After
Page 17
“I just want you to look outside.”
A warm feeling spread through me. I wondered if he’d raked the leaves again. I got out of bed, pulled open the curtain, and looked down. But the leaf pile had dispersed in yesterday’s rain, and no one had put it back together again. Early-morning sunlight beamed down on a front lawn that looked absolutely ordinary.
“I don’t see anything,” I said to Sam.
“Are you looking down?”
“Yes,” I said, puzzled.
“Try looking up,” he said mysteriously.
I did as he said, and right away, I saw why he’d called. I gasped.
Stretching across the sky and dipping down again in the distance was the prettiest, brightest rainbow I’d ever seen. It was just like the one in Sam’s painting under the bridge.
“Oh my God,” I breathed. I blinked a few times. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“Lacey,” Sam said, “it’s not even raining. Look. It’s all sunshine.”
I looked around. He was right. A few wispy white clouds floated by, but there wasn’t a rain cloud, nor a drop of rain, in sight. There was no logical reason for there to be a rainbow.
“You can’t tell me you don’t believe now,” Sam said. “Your dad’s up there, Lacey.”
I gazed at the rainbow. Then I craned my neck as far as it would go and strained to look up, my chin pointing heavenward. I smiled at my dad.
“Thank you,” I whispered to Sam. “Can I call you later?”
We hung up and I stared at the rainbow for a long time. “Thanks, Dad,” I said.
Then I sent Jennica a text. No way could I call her this early.
LACEYLOO321: call me when u wake up. miss u.
Then I dialed Mom’s cell number.
She answered on the first ring. “Hi, honey. Is everything all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. I took a deep breath, realized that it was the first time in a year I’d meant it. “In fact, I’m pretty sure that everything’s going to be okay from now on.”
epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
The second anniversary of Dad’s accident fell on a Monday, so we couldn’t go to the cemetery until the evening, when we were through with school and Mom was home from work.
Sam had bowed out of the visit. He had gone with me to the cemetery over the past year, but today, he said, was for my family. He didn’t want to intrude. And that was just one of the many reasons I loved him. He was always thinking about things like that.
His dad was doing a lot better. He liked to play board games, so Sam and I would get out Monopoly or Battleship and sit with him for hours. It sounded crazy, but it was one of my favorite things to do now. Tanner even visited sometimes, and he entertained all of us with his new jokes—he’d decided he might want to be a stand-up comic. He and Mr. Stone really liked each other.
Logan’s car accident had been the wake-up call he needed. Because it was a first offense, he wasn’t sent to jail, but he had to enroll in a program for teen alcohol abusers, which met twice a week. He had stopped partying, and he had started hanging out with his old friends Josh and Will again. He and Sydney broke up, and she had a brand-new BMW and a brand-new boyfriend.
Mom was finally closer to being her old self again. I still heard her sobbing at night sometimes. But those nights were a lot fewer and farther between. And her smiles at the dinner table were real.
As for Kelsi, Mindy, Cody, Logan, Sam, and I, we’d become even closer. A freshman named Amber had joined our group a few months earlier; her dad had died when she was five. And Jennica, who had broken up with Brian in January, sometimes came too. The group had decided that it would be okay, from time to time, if kids whose parents were getting divorced joined us.
Today my family met at the cemetery, just after the sun had gone down. The last remnants of the sunset—a few streaks of orange and fuchsia across a deep indigo sky—hung above us, lighting our way. I had a car now, an old Toyota, and I had driven Tanner and Logan. Mom came straight from work, trading her high heels for sneakers in the parking lot.
I came here more often now to ponder things. In fact, I’d come here just last week when I needed to think about a big college decision. I had asked Dad’s advice. And in the silence, with the sunshine dappling through the trees around us and the wind stirring the leaves on the ground ever so slightly, I think I’d gotten it.
We gathered around his headstone and I swallowed hard. Two years ago. It was hard to imagine that it had been two whole years since my dad had smiled at me or hugged me or said my name.
