by Emily Henry
An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Emily Henry
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
Ebook ISBN: 9780451480729
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.
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For Jack, Sophia, Jill, Morgan, Nigel, and Nathan, who saved me back then.
And for my brothers: You’re like brothers to me.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ONE
THE NIGHT OF THE crash started like most had that summer: with the six of us, and one mouth-breathing border collie, crammed into Remy’s clunky Geo Metro, rumbling down Old Crow Station Lane.
The mist was so thick it swallowed the headlights before they could reach the wall of corn on our right or the woods leaning close on our left, and the moisture was hissing off the asphalt like oil in a pan.
Handsome Remy was driving—he was the only one with a car—and Levi rode shotgun, scribbling notes on the script in his lap.
Side by side, the two of them looked more like an oddball pairing from a John Hughes movie than cousins.
Levi was a six-foot-three online shopping addict and wannabe director with a style aesthetic we’d affectionately dubbed “Techni-color Beach Boy” and a coif of reddish hair. He was also brave enough to own a lot of hats.
Remy, meanwhile, was on the shorter side of average with dark, wavy hair and a slim build he kept outfitted in three (seasonal) variations of a Canadian Tuxedo he’d pieced together from thrift stores, then blown out skateboarding. Because the first colors of fall had sneaked into the leaves, he’d swapped out his basic denim jacket for the one with the wool collar, and as if to spite him, Splendor Township was hotter than it had been all summer.
“What does everyone think of the ghost fart joke?” Levi asked, looking up from the script.
Sofía leaned around me to answer. “I vote we cut it.”
“Oh, do you?” Nick teased from the far side of the back seat. “Do you vote that, Supreme Court Justice Perez?”
Teasing was Nick’s primary love language, but Sofía was an essentially perfect human—beautiful, athletic, next year’s likely valedictorian—so the only thing we had to tease her about was that when we’d met her in the seventh grade, she’d announced her intention to study law at Boston University.
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Nicholas. That’s my vote. Would you care to give yours, or are you part of the forty-three percent of Americans who don’t exercise their political voices?”
Nick shrugged and waved one of his thoroughly tattooed hands. “Fine. The joke’s garbage.” Droog, my family’s near-geriatric dog, sat up in Nick’s lap and licked his cheek, as if to agree. Then she turned and stuck her head out the window, effectively putting her speckled butt in the center of the car and our conversation.
Levi frowned. “Really? I thought it was solid comedy. Franny? What about you?”
“One of the rare situations where your bottomless fount of optimism doesn’t pay off,” I said.
Levi adjusted his bright orange porkpie hat and looked to his cousin. “What about you, Handsome Remy?”
“I’d like to go on the record as still not a fan of that nickname,” Remy said.
The nickname had arisen when a girl in my art class stopped me in the hallway to say, You’re friends with Handsome Remy, right? Could you give him my phone number?
Every couple of months, someone brought it back into popular use. Usually Nick.
“Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you grew out those gorgeous dark locks.” Nick reached forward and flicked Remy’s wool-lined collar. “You’re aware it’s nine hundred degrees, right, dude?”
“Are you aware this isn’t an ICP concert inside a Hot Topic?” Remy said.
“Ohhhhhhhh,” Levi crowed. “Roasted.”
“Roasted?” Nick crossed his tattooed arms over the metal band displayed on his black T-shirt, as if to lean into Remy’s jab. “Sort of like what this weather’s doing to Handsome Remy’s flesh under all that wool.”
“Lovely, Nicholas,” Sofía said, and shuddered.
“When you shudder, something twinges in my spine,” I told her.
“Because of the empathic bond of womanhood?” she asked.
“Because your knee is digging into a part of my butt I think is connected to my spine,” I said.
“Oh! Sorry!” Sofía tried to make more room for me, but it was no use. She, Arthur, Nick, and I were packed like sardines. I was basically riding on her knees, with my top half hanging out the window where the sticky wind was working to fully tease my already tangled blond hair.
“Take this turn,” Arthur said, leaning forward between Remy and Levi. “It’s faster.”
Despite not knowing how to drive himself, Arthur was pretty confident he knew the fastest way to get anywhere. Of all of us, my brother was the most confident about the most things, and since he was right about 50 percent of the time, he’d become the de facto leader of our group.
Remy nodded and turned down the narrow road that curved through the fore
st. The car thunked over a pothole, and Sofía and I winced in unison as my tailbone jolted against her thigh.
