by Leah Scheier
“Secret Rule?” I whisper as I step away.
“What can I do?” he asks me.
“Tell me what you’ve been studying today. I want to hear about it.”
He smiles broadly. “Brain transplants.”
“What? You’re kidding! That’s actually possible?”
“No! Of course not!” He bursts out laughing, and suddenly his whole body is shaking, he’s doubled over with hysterical glee. I feel my face flush red, and I give him a playful shove to hide my embarrassment.
“That isn’t fair, Ethan!” I protest over his peals of laughter. “I always believe everything you say. I don’t know what to expect from you anymore!”
He takes a deep breath and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Well, maybe that’s what I want,” he says and breaks into a run.
Rain’s Chocolate Chip Cardamom Cookies
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened (not melted)
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup cream cheese
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla (or chocolate liqueur)
1/2 teaspoon cardamom
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup milk chocolate, grated
1/2 cup chocolate chips
Combine the butter and sugars in a large mixing bowl, and cream until fluffy (the fluffier, the better!). Add the cream cheese, egg, and vanilla (or chocolate liqueur). In a separate bowl, mix the cardamom, flour, cornstarch, baking soda, and salt. Add the flour mixture to the creamed butter, and blend. When well mixed, fold in chocolate chips and grated chocolate. Refrigerate 4 hours or overnight.
When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350°F. Drop rounded spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet, and bake until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Let the cookies cool before enjoying!
Rain’s Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 tablespoons coconut oil
3 tablespoons maple syrup or date honey
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla (or chocolate liqueur)
2 cups ground almonds
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips
In a large mixing bowl, combine the coconut oil, syrup (or honey), sugar, egg, and vanilla, and mix until well blended. Sift together the almonds, baking soda, and salt, then add to the mixture. Gently fold in the chocolate chips.
Refrigerate 4 hours or overnight. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350°F. Drop spoonfuls onto cookie sheet, and bake until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Let the cookies cool before enjoying!
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to many people who helped me during the writing of this novel: Rena Rossner, for her invaluable advice and encouragement over the last four years. She truly is a superagent; Annette Pollert-Morgan, for her vision. A great editor is like a mother to her characters. Her suggestions help their story grow because each comment is given with love. I am so lucky to have worked with Annette on two novels; Cassie Gutman and Katelyn Hunter, for their incredible attention to detail; the entire Sourcebooks team for believing in my books; my mother, for being my most enthusiastic beta-reader and my father for his wonderful critique about the ending (thank you for making it so much better!); my sisters, to whom this novel is dedicated, for their high-pitched and clamorous support; my husband, Eric, for answering multiple questions about medical procedure, and for more than twenty years of patient listening; and to my three daughters, Aviva, Miriam, and Talia, whose teenage voices fill my novels and my life.
About the Author
Leah Scheier is a pediatrician and the author of Secret Letters, a historical mystery featuring the daughter of the Great Detective, and Your Voice Is All I Hear, a contemporary young adult novel about a girl whose first love is diagnosed with schizophrenia. During the day she waves around a pink stethoscope and Smurf stickers; at night she bangs on her battered computer and drinks too much caffeine. Feel free to contact her through her website at leahscheier.com or on Twitter @leahscheier.
Read on for a peek of Leah Scheier’s
Your Voice Is All I Hear
Prologue
I know my way around the mental hospital.
I doubt most of the girls in my neighborhood could claim that, even though many of us lived just a few minutes from its leafy, sterile grounds, and some of us picnicked on the lawn outside its gate during summer break.
By the end of tenth grade, I knew Shady Grove Hospital better than I knew my school. I knew that the security guard’s name was Carla and that she’d worked at her depressing post since the place was built. I knew the quiet path behind the topiary garden where I could wait until visiting hours began and she let me in. I’d memorized the shape and color of his shadow behind the dark-red curtains, and I knew where I had to stand so he could see me from his eleventh-story window. From that distant spot, I could even guess how well the medicine was working for him that day; I could tell what kind of visit it would be by counting the paces of his shadow.
I had the place mapped out, his daily routine memorized, the doctors’ names and call schedule, every pointless detail carefully recorded in his special little book. He’d given me those notes as if they were classified secrets, the papers wrapped in strips of hospital linen sealed together with bubble gum, long wads of partially chewed Wrigley’s tied into a crisscrossed mesh. That tattered spiral notebook was crammed with data he’d gathered over months: patients’ names and histories, nurses’ phone numbers, the cleaning crew’s shift hours. I would never know how these bits of information came together for him or how he even found them out. But somewhere in these random nothings, he’d put together a story for me, a clue of how to get to him, a coded message that, for some reason, he believed only I could read. I was the one he trusted, the only one who had not betrayed him. I was the one he loved, the only one who believed him, even when his own mother had locked him up and thrown away the key.
And now, nearly three months after they’d taken him away, I was finally ready. I was going to march up to the security window, look into the tired guard’s blurry eyes, state my name and the name of the patient I was visiting, and hear the buzz and click of the locked gate sliding open. I was going to walk down the white-tiled hallway, knock on his doctor’s office door, slam his secret notebook on her desk, and make her read it, make her understand what he was hiding, make her see what only I had seen.
I was finally going to do it.
I was going to betray him.
Chapter 1
Six Months Earlier
I’d lost the homeschooling argument again. Also the school transfer argument, the study abroad argument, and finally (in a pathetic, last-ditch effort that stank of desperation), the chronic fatigue syndrome argument.
The truth was that I hadn’t really expected to win. I knew what my mother was going to say before she said it. Simplified, her points were: single parent, can’t afford it; can’t afford that; can’t afford that either; you don’t have that illness or any other, April, so stop being ridiculous and get your books ready for school and don’t forget to set your alarm, please, good night.
“But I can’t, I just can’t go without Kristin,” I wailed, unleashing my last and final weapon—honesty. That has to get through to her, I thought. She couldn’t ignore her only daughter baring her soul. My mom was all about “sharing your emotions,” “listening to your primal voice,” and “nursing your inner baby”—or whatever. (She reads a lot of self-help books.) So maybe if I dumped a buttload of truth and suffering on her, she’d celebrate my personal growth, shed a couple of cleansing tears, and let me stay
home. “Mom, please, you know how hard it’s been for me to make friends at Fallstaff High,” I pleaded. “I just can’t go back there tomorrow; I need a little bit more time—”
I should have expected the next part, I guess. She’d just gotten through her latest favorite: Face Your Fear by some celebrity healer. What did I think was going to happen? Fast-forward half an hour, and we were still in the same position on the living room rug. I was tired. She was just getting started. Somewhere between “fighting back against the darkness” (you’ve never been to Fallstaff High, have you, Mom?) and “knotting the spiritual umbilical cord” (knotting my spiritual what?), I humbly admitted defeat. Or exhaustion. Same result.
Bottom line: I was going to start tenth grade tomorrow (Mom’s words).
I was going to “connect with others” and “strengthen my inner immunity” (Mom again).
I was going to end up sitting alone at lunch, everyone was going to treat me like I had leprosy, and I was going to be miserable (me—obviously).
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