The A-Word

  ALSO BY JOY PREBLE

  The Sweet Dead Life

  Copyright © 2014 by Soho Press, Inc. and Joy Preble

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States in 2014 by Soho Teen

  an imprint of

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Preble, Joy.

  The A-word : a Sweet dead life novel / Joy Preble.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-61695-290-7

  eISBN978-1-61695-291-4

  1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Guardian angels—Fiction.

  3. Angels—Fiction. 4. Dead—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.

  6. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 7. Texas—Fiction. 8. Diaries—Fiction.

  9. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P90518Ab 2014

  [Fic]—dc23 2013045390

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  v3.1

  For Rick, who knows how important the stories are.

  “Texas is a state of mind.”

  —John Steinbeck

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Jenna’s Journal - October 20th - Early Evening

  Jenna’s Journal - October 20th - Middle of the Evening

  Jenna’s Journal - October 20th - Later in the Evening

  Jenna’s Journal - October 21st - Early Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 21st - Just Before Noon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 21st - Afternoon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 21st - Later in the Afternoon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 21st - Much Later in the Afternoon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 21st - About the Same Time in the Afternoon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 21st - Evening

  Jenna’s Journal - October 22nd - Middle of the Night

  Jenna’s Journal - October 22nd - Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 22nd - Early Afternoon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 22nd - Later in the Evening

  Jenna’s Journal - October 23rd - Somewhere After Three in the Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 23rd - Later in the Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 23rd - Late Afternoon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 23rd - Later That Night

  Jenna’s Journal - October 23rd - Even Later

  Jenna’s Journal - October 24th - A Little After Midnight

  Jenna’s Journal - October 24th - Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 25th - After School

  Jenna’s Journal - October 25th - Later Afternoon

  Jenna’s Journal - October 25th - A Little After Sunset

  Jenna’s Journal - October 25th - After Dark

  Jenna’s Journal - October 26th - Middle of the Night/Early Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 26th - Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 26th - Later in the Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 26th - Much Later in the Morning

  Jenna’s Journal - October 26th - Sometime in the Afternoon, I Think

  Jenna’s Journal - October 26th - Later That Night

  Jenna’s Journal - October 28th - Night

  Acknowledgments

  It took everything I had to convince my best friend Maggie to come to the football game. Football is not Maggie’s thing. It’s not mine either, even though my brother, Casey, played for years until that became impossible due to A-word (I still didn’t like saying the word angel) circumstances out of everyone’s control. But more on that later. I was going because I wanted to see Ryan Sloboda play. More accurately, I wanted Ryan Sloboda to see me seeing him play. Maybe that would jump-start something and he’d get off his butt and ask me out, which he’d been working up to for months. Ryan is still pretty backward in the socializing area.

  Plus it was the day before my fifteenth birthday and I was feeling optimistic. Maggie’s neutral about birthdays, but me—I like to do them up big. Cake-and-pony big. Well, maybe not an actual pony. But celebrate. Be happy. Tomorrow your brother might bite the dust driving you to the hospital because your mom’s boss had been poisoning you (more on that later, too) and come back as your guardian angel.

  Trust me. It could happen.

  So eat the damn birthday cake if someone makes you one, which hopefully someone will.

  But as I couldn’t exactly tell Maggie that my brother was a heavenly being now, I asked, “What about the boots? Too much?” meaning my red cowboy boots I had just shoved on my feet. I waited while she furrowed her eyebrows and thought it over, dramatic-like in that way she preferred.

  We were sitting on the floor in my room, going over Appropriate Football Outfit Choices Guaranteed to Get Ryan Sloboda to Take Notice. Maggie is obsessed with finding me the perfect signature style even though I have informed her that I am more eclectic when it comes to fashion.

  “Eclectic” is one of my new favorite words. It means derived from a variety of sources, which means it is perfectly fine to wear my red cowboy boots with a denim skirt instead of jeans, and also okay for Maggie to help me cover it with black lace, and top it with my plaid button-down, sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

  “I think you’re pushing it,” Maggie said in her absolutely certain tone. Maggie is Absolutely Certain about most things.

  I reminded her about Ryan Sloboda’s social awkwardness. Plus, even with a button or two undone, there is not much to see. But like I say, I am an optimistic girl.

  “Skirt’s good, though, right?”

  “I guess,” Mags said, kind of quiet. She poked at the black lace, tugging it here and there. “Long as you don’t go skydiving in it or something.”

  Maggie rarely expresses shock at what the universe spits out. That’s just how Mags is—an embrace-the-world-by-the-horns girl and proud of it. Yesterday she justified failing her Spanish II quiz by observing that the universe probably wanted her to be more sympathetic to the plight of undocumented workers. (“Now I know how hard it is to be in a strange land and master a new language.”) My opinion was that she had forgotten to study, which was also the case. But the stuff that’s been happening in my universe is a tad harder to digest.

