TWISTED
BOOKS BY LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON
Speak
Fever 1793
Catalyst
Prom
Twisted
TWISTED
LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON
VIKING
VIKING
Published by Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
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Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2007 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Laurie Halse Anderson, 2007
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0066-7
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
TO SCOT, FOR BUILDING THE BEST FORT EVER
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Acknowledgments
* * *
NOTE:
THIS IS NOT A BOOK FOR CHILDREN
* * *
TWISTED
1.
I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan’s vomitorium, for free.
Character building, my father said.
Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.
Still, it was better than jail.
I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn’t want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn’t want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn’t.
Joe wandered over, looked at my work, and grunted.
“We done yet?” asked Dopey. “Thunderstorms rolling in soon. Heavy weather.”
I looked up. There were no clouds in the sky.
Joe nodded slowly, studying the roof. “Yeah, we’re done.” He turned off the motor on the tar kettle. “Last day for Tyler, here. Bet you’re glad to be quit of us, huh, kid?”
“Nah,” I lied. “You guys have been great.”
Dopey cackled. “If the sewer pipes back up again, we’ll get you out of class.”
There had been a few advantages to working with these guys. They taught me how to steal soda out of the vending machines. I snagged a couple of keys when they weren’t looking. Best of all, the hard labor had turned me from Nerd Boy into Tyler the Amazing Hulk, with ripped muscles and enough testosterone to power a nuclear generator.
“Hey, get a load of this!” Toothless shouted.
We picked our way around the fresh tar patches and looked where he was pointing, four stories down. I stayed away from the edge; I wasn’t so good at heights. But then I saw them: angels with ponytails gathered in the parking lot.
The girls’ tennis team.
Wearing bikini tops and short shorts.
Wearing wet bikini tops and wet short shorts.
I inched closer. It was a car wash, with vehicles lined up all the way out to the road, mostly driven by guys. Barely clad girls were bending, stretching, soaping up, scrubbing, and squealing. They were squirting each other with hoses. And squealing. Did I mention that?
“Take me now, Lord,” Toothless muttered.
The marching band was practicing in the teachers’ lot. They fired up their version of “Louie, Louie.” Finely toned tennis-angel butts bounced back and forth to the beat. Then a goddess rose up from the hubcap of a white Ford Explorer.
Bethany Milbury.
The driver of the Explorer said something. Bethany smiled and blew at the soapsuds in her hands so bubbles floated through the air and landed on his nose. The driver melted into a
puddle on the front seat. Bethany threw back her head and laughed. The sun flashed off her teeth.
Joe’s tongue dropped out of his mouth and sizzled on the hot roof. Dopey took off his glasses, rubbed them on a corner of his shirt, and put them back on. Toothless adjusted himself.
Bethany bounced along to the next car in line, a dark-green Avenger that was burning oil.
Bethany Milbury pushes me against the hood of my cherry-red, turbocharged Testarossa. “I love fast cars,” she whispers, soapy fingers in my hair.
“This is the fastest,” I say.
“I’ve been waiting so long for you, Tyler….” Her head tilts, her lips open.
I am so ready for this.
She grabs my arm and snarls, “Be careful, dummy, you’ll break your neck.”
No, wait. I blinked. I was on a hot tar roof with three smelly grown men. Joe was gripping my arm, yanking me back from the edge.
“I said, be careful, dummy. That first step is a doozy.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I mean, thanks.”
A navy-blue 1995 Mercedes S500 sedan rolled into the parking lot. It came to a complete stop. Left blinker flashing, it turned and parked in front of the building. A man in a black suit got out of the driver’s seat. Stood next to the car. Looked up at me and tapped the face of his watch once, twice, three times. I had inconvenienced him again.
Dopey, Toothless, and Joe crawled out of sight. They had seen my father detonate before.
2.
On the public-humiliation scale, being picked up in Dad’s car was better than being picked up in Mom’s. Yes, it had a couple rust spots and 162,000 miles on it, but at least it was a Benz. Mom drove an ancient Suburban, beige, dented from encounters with mailboxes and trees. If I had my own car back, that would’ve been the best.
When I came out the front door, he pointed to the trunk, gaping open.
I stripped off my sweatshirt, boots, and wet socks, and dumped them in the cardboard box stuck in a nest of investment brochures and bungee cords. I left my jeans on. Even Dad knew it would not be cool to strip down to my boxers in front of the school.
“Hurry up,” he called.
I sat on the beach towel laid on the backseat. Wouldn’t want to mess up the leather.
His cell phone rang. His lip curled slightly when he saw the number on the screen. He answered the phone. “What is it now?”
Meet my father: Corporate Tool. He’d always been a hardass, but since his latest promotiwon, he’d dialed it up.
“That’s not my problem,” he told the phone. “It’s yours. Solve it.”
Mom stared at him from the passenger seat, then sighed deeply. It was Friday afternoon, which meant they had just come from their therapy session. They were recovering the joy in their relationship.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
She looked back and gave me a little wave. Her smile was fake, like a piece of paper with a smile drawn on it had been glued to her face.