My mom laid down a bouquet of roses and murmured something under her breath. They weren’t words for us. They were for Dad. Tanner told a few jokes. He came to Dad’s grave with me sometimes, and he told a few each time. And, he’d told me, he was pretty sure that Dad could hear his jokes wherever he was and was proud of him. I’d had to blink several times to stop myself from crying when he said that.
“I miss you, Dad,” Logan said in a deep voice that was growing deeper by the day. He bent down on one knee and closed his eyes, and when he stood, there was a tear running down his cheek. He didn’t bother to wipe it away.
I took a deep breath. “I have some news,” I said. “I got a letter from Boston University yesterday.” I paused and grinned. “I got in. I got accepted. And I think there’s a pretty good chance I’ll get that scholarship.”
I had applied for a scholarship for children whose parents had died, sponsored by Kate’s Club in Atlanta—the club that had inspired our group. Every year, the founder, Kate Atwood, chose a few kids to send through college. You just had to write an essay about how your life had changed since your parent’s death and what your plans were for the future. I had sat down to write an essay. Instead, I wrote twenty-two chapters. I couldn’t stop writing. And Ms. Atwood had called to say that my story had moved her to tears, and she thought that with some editing, it could maybe even be turned into a book.
Mom was the first to hug me. “I’m so proud of you. And I know Daddy would be too.”
I hugged her back and imagined Dad’s arms also wrapped around me. I imagined what his face would look like, so full of pride and joy for me. And for a moment, I felt like he was there with us.
I’d wanted to tell my family first, but I could hardly wait to tell Sam later tonight. He’d been accepted at Northeastern. I knew we were young, and who knew what would happen in the future? But at least this meant we were going to be in the same city and we wouldn’t have to deal with the whole long-distance thing. If we were meant to work out, we would.
Logan cleared his throat. “Well, I haven’t heard back yet, but I applied to Suffolk,” he said, naming a small university in the center of Boston. He’d taken a year off after graduation. “And I think my grades and SAT scores will get me in. So I guess we’ll both be in the city.”
Logan and I hugged. He drove me crazy sometimes, but we’d become a lot closer in the past year, and I couldn’t imagine being far away from him. Plus, he’d probably need to hit me up for rides home to visit Mom.
Tanner was grinning. “This is perfect!” he announced. “There’s a comedy club in Boston that me and Sarah read about. And on Monday nights, they have amateur night for comics under eighteen. We’re gonna work on our act. We should be ready by next fall. And you guys can come watch us and bring all your friends!”
I grinned back at my little brother. “You bet! You’re going to have the biggest BU cheering section any comedian has ever had.”
“Not to mention the biggest Suffolk cheering section,” Logan added.
“And probably the biggest Northeastern cheering section too,” I said, thinking of Sam. “Actually, it just sounds like you’re going to have the biggest cheering section ever.”
Tanner smiled from ear to ear. “Cool,” he said.
Mom was looking at all of us, her eyes glistening. “Dad would be really proud of you,” she said. “All of you.”
As we walked away from D
ad’s grave that night, Mom held hands with my brothers, and I held Tanner’s right hand, my own right hand outstretched. I was reaching for Dad. I knew he was right there with us, as much a part of our family as he had ever been. Just because we couldn’t see him didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
Kristin Harmel is a longtime contributor to People magazine. It was while working on a People story that she got to meet Kate Atwood, who runs Kate’s Club, an organization for grieving kids in Atlanta, which inspired this novel. Kristin lives in Orlando, Florida, and admits that she spends far too much time at Walt Disney World, which is just fifteen minutes from her house.
To learn more about Kristin, visit her Web site at www.KristinHarmel.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Kristin Harmel
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of
Random House, Inc.
Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harmel, Kristin.
After / Kristin Harmel. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When her father is killed in a car accident, Lacey feels responsible, so when she is given a chance to make a difference in the lives of some of her fellow students, she jumps at the chance.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89488-6
[1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Guilt—Fiction. 3. Family life—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction.
5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H2116Af 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009001367
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.0
Table of Contents
prologue
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 20
chapter 21
chapter 22