Everyone We've Been Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  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.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Sarah Everett

  Cover photograph copyright © 2016 by Stocksy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780553538441 (trade) — ISBN 9780553538458 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780553538465

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2: An Hour Earlier

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7: Before

  Chapter 8: Before

  Chapter 9: After

  Chapter 10: After

  Chapter 11: Before

  Chapter 12: After

  Chapter 13: Before

  Chapter 14: After

  Chapter 15: Before

  Chapter 16: After

  Chapter 17: Before

  Chapter 18: After

  Chapter 19: Before

  Chapter 20: Before

  Chapter 21: After

  Chapter 22: Before

  Chapter 23: Before

  Chapter 24: Before

  Chapter 25: After

  Chapter 26: After

  Chapter 27: After

  Chapter 28: Before

  Chapter 29: After

  Chapter 30: Before

  Chapter 31: After

  Chapter 32: Before

  Chapter 33: After

  Chapter 34: Before

  Chapter 35: Before

  Chapter 36: After

  Chapter 37: After

  Chapter 38: Before

  Chapter 39: Before

  Chapter 40: After

  Chapter 41: Before

  Chapter 42: After

  Chapter 43: Before

  Chapter 44: Before

  Chapter 45: Before

  Chapter 46: After

  Chapter 47: Before

  Chapter 48: After

  Chapter 49: Before

  Chapter 50: After

  Chapter 51: After

  Chapter 52: Before

  Chapter 53: Before

  Chapter 54: After

  Chapter 55: Before

  Chapter 56: After

  Chapter 57: Before

  Chapter 58: After

  Chapter 59: After

  Chapter 60: After

  Chapter 61: After

  Chapter 62: Before

  Chapter 63: After

  Chapter 64: Before

  Chapter 65: Before

  Chapter 66: After

  Chapter 67: After

  Chapter 68: After

  Chapter 69: After

  Chapter 70: After

  Acknowledgments

  To all the people who take up space in my heart

  On the first turn, I think about my orchestra uniform: a knee-length black skirt, soft and silky between my fingers.

  On the second turn, a stack of sheet music, pieces I’m halfway through learning or planning to learn.

  On the third turn, I slam into the seat in front of me. The boy three rows ahead jerks forward, too, but it’s a backpack he guards instead of a viola case.

  On the fourth turn, the world bursts with noise. Smattering applause of broken glass. A startled scream from a little girl. Yellow streetlight that is too bright and thick and long. The trees whirl around us; it’s hard to tell whether they are gliding around on a sheet of ice or we are.

  Finally we stop spinning.

  There is no sound.

  AN HOUR EARLIER

  An hour earlier

  About thirty miles outside of Caldwell, we pick up the last set of passengers. An elderly Asian couple and a teenage boy who looks about my age—seventeen. The couple sits in the second row closest to the doors, but the boy keeps walking through the aisle, rubbing his palms together and breathing on his hands to warm them.

  He scans the bus as he enters the aisle, surveying the seating options. There are five or six other passengers, a small enough number that we’re not wrestling for armrests or invading each other’s personal space, which is the single worst thing about public transportation, especially on Saturdays. I’m near the back of the bus, just in case we get a surge of people.

  The boy passes the drowsy-looking college student on the left whose jet-black hair flops down over his eyes. He stops a few rows from my seat, on the right side of the aisle.

  Behind me, a mother shushes one of her two elementary-school-age kids.

  I watch as the boy peels his backpack off his shoulders and places it on the seat closest to the window. The backpack is half unzipped, the short metal legs of a tripod sticking out. He glances up at me, catching my eye, just as I’m about to look away.

  “God, it’s cold,” he says, rubbing his palms over his shoulders.

  “I know, it’s freezing,” I say back disappointingly. Uninterestingly.

  I notice that he’s completely underdressed for this cold. His hair is tucked under a black wool beanie, but he’s wearing a thin cotton shirt pushed up at his elbows. No coat, no scarf. How has he not frozen to death?

  “Jackets help,” I blurt out, past the acceptable response time. Then add in a slightly more normal voice, “Or so I’ve been told.”

  The boy assesses me and breaks into a grin that takes up his whole face as he looks down at how he’s dressed. “Hmm. I might have to try that one of these days.” His smile makes a funny feeling slide through my stomach. He hesitates a moment, then sits with his back to me, three rows ahead.

  I pull out my phone to check the time and see three texts from my mom, asking how the trip is going and what time the bus arrives so she can pick me up from the station. I send her a quick response before sticking the phone back in my pocket.

  “What do you play?” the boy asks a few minutes later, turning his entire upper body around to face me. He nods at the case occupying a seat next to me. The bus to Caldwell this morning got me there four hours before the concert started, so I’d brought my viola in case I found somewhere to practice and kill time while I waited.

  “The viola,” I say. Why do I always spend so much time hoping someone will talk to me, only to have absolutely nothing to say when they do?

  Presumably just to witness my verbal ineptness, Goth College Guy rouses a little and turns back to look at me. He blinks a few times, then turns around again.

