99 Days
Katie Cotugno
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Advance Reader’s e-proof
courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers
This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Dedication
This one’s for the girls.
Contents
Cover
Disclaimer
Title
Dedication
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26
Day 27
Day 28
Day 29
Day 30
Day 31
Day 32
Day 33
Day 34
Day 35
Day 36
Day 37
Day 38
Day 39
Day 40
Day 41
Day 42
Day 43
Day 44
Day 45
Day 46
Day 47
Day 48
Day 49
Day 50
Day 51
Day 52
Day 53
Day 54
Day 55
Day 56
Day 57
Day 58
Day 59
Day 60
Day 61
Day 62
Day 63
Day 64
Day 65
Day 66
Day 67
Day 68
Day 69
Day 70
Day 71
Day 72
Day 73
Day 74
Day 75
Day 76
Day 77
Day 78
Day 79
Day 80
Day 81
Day 82
Day 83
Day 84
Day 85
Day 86
Day 87
Day 88
Day 89
Day 90
Day 91
Day 92
Day 93
Day 94
Day 95
Day 96
Day 97
Day 98
Day 99
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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day 1
Julia Donnelly eggs my house the first night I’m back in Star Lake, and that’s how I know everyone still remembers everything.
“Quite the welcome wagon,” my mom says, coming outside to stand on the lawn beside me and survey the runny yellow damage to her lopsided lilac Victorian. There are yolks smeared down all the windows. There are eggshells in the shrubs. Just past ten in the morning, and it’s already starting to smell rotten, sulfurous and baking in the early summer sun. “They must have gone to Costco to get all those eggs.”
“Can you not?” My heart is pounding. I’d forgotten this, or tried to, what it was like before I ran away from here a year ago: Julia’s reign of holy terror, designed with ruthless precision to bring me to justice for all my various capital crimes. The bottoms of my feet are clammy inside my lace-up boots. I glance over my shoulder at the sleepy street beyond the long, windy driveway, half-expecting to see her cruising by in her family’s ancient Bronco, admiring her handiwork. “Where’s the hose?”
“Oh, leave it.” My mom, of course, is completely unbothered, the toss of her curly blonde head designed to let me know I’m overreacting. Nothing is a big deal when it comes to my mother: The President of the United States could egg her house, her house itself could burn down, and it would turn into not a big deal. It’s a good story, she used to say whenever I’d come to her with some little-kid unfairness to report, no recess or getting picked last for basketball. Remember this for later, Molly. It’ll make a good story someday. It never occurred to me to ask which one of us would be doing the telling. “I’ll call Alex to come clean it up this afternoon.”
“Are you kidding?” I say shrilly. My face feels red and blotchy, and all I want to do is make myself as small as humanly possible—the size of a dust mote, the size of a speck—but there’s no way I’m letting my mom’s handyman spray a half-cooked omelet off the front of the house just because everyone in this town thinks I’m a slut and wants to remind me. “I said where’s the hose, Mom?”
“Watch the tone, please, Molly.” My mom shakes her head resolutely. Somewhere under the egg and the garden I can smell her, the lavender-sandalwood perfume she’s worn since I was a baby. She hasn’t changed at all since I left here: the silver rings on every one of her fingers, her tissue-thin black cardigan and her ripped jeans. When I was little I thought my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. Whenever she’d go on tour, reading from her fat novels in bookstores in New York City and Chicago and L.A., I used to lie on my stomach in the Donnellys’ living room and look at the author photos on the backs of all her books. “Don’t you blame me; I’m not the one who did this to you.”
I turn on her then, standing on the grass in this place I never wanted to come back to, not in a hundred million years. “Who would you like me to blame, then?” I demand. For a second I let myself remember it, the cold, sick feeling of seeing the article in People for the first time in April of junior year, along with the grossest, juiciest scenes from the novel and a glossy picture of my mom leaning against her desk: Diana Barlow’s latest novel, Driftwood, was based on her daughter’s complicated relationship with two local boys. The knowing in my ribs and stomach and spine that now everyone else would know, too. “Who?”
For a second my mom looks completely exhausted, older than I ever think of her as being—glamorous or not, she was almost forty when she adopted me, is close to sixty now. Then she blinks, and it’s gone. “Molly—”
“Look, don’t.” I hold up a hand to stop her, wanting so, so badly not to talk about it. To be anywhere other than here. Ninety-nine days between now and the first day of freshman orientation in Boston, I remind myself, trying to take a deep breath and not give in to the overwhelming urge to bolt for the nearest bus station as fast as my two legs can carry me—not as fast, admittedly, as they might have a year ago. Ninety-nine days, and I can leave for college and be done.