  The truth is this: my brother and his angel boss, EMT/bartender Amber Velasco, had spread their wings over the atrium at the Galleria Shopping Mall to save me from the evil Dr. Renfroe. When you think of comic-book bad guys, true villains, you think of them as handsome in a sinister way, just maybe not so hairy. On the other hand, Dr. Renfroe was comic-book classic in that he was charming and very good at lying. He poisoned me and experimented with memory drugs on my parents and a bunch of innocent oldsters at Oak View Convalescent. But Casey swooped in before I splattered in a public demise at the hands of Dr. Renfroe and his partners in crime. Amber snagged the Bad Guy. A happy … ending?

  Here’s the problem: I can’t tell Mags, my best friend in the entire crazy universe, the truth. Instead I have to stick to the far-less-believable story that we attempted a crazy skydiving stunt right before Christmas. And that in the process, we accidentally helped bring down a crime ring that wanted to weaponize Dr. Renfroe’s memory drugs.

  Luckily, people’s memories are sketchy enough on their own. That’s what Casey says, and he should know, giv
en his weed-addled brain. But I agree, what with us all watching YouTube videos and downloading Internet porn (like my brother used to do before he ended up on Heaven’s payroll, not that he gets paid). Besides, being famous for weird stuff only lasts so long at school. Take a deep breath and some idiot is sending a picture of herself in her underwear, and her boyfriend is forwarding it to the entire student body.

  Plus Casey still looks like Casey. Not that I ever thought much about what angels would look like. But I guess if I did give it pause, I would picture them in white sparkly outfits or maybe invisible or wearing halos. Not sleeping in the room down the hall from me, passed out in a Mountain Dew T-shirt next to half-eaten Jack in the Box tacos.

  I hate that I have no alternative but to lie to Maggie. Maybe someday I can tell her the truth—that Casey isn’t quite Casey anymore. I’d tell her all the rest of it, too.

  But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the angelic world, it’s that there are rules. Flying under the radar is a big one. Meaning: Do. Not. Tell.

  All I could do was ramble about how many buttons I should leave undone, and did Maggie think we should paint our faces red and blue in the Spring Creek colors? Which is more school spirit than I normally work myself up to, and definitely more than I had last year when I was still at Ima Hogg Junior High.

  I couldn’t talk about how people had basically forgotten the whole Galleria thing because there had never been a trial. Someone had paid Dr. Renfroe’s bail, and he’d disappeared without a trace. I couldn’t talk about Manny, the owner of Manny’s Real Tex Mex in Houston—the shady criminal who was blackmailing Dr. Renfroe—because Manny had also conveniently vanished. I couldn’t talk about how Casey was effectively grounded from using his wings in public or that the guys who caused the whole mess weren’t ever going to be dragged to justice.

  It was easier to think about my boots. Which, by the way, I loved. They’d been a gift from Amber Velasco after my old Ariats had been destroyed, since that was how Renfroe had been slipping the poison into my system.

  “Ryan is going to pee his pants,” Maggie said, perking up once we had declared my outfit and me a finished product.

  “What’s that about Ryan?” asked my brother.

  There he was, in my doorway. Now that he was an A-word (I definitely never said angel around Maggie), my brother was pretty light on his feet. Pretty nosy, too.

  “Get out,” I told him.

  “I’m taking you and Maggie to the game.” He lounged against the doorpost, looking perfectly put together in that way he had now. My brother’s (mostly) previous weed habit had made him a bit fleshy. Not that it mattered then. Back before this whole mess started he was a mostly do-it-yourself operation in the romance department.

  Now that he was no longer exactly human, he sported tidy hair and a toned six-pack, among other things. I found this not only annoying but also supremely unfair.

  “Maggie’s dad is taking us.”

  “Not any more. Call your dad, Mags. Tell him he can stay home in the La-Z-Boy and watch Nat Geo. He doesn’t know jack about football.”

  WHAT MAGS DIDN’T know: Casey had his own reasons for taking us, aside from dogging my every step. Lanie Phelps was cheering tonight. Lanie Phelps: my brother’s ex two times over. First, she dumped him after he quit football and took up weed when our family life fell into the cesspool. They made up afterward. Of course they did. Because Lanie had no idea she was essentially dating a dead guy and that part of the reason she wanted to jump his bones was the A-word pheromones (my phrase) he put out unless he concentrated on pulling them back. Which he rarely did.

  To Casey’s credit, their current breakup had been his doing. He didn’t talk about it, but I knew he thought he was protecting her from the inevitable.

  I knew better. Breaking up wouldn’t be any protection at all. I just think he figured if Lanie hated him, it might ease things when Management finally plucked him to wherever they pluck angels once they’ve finished their earthly duties. Not that I was such an expert on these matters. Just that I shared a bathroom with him and he drove me to school every morning. Also, I’d been his sister my entire life. My brother had never been the deepest of thinkers. It wasn’t hard to follow the workings of his pea brain. Even now.

  Plus everyone’s favorite EMT/bartender Amber Velasco had probably insisted he sever ties with Lanie. More than once I’d heard her refer to Casey’s relationship with his two-time ex as “imprudent and potentially dangerous.” Which was a sophisticated way of saying that he needed to stop hooking up with her in the back of our Merc.

  Bosses acted boss-like, even if they were angels.

  Which brings us to the game: matters were compounded a few weeks ago when Lanie started seeing Donny Sneed, the varsity quarterback who, while not the brightest star in the sky, was basically a nice guy. Not that this made my brother any less pissy about the whole matter.