As I buckled my seat belt, Dad ended his call and started the engine. “I still don’t know why you insist on picking him up every day,” he told Mom. “It wouldn’t kill him to ride his bike.”
Mom’s smile fell off. She blinked hard and studied the dust on the dashboard.
Meet my mother: pet photographer, cake baker, nice lady who smells faintly of gin.
Dad put the car in reverse and glanced at me in the mirror.
“We have an office barbecue tonight,” he said. “I suppose it’s too late for you to get a haircut before then.”
I shook my bangs in front of my eyes. “I don’t want to go.”
“I expect you and your sister to be ready by seven o’clock.”
“I have plans,” I said, which was not exactly true, but sounded good.
“Change them.” Dad looked beyond me. “Dammit.”
We were blocked in by the cars lined up to be washed. Dad shifted back into park and turned off the engine. “Don’t want to waste gas,” he muttered. His phone rang again. He answered it without a word, listened for a moment, then launched into a rant about federal regulations and interoffice memos.
Mom rolled down her window and waved at one of the tennis players soaping up a Volvo. She waved at Bethany Milbury. The Bethany Milbury. Bethany waved back.
I thought the tar fumes had made me delusional. She’d been in my homeroom since seventh grade. She’d had the starring role in most of my fantasies since then, too.
But this was real.
Bethany Milbury, Holy Goddess of Hotness, floated…towards…our car. She put her clean hands with their perfect fingernails on my mother’s door and leaned forward, straining the top of her bikini to the max.
“Hey, Tyler,” Bethany said to me.
I had this weird rushing noise in my ears. My jeans tightened near the zipper.
“Ha,” I said. “Heya-ha.”
Idiot. Moron. Cretin. Fool.
Mom said something about the party. Bethany looked surprised for a second, but then Mom mentioned pasta salad and I stopped listening because a drop of water slipped from Bethany’s collarbone to her cleavage. I leaned forward for a better view of the water crawling, millimeter by millimeter, down the golden, soft canyon of her...
“Ow!”
Both Mom and Bethany stopped talking to stare at me.
“Did you hit your head, Tyler?” Mom asked.
“Are you okay?” Bethany asked.
“Ha,” I said.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I pressed my face against the back window to watch her walk away. Bethany was the Alpha Female of George Washington High—the most beautiful, the most popular, the queen bee. She was also the daughter of my dad’s boss, and the sister of the guy who had been making my life hell for years.
And me? I was a zit on the butt of the student body. I had a screwed-up past and no visible future. My chances of hooking up with anything female, much less Bethany, were small.
But anything was possible on the last Friday of summer vacation.
3.
The Milburys lived in the Hampton Club and Estates, ten blocks and fifty million miles away from our house. It was close enough to walk to, and far enough that we should have chartered a jet. My parents were struggling wannabes of the upper middle class. The Milburys were the people they wanted to be.
“I can’t believe you’re making us do this,” Hannah bitched as we pulled out of our driveway at precisely seven P.M.” Why can’t we stay home?”
Mom balanced a two-gallon plastic bowl of pasta salad in her lap. “Don’t whine.”
“I’m not whining.”
Dad slowed down to go around a pothole. “You’re whining about not whining.”
“How can you say that?” Hannah asked.
“In English,” Dad said, “so you should be able to understand it.”
“Enough,” Mom said. “We’re going to a party. Can’t we have some fun?”
Dad cleared his throat. “This is not’a party,’” he corrected. “It’s a business function. We’re going to put in a family appearance, I need ten minutes of face time with Brice, and then we can leave. I expect everyone to be on their best behavior.”
His eyes found mine in the rearview mirror. “Including you.”
Dad liked to pretend I was a dangerous criminal because of the Foul Deed. But it was just a stupid prank. I mean, all pranks are stupid, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
The last time anybody had noticed me (in a good way) was in third grade when I won the home-run contest during Field Day. After that, my reputation struck out every time. I was the shortest guy in middle school and too chicken to hit back. I had “victim” tattooed on my forehead.
It got a little better in high school. I became invisible, your average piece of drywall who spent too much time playing computer games. Girls would look straight at me and never see the writhing masculine beast hidden inside my hundred thirty-five pounds of veal-white man-flesh. So at the end of my junior year, I decided
to do something bold. A prank that would turn me into a legend.
At three o’clock in the morning on Monday, May first, I used five cans of spray paint to decorate George Washington High with words that proclaimed the superiority of the junior class and a couple crude remarks about the manhood of Principal Hughes.
I misspelled “phenomenal” and “testicle.” I also forgot one of the cans, the red one. And I was so flustered, trying to finish before the sun came up, that I didn’t notice my wallet was missing until the police arrived on our front porch.
“Best behavior,” Dad repeated. “Be an asset, not a liability.”
Hannah made a face at the back of his pointy head.
I stared at him in the mirror until he looked away.
4.
The Milburys’ house was what you’d expect: monstrously big and slightly tacky.
“It’s gorgeous!” Mom said. “So tasteful. What a beautiful fountain.”