My mom stands in the yard and looks at me: She’s barefoot lik
e always, dark nails and a tattoo of a rose on her ankle like a cross between Carole King and the first lady of a motorcycle gang. It’ll make a great story someday. She said that, she told me what was going to happen, so really there’s no earthly reason to still be so baffled after all this time that I told her the worst, most secret, most important thing in my life—and she wrote a best-selling book about it.
“The hose is in the shed,” she finally says.
“Thank you.” I swallow down the phlegmy thickness in my throat and head for the backyard, squirming against the sour, panicky sweat I can feel gathered at the base of my backbone. I wait until I’m hidden in the blue-gray shade of the house before I let myself cry.
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day 2
I spend the next day holed up in my bedroom with the blinds closed, eating Red Vines and watching weird Netflix documentaries on my laptop, hiding out like a wounded fugitive in the last third of a Clint Eastwood movie. Vita, my mom’s ornery old tabby, wanders in and out as she likes. Everything up here is the same as I left it: blue-and-white striped wallpaper, the cheerful yellow rug, the fluffy gray duvet on the bed. The Golly, Molly artwork a designer friend of my mom’s did when I was a baby hanging above the desk, right next to a bulletin board holding my track meet schedule from junior year and a photo of me at the Donnellys’ farmhouse with Julia and Patrick and Gabe, my mouth wide open mid-laugh. Even my hairbrush is still sitting on the dresser, the one I forgot to take with me in my mad dash out of Star Lake after the People article, like it was just waiting for me to come crawling all the way back here with a head full of knots.
It’s the photo I keep catching myself looking at, though, like there’s some kind of karmic magnet attached to the back of it drawing my attention from clear across the room. Finally, I haul myself out of bed and pull it down to examine more closely: It’s from their family party the summer after freshman year, back when Patrick and I were dating. The four of us are sitting sprawled on the ratty old couch in the barn behind the farmhouse, me and all three Donnellys, Julia in the middle of saying something snarky and Patrick with his arm hooked tight around my waist. Gabe’s looking right at me, although I never actually noticed that until after everything happened. Just holding the stupid picture feels like pressing on a bruise.
Patrick’s not even home this summer, I know from creeping him on Facebook. He’s doing some volunteer program in Colorado, clearing brush and learning to fight forest fires just like he always dreamed of doing when we were little and running around in the woods behind his parents’ house. There’s no chance of even bumping into him around town.
Probably there’s no good reason to feel disappointed about that.
I slap the photo facedown on the desktop and climb back under the covers, pushing Vita onto the carpet—this room has been hers and the dog’s in my absence, the sticky layer of pet hair has made that much abundantly clear. When I was a kid, living up here made me feel like a princess, tucked in the third-floor turret of my mom’s old haunted house. Now, barely a week after high school graduation, it makes me feel like one again—trapped in a magical tower, with no place in the whole world to go.
I dig the last Red Vine out of the cellophane package just as Vita hops right back up onto the pillow beside me. “Get out, Vita,” I order, pushing her gently off again and rolling my eyes at the haughty flick of her feline tail as she stalks out the door, fully expecting her to turn up again almost immediately.
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day 3
Vita doesn’t.
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day 4
Imogen doesn’t, either. When I was staring down my summer-long sentence in Star Lake, the idea of seeing her again was the only thing that made it feel at all bearable, but so far my hey, I’m back and let’s hang out texts have gone resolutely unanswered. Could be she hates me, too. Imogen and I have been friends since first grade, and she stuck by me pretty hard at the end of junior year, sitting beside me in the cafeteria at school even as everyone else at our lunch table mysteriously disappeared and the whispers turned into something way, way worse. Still, the truth is I didn’t exactly give her a heads-up before I left Star Lake to do my senior year at Bristol—an all-girls boarding school plunked like a missile silo in the middle of the desert outside Tempe, Arizona.
Absconded under the cover of darkness, more like.
By the next day it’s been a full ninety-six hours of minimal human contact, though, so when my mom knocks hard on the bedroom door to let me know her cleaning lady is coming, I pull some clean shorts out of the pile of detritus already accumulated on my floor. My T-shirts and underwear are still in my giant duffel. I’ll have to unpack at some point, probably, although the truth is I’d almost rather live out of a suitcase for three months. My old sneakers are tucked underneath the desk chair I notice while I’m crouched down there, the laces still tied from the last time I wore them—the day the article came out I remember suddenly, like I thought I could somehow outrun a national publication. I had sprinted as hard and as fast as I could manage.