  Which I totally understood.

  Plus, it was football. Casey missed playing like you’d miss an arm or a kidney.

  Luckily (ha ha), our parents were currently too preoccupied trying to decide if they should stay married to notice that their son—who had helped save their lives, not that they exactly knew that—had changed in like a million ways. On the rare occasions they did question something, he made up excuses. Like the other day when Mom looked Casey up and down and back up again, poking a finger at his muscly arm, clearly flummoxed, and finally said, “Have you been taking supplements or something? You know that Creatine is dangerous, right?”

  That he still toked up now and then did not enter the discussion. Yes, it turned out that angels could do drugs if they felt like it. Drugs seemed vastly inappropriate, especially considering Casey’s boss was still theoretically a member of the medical community. But who the hell knew what Amber Velasco thought? She was also a bartender. No one ever asked me. No one ever asked my opinion. No one dead, anyway.

  “CAN I RIDE in front?” Mags asked.

  I tried to kick her. Casey blocked my leg with his.

  “We’ll all sit up front,” he said. “We’re all skinny.”

  “Goodie,” I told him.

  “Skinny?” Mags said. “You’re sweet, Casey.”

  “Just stating the facts, ma’am,” Casey said, which made Mags blush. I shot daggers in his eyes. He shot them back.

  Maybe he figured being a dickhead would work on me, too. That I would be happy to see him go. That when the inevitable happened, Lanie Phelps wouldn’t be the only one who didn’t miss him. I decided to focus on encouraging Ryan Sloboda out of his social awkwardness. At least it was something that had a chance in hell of coming true.

  By the end of the second quarter, we were winning, seventeen to seven. The coach put Ryan in on defense.

  The cheerleaders, including Lanie Phelps, were chanting and tumbling and tossing themselves into the air. The band was pounding and swaying. The fancy new Jumbotron flashed: GO SPRING CREEK MUSTANGS! Followed by: TEXICON: THE OFFICIAL MUSTANG SPONSOR! My brother leapt to his feet.

  “Don’t forget to bull-rush ’em out there, Sloboda. Show ’em what you got.”

  I pinched his arm—hard. “Stop it, you pissant.”

  Maggie, bored, grabbed me, and we hightailed it to the concession stand to stuff ourselves with Frito pie—hold the onions—and Dr. Pepper.

  After halftime was over, I led Mags down to the fence by the field. “Won’t Casey miss us?” Mags asked, only half-sarcastic since my brother’s angel mojo was a force of nature on females. “Whatever,” I told her. My brother the angel was being a jerk, even if I was the only one who understood why. “I want Ryan to see me.”

  “Oooooh,” Maggie said. She can be sufficiently girlie when she wants to.

  On the field, the cheerleaders held up this huge banner that the football guys ran through when they came out. Some corporate sponsor had recently donated a ginormous blow-up mustang head and a smoke machine so that they could burst out of the smoking horse’s head an
d onto the turf.

  Quite the show.

  I was still not sure how I felt about Ryan Sloboda other than I liked him enough to wear boots and a skirt and a blouse of questionable buttonage, but when he flew like a banshee out of that horse’s head, my heart gave a ping. And when he waved to me—Me!—as he was trotting toward the sidelines, I waved back. Except part of my mind was still on Casey and Lanie and what could possibly be going through my brother’s head.

  WITH THREE MINUTES left, Forest Ridge scored a touchdown and ran the ball for two extra points. Now the score was seventeen us, fifteen them. Even I knew that all Forest Ridge had to do was score a field goal and it would be all over. But we had possession. I knew that, too. Actually, I knew more than that. Unlike my brother, I am not a pea brain. I ran track until Dr. Renfroe began poisoning my boots. I figured I’d even try out again come spring.

  In any case, I was fully aware that the Spring Creek Mustangs were in trouble. Ryan was back on the sidelines, pacing up and down.

  “Coach won’t put the pissant in, you know.” My brother was now standing next to us, leaning his elbows on the low fence.

  “ ’Course not,” I told him, supremely annoyed. “He plays defense. Plus he’s in ninth grade.”

  “Put me in when I was a freshman. And I played both.”

  “That’s right!” Maggie said. “I remember that.” Being as she sounded like an insufferable ditz, I assumed she was trying to flirt. Then she frowned. “But you quit.”

  I felt momentarily bad, but only momentarily. My brother trained his sour gaze on the field. Coach Collins tapped Donny Sneed on the helmet. Coach Collins used to be my algebra teacher at Ima Hogg, as well as Casey’s former junior high football coach, but he was now coaching and teaching here at Spring Creek, our high school. Maybe it was a promotion. Or maybe here in Texas the same grumpy blowhards end up having the same jobs, just in different places.

  Coach and Donny conferred, heads close.

  My brother’s eyes narrowed. He gripped the fence tighter. The list of living people Casey could talk to—namely about how it felt having to break up with his girlfriend so she wouldn’t find out he was an angel—was limited. Nonexistent, in fact, unless he counted me. Now he had to watch her with Donny Sneed.