Remy’s dark eyes flicked toward the rearview mirror, and his dimples surfaced as he grimaced. “Sorry.”
Through the dark, the headlights flashed over the green NOW LEAVING SPLENDOR sign, and Nick whooped and thumped the roof of the car, so that the birds inked on his fingers looked like they’d just flown into it. “Yeah, buddy!” he cried, thumping it again. “So long, assholes!”
It was a running joke.
Our township was so small that the NOW ENTERING SPLENDOR sign sprang up on the two-lane road a minute or two before you reached my house, and the NOW LEAVING sign came another five minutes down the road, when the corn dropped away and the dark woods rose to cup the lane like greedy hands.
That the town was called Splendor also seemed like a running joke—one that had long outlived whoever named our plot of dead-brown fields and rangy forest and the single Taco Bell between the high school and the tractor warehouse.
“Don’t care if I ever see it again,” Arthur agreed, though it took me a few seconds to translate because he had a hand-rolled cigarette tucked between his lips and was using both his hands to try to light it.
Remy tugged on his wool collar and glanced in the rearview mirror. “Could you not smoke in my car?”
“No,” Arthur mumbled around the cigarette. “I’m addicted, Remy. That’s the point.”
Levi spun in the passenger seat, training his video camera onto me. “And, Franny, how does it feel to watch your older brother fight the uphill battle of being addicted to novelty cigarettes?”
“I mean, it’s terrifying,” I said, twisting so my face was smashed against the roof of the car. “One second you’re carefree youths, riding bikes and throwing Frisbees, and the next, your brother’s under a bridge, wearing fingerless gloves and playing bad Dylan covers just to feed his habit.”
“And you, Nicholas Raymond Colasanti Jr.?” Levi turned. “I understand you’re as close with Frances and Arthur Schmidt as a goth can be with anyone?”
Nick’s skeletal face scrunched up, and he palmed the camera. “I’m metal, not goth. Now get that thing out of my face, dude.” His Southern-skewing accent thickened, like it always did when the camera was on. “I’m doing my pre-shoot meditation!”
“Maybe we should buy ads,” Arthur said suddenly, like he was part of an entirely different conversation. He leaned over Nick and flicked his cigarette ash out of the car.
“Ads?” Sofía said. “For . . . ?”
“The Ordinary!” Arthur snapped, like it should have been obvious. Like we had all just been sitting in a circle around him, hands extended, absorbing his thoughts.
“We should totally do ads,” Levi said, immediately excited.
Levi was often immediately excited. His optimism wasn’t reserved for bad jokes about flatulence and boldly colored fedoras. It was more wide reaching than that, with a special surplus set aside for The Ordinary.
Sofía’s brow furrowed. “You want to buy ads for our failing YouTube channel?”
“For our mockumentary webisodes,” Levi corrected.
“With what money, Spielberg?” Nick said.
“You’ve got to stay positive,” Levi said, and put on a Talking Heads song.
“Ads. Now that’s a good idea,” Arthur mumbled around his cigarette. As usual he seemed only dimly aware of what was going on with the rest of us. My brother had a kind of laser focus that kept us moving whenever we were working on The Ordinary.
Our YouTube mockumentary series was Levi’s baby, but when it came to actually filming, he seemed just as content to have us over for movie nights and elaborately themed “parties” (only the six members of The Ordinary were ever present, be it for the Quentin Tarantino–themed birthday, the Spielberg birthday, the Wes Anderson birthday, etc.).
When we managed to finish episodes it was usually because they fit nicely with whatever lofty aspiration Arthur was fixated on at the time.
We’d made our “Kite Chasers” episode back when he’d thought he wanted to be an actor (it turned out he was no better at emoting on film than in real life), the “Rock Gods” episode when he decided we should form a band (none of us played instruments), and “The Recluse,” our episode about a J. D. Salinger–esque author living in the woods with a bunch of blow-up dolls he believed to be his relatives, when Art was casually toying with the idea of being the next great American novelist (how this was going to prepare him for that career path remains unclear).
What my brother really wanted, I thought, was to be a superhero. But for his last summer before he left for the lone liberal arts college that had accepted him, he’d settled for World’s Best Special Effects Creator, and thus the “Ghost Hunters” episode we were on our way to film had been born.
Arthur let out another puff of smoke. “We could get some investors.”
Remy smirked at me in the rearview mirror.
We could absolutely not get investors.