I’d thrown up on the dusty side of the road.
Woof. I do my best to shake off the memory, grabbing the photo of me and the Donnellys—still facedown on the desk where I left it the other night—and shoving it into the back of the drawer in my nightstand. Then I lace my boots up and take my neglected old Passat into Star Lake proper.
It’s cool enough to open the windows, and even through the pine trees lining the sides of Route 4 I can smell the slightly mildewy scent of the lake as I head for the short stretch of civilization that makes up downtown: Main Street is small and rumpled, all diners and dingy grocery stores, a roller rink that hasn’t been open since roughly 1982. That’s about the last time this place was a destination, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell—the lakefront plus the endless green stretch of the Catskill Mountains was a big vacation spot in the sixties and seventies, but ever since I can remember Star Lake has had the air of something that used to be but isn’t anymore, like you fell into your grandparents’ honeymoon by mistake.
I speed up as I bypass the Donnellys’ pizza shop, slouching low in my seat like a gangbanger until I pull up in front of French Roast, the coffee shop where Imogen’s worked since we were freshmen. I open the door to the smell of freshly ground beans and the sound of some moody girl singer on the radio. The shop is mostly empty, a late-morning lull. Imogen’s standing behind the counter, midnight dark hair hanging in her eyes, and when she looks up at the jangle of the bells a look of guilty, awkward panic flashes across her pretty face in the moment before she can quell it.
“Oh my God,” she says once she’s recovered, coming around the counter and hugging me fast and antiseptic, then holding me back at arm’s length like a great-aunt having a look at how much I’ve grown. Literally, in my case—I’ve put on fifteen pounds easy since I left for Arizona—and even though she’d never say anything about it, I can feel her taking it in. “You’re here!”
“I am,” I agree, my voice sounding weird and false. She’s wearing a gauzy sundress under her French Roast apron, a splotch of deep blue on the side of her hand like she was up late sketching one of the pen-and-ink portraits she’s been doing since we were little kids. Every year on her birthday I buy her a fresh set of markers, the fancy kind from the art supply store. When I was in Tempe I went online and had them shipped. “Did you get my texts?”
Imogen does something between a nod and a headshake, noncommittal. “Yeah, my phone’s been really weird lately?” she says, voice coming up at the end like she’s unsure. Sh
e shrugs then, always oddly graceful even though she’s been five eleven since we were in middle school. Somehow she never got teased. “It eats things; I need a new one. Come on, let me get you coffee.” She heads back around the counter, past the rack of mugs they give people who plan to hang out on one of the sagging couches, and hands me a paper to-go cup. I’m not sure if it’s a message or not. She waves me off when I try to pay.
“Thanks,” I tell her, smiling a little bit helplessly. I’m not used to making small talk with her. “So, hey, RISD, huh?” I try—I saw on Instagram that that’s where she’s headed in the fall, a selfie of her smiling hugely in a Rhode Island School of Design sweatshirt. As the words come out of my mouth I realize how totally bizarre it is that that’s how I found out. We told each other everything—well, almost everything—once upon a time. “We’ll be neighbors in the fall, Providence and Boston.”
“Oh, yeah,” Imogen says, sounding distracted. “I think it’s like an hour, though, right?”
“Yeah, but an hour’s not that long,” I reply uncertainly. It feels like there’s a river between us, and I don’t know how to build a bridge. “Look, Imogen—” I start, then break off awkwardly. I want to apologize for falling off the face of the earth the way I did—want to tell her about my mom and about Julia, that I’m here for ninety-five more days and I’m terrified, and I need all the allies I can get. I want to tell Imogen everything, but before I can get another word out I’m interrupted by the telltale chime of a text message dinging out from inside the pocket of her apron.
So much for a phone that eats things. Imogen blushes a deep sunburned red.
I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say, pushing my wild, wavy brown hair behind my ears just as the front door opens and a whole gaggle of women in yoga gear come crowding into the shop, jabbering eagerly for their half-caf nonfat whatevers.
“I’ll see you around, okay?” I ask, shrugging a little. Imogen nods and waves good-bye.
I head back out to where my car’s parked at the curb, pointedly ignoring the huge LOCAL AUTHOR! display in the window of Star Lake’s one tiny bookstore across the street—a million paperback copies of Driftwood available for the low, low price of $6.99 plus my dignity. I’m devoting so much attention to ignoring it, in fact, that I don’t notice the note tucked under my wipers until the very last second, Julia’s pink-marker scrawl across the back of a Chinese take-out menu:
