes, she found she’d been both right and wrong.

  There was someone staring at her, all right, but it wasn’t Wickham Hill. It was a tall boy in black pants and a pinkish shirt, possibly that semi-creepy, semi-handsome boy she’d caught staring at her once or twice in World Cultures. Now, caught staring again, he readjusted his gaze and pretended not to have been staring, which was kind of embarrassing for them both. He turned and walked hurriedly away.

  Audrey closed her eyes again and when, within her imagination, the face of Wickham Hill presented itself with perfect clarity, she kept them closed.

  “Yo, Tatesters!”

  C.C.’s brother, Brian, approaching from below.

  Brian Mudd was a sophomore, small for his age, but with big hands and feet. He’d been in the public school system for three years now and liked it. For him, the Tate School hadn’t been a serene island. He liked computers, and Edie March had liked fountain pens. Every time Edie had asked a question he didn’t know the answer to—which, as he put it, “was like a gazillion times a day”—he felt himself getting squished. “That wasn’t a schoolroom, dudes. It was a trash compactor.”

  Today Brian was cradling something against his neck, something brown, spiky, and reptilian.

  Lea seemed alarmed. “What is it?” she said. C.C. looked at the reptile, then at her brother, and said, “Where did you get that? And don’t you dare bring it home.”

  Brian nuzzled the creature and gave it a nibbling kiss. “Found it sitting by a bush,” he said. The lizard had a flat triangular head with gold eyes, and spikes ran down the ridge of its spine. It seemed designed for gladiatorial work.

  “Bearded dragon?” Audrey asked.

  “Well done, Miz Reed!” Brian said, mimicking Edie March; then he loosened the enormous lizard from his neck and held it out in his big hands for general presentation. “So how stellar is this?” he said.

  “Not very,” C.C. said, “and don’t you dare let loose of that thing.”

  Which of course Brian immediately did. The reptile blinked, looked around, and then began slogging very slowly downhill, through the dirt. “Lookit ’im scoot!” Brian said.

  Audrey didn’t share Lea’s and C.C.’s aversion to reptiles. She got up and followed Brian and the lizard until, perhaps twenty yards along, Brian reached down and scooped the bearded dragon back up. The reptile seemed pleased, and nestled restfully against Brian’s neck.

  “Wanna hold it?” Brian asked. “He’s totally gentle.”

  Audrey handed her box of currants to Brian and took the animal—it was a strange combination of roughness and plumpness—and it seemed to relax against her neck, too.

  Brian was nodding his head and smiling. “Blissing out. Animal’s blissing out.”

  “That’s its name? Animal?”

  “If you say so,” Brian said.

  Like C.C., Brian had thick, dark hair. H
e wore it mostly uncut, which meant he occasionally had to push it aside with his fingers in order to see. When they had all met at the Tate School, he’d been a skinny little kid with teeth too large for his mouth. Now that he had grown into his teeth, he wasn’t bad-looking, but he was still Brian, and normal conversation with him was impossible.

  “Is it male or female?” Audrey ventured.

  Brian gave a who-knows shrug. “Before you came up with Animal, I was thinking of going with a gender-neutral name. Pat or Terry, or maybe Kiki.” Brian’s grin suddenly broadened. “Did you know that male lizards have two penises? Technically, one penis split in two. It’s called a ‘hemipenis.’ But it takes some real effort to expose it.”

  Audrey paused, her hands on the lizard. “Then let’s not,” she said.

  Brian smiled and shrugged. He took one of Audrey’s currants and popped it into his mouth. “What are these things, anyway?” he said. Brian was six inches shorter than Audrey and had to look up, which made Audrey feel enormous. She wished they could sit.

  “They’re like raisins,” Audrey said, “only more exotic.”

  “Ah,” Brian said, and then he did something he occasionally did. He smiled and let his eyes settle gently on Audrey. “Raisins with snob appeal.”

  Audrey laughed, but it was a laugh cut suddenly short.

  From behind them, C.C. was reading aloud, in a reciting voice, “11:13 a.m., November 2. Something happening. Something definitely happening.”

  Audrey turned abruptly. “What’re you doing, C.C.?”

  C.C. flipped the page of Audrey’s green composition book and read: “Here’s the fortune I got last night at Ming Garden with Dad. ‘For you the time is auspicious for romance.’”

  “Give me that, C.C.!” Audrey said. She shoved the bearded dragon back into Brian’s hands and hurried up the knoll. “That’s spying!” she said, and after grabbing her composition book, she said to C.C., in a softer voice, “You’re terrible.”

  C.C. grinned her pleasant grin, and in an exaggerated Asian accent said, “For you, time velly auspicious for romance!”

  “That’s not funny, C.C.,” Audrey said.

  Brian, standing aside and smoothing a finger over the dragon’s flat head, said, “Yeah, well, you know what they say. The taller they are, the farther they fall.”