Remy pulled onto the narrow bridge that ran over the train tracks, and Nick gasped so loud I hit my head on the car roof twisting to see him.
“Guys,” he said, voice low and panicky. He was turned to the window on his side of the back seat, his tattooed fingers braced against the glass. “Did you see that? There was something hanging from the bridge . . .”
I tugged at my nautilus shell necklace, like it was a talisman handcrafted to ward off bridge ghosts.
“Stop it, Nick,” Sofía said.
“I swear to Gah,” Nick said, laughing. He was always swearing to Gah. Allegedly his mom got on him for Using the Lord’s Name in Vain, but Nick had a tendency to exaggerate (sometimes called “a lying problem”), and it was possible he felt guilty swearing to the veracity of something he knew was ludicrous. Still, he forged on: “Something’s out there!”
“Oh yeah?” I said. I was ninety-nine percent sure he was messing with me, but that last one percent was tightening around my chest. “Like how you swore to Gah Katelyn Marsh’s mom chased you out an upstairs window onto the roof?”
“Franny, I’m not kidding.” Nick slipped deeper into his accent. “There was something—or someone—hanging from the bridge.”
“I saw it too!” Levi joined in.
Sofía rolled her eyes. “You guys are dicks.”
“Yeah, but we’re your dicks,” Nick said.
“Ew,” I said.
Nick threw his head back and laughed, and Remy’s dimple deepened as he turned off the bridge and sped away from that claustrophobic stretch of wooded road. Levi turned up “Monster Mash,” and my anxiety ebbed away.
Everything was right once more, or as right as things got for the six of us.
In a couple of weeks, Arthur would leave for college in Indiana, and Remy would be two hours north at Ohio State. Nick would bump up his hours at Walmart to full-time, and Levi, Sofía, and I would be back in the halls of Splendor High School for our senior year, being occasionally mocked and often ignored.
Things would be different, I knew, but if there were two subjects I did my best not to think about, they were: a) the past and b) the future.
We turned down Jenkins Lane and followed the gravel road to its dead end. There was nothing but a small electrical substation on one side of the street and the run-down wreck everyone called the Jenkins House on the other, our destination.
Years and weather had stripped the house’s whitewashed veneer to a drab gray, and a few small fires started by trespassers had charred the left side of the second floor. The porch had collapsed in the center, brush snaking through the holes, and the black shutters hung askew, like someone had tried to pry them off the house’s face, while the blood-red door looked like its center had been smashed to bits by an ax.
Remy cut the engine as a breeze rolled past, rattling the house.
“It’s perfect,” Levi said brightly, and got out of the car with the camera.
The wind blew a tuft of golden hair into my face, and I pushed it behind my ear, then wiped the sweat from my hairline.
Levi was already shooting B-roll of a loose shutter clapping against the house.
His voice dropped into the nasally, faux-British narrator impression he prized so much: “The travelers arrive to the alleged hotbed of paranormal activity, skeptical and unscathed.”
Arthur doled out the equipment we’d brought at the trunk. We didn’t have much. The Ordinary shoots were casual, the editing afterward practically nonexistent. Within a couple of days, Levi would have slapped tonight’s episode online so it could garner our feed’s traditional five to seven comments, ranging between “lol some people have too much free time” and “KILL YRSELF.”
To be fair, they were right on that first count. The six of us had a lot of free time (minus Sofía, who squeezed us in around a full schedule of Achieving Things).
We never talked about it, never said it aloud, but if things were different, if the accident hadn’t happened, the six of us wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be the Ordinary; we probably wouldn’t even be casual friends.
Arthur and Nick raced up the porch steps, Droog bounding after them. Sofía and Levi were close behind them when Remy fell into step beside me halfway across the dark yard and grinned. “You’re not spooked, are you, Fran?”
I looked between him and the crumbling house. The rumor was that the man who’d lived there had murdered an entire birthday party’s worth of people.
More likely, the house looked like shit for the same reason the rest of the town did: because we all felt like shit. Half the town lost their jobs when the mill closed down. Foreclosed houses with busted porches and graffitied walls were a dime a dozen here. A birthday party massacre was hardly a prerequisite.
Still, I never would’ve agreed to come here if it weren’t specifically for an episode.
“I’m not thrilled,” I finally answered.
Remy flicked on his flashlight, and the beam bounced along the thirsty grass ahead of us. “It’s gonna be fine. Ghosts aren’t real.”