  “I don’t know one thing about the viola,” the boy says, grinning at me. I know I’m on a concert high—“outside my lane,” as my pilot father might say—because something about the grin elates me. His smile is so easy, his face so open, that I feel like he must do it a lot—which, of course, ought to put me back inside my lane. He probably smiles like this at everyone.

  But staying firmly in the wrong lane, I smile back and speak a little more quietly, in case anyone is trying to
sleep.

  “Well, they look a lot like violins but they’re not.” I hear myself quickly going down the path of many Violas Are Not Violins activists who have gone before me, so I change directions. “Rumor has it that Jimi Hendrix started off playing the viola.”

  “Really,” the boy says, and, God bless him, pretends to be interested.

  “Yeah. I actually just came from watching a concert,” I say, wanting to keep the conversation going. “Not Jimi Hendrix. Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” the boy repeats, teasing, and something flutters inside me again.

  “Pretty sure dead people don’t have concerts.”

  I might be rambling, but he is playing along. “I’ve never been invited to one,” he says.

  I laugh. It slips out quickly, without permission, and Goth Guy rouses again to glare at me. But the boy looks pleased he’s made me laugh.

  I drop my voice to a whisper. “Unless it’s just that they’re exclusive. Think how many people would pay to see a Ghost Mozart concert,” I joke. Then, sobering up, I add, “It was actually this orchestra at Samberg Auditorium.”

  “Were they any good?”

  “They were incredible,” I say.

  My mind swivels back to the performance, especially to the second movement of that Bach orchestral suite. I could see why it had become famous as “Air on the G String.” Through that dark, echoing auditorium, the sound stretched across all the empty space and reeled me in closer. A long musical finger, crooked at me.

  I’d heard it before, but there was something about that piece. Something different and powerful. I’d clung to the armrests until the very last note ended.

  Now I blink back into reality, realizing the boy is still looking at me.

  “What about you?” I ask, embarrassed by my lapse in attention. “Where are you coming from?”

  He looks out the dark window then and tugs on his hat. “Long story, but my piece-of-shit car wouldn’t start.”

  He grins again as he speaks, and I wonder if “piece-of-shit” is actually code for a Lamborghini and why blood rushes to my face every time he smiles.

  “That sucks,” I say.

  He shrugs. The kids at the back of the bus are arguing over something while their mom threatens to confiscate it. It feels awkward to keep talking across three rows, so the boy turns back to face the front and I finally force myself to pull out Great Expectations, the book we’re discussing in English class.

  We stop for gas at Riverton, and the boy gets off behind the driver. The mom, a short woman with light brown hair to the middle of her back, shepherds her kids down the aisle.

  “I don’t waaaanna go to the bathroom,” the little girl whines, her brother following her, skipping between the seats. The girl’s hair is almost identical in length and color to her mother’s. The mother gives me this look I can’t explain when she walks past me, then hurries her kids along.

  When I squint out the window, I see the boy standing next to the bus driver, smoking. Both of them march in place, trying to stay warm, tufts of cigarette smoke intermingling with the clouds of their breath. It’s judgmental of me, but the discovery of Smiling Boy’s nicotine problem makes it easier to dismiss any connection we might have shared. He’s a random boy on a bus in the middle of January.

  The family comes back on first, and I feel the mother’s gaze on me again, but this time she jerks her eyes away when I look up. As if she’s embarrassed to have been caught staring. She walks to the back of the bus and retrieves a sweater and backpack, then the three of them relocate to the very front of the bus, opposite the couple.

  I wonder what her problem is. I self-consciously check the cover of my book. Does Great Expectations have some reputation for being super racy that I’m not aware of?

  My face is back in my book when the boy and bus driver get on again, but the letters quickly blur into meaningless squiggles, and I doze on and off for the next hour.

  I wake up to the spinning.

  The bus sliding out of control, careening off the road. The other passengers screaming. Underneath it: the sound of sharp things breaking and blunt things—heads, elbows, backs—slamming.

  Then I’m flying forward, falling. A sharp, hard pain pierces the side of my head.

  Everything goes black.

  I wake up to a light so blue and harsh its mere force seems to pry my eyelids apart. The air smells like antiseptic, and I’m lying in a bed that isn’t my own. Wires extend from a machine beside me like thin plastic tentacles.

  I’m in a hospital room.

  When I try to sit up, it feels as if someone is plucking the inside of my skull like a string instrument, but without the relief of music. I lie back down and groan to make it stop.

  “You’re okay, hon,” someone with a thick Southern accent says, rubbing my shoulder. “How are you feeling?”

  The assault of murky, too-bright light slowly shifts into the image of a middle-aged woman in green scrubs standing by my bed.

  I make an incoherent sound, but the nurse seems to be fluent in those because she nods and says, “Yes, I know. You hit your head during the crash. Do you remember that, Addison?”

  My mind drifts back to the bus.

  The spinning.

  The boy a few rows ahead.

  It takes three tries before I manage to get any words out. “Y-y-yes. Is everyone okay?”

  The nurse nods. “You were all extremely lucky. Some minor injuries here and there, but everyone’s going to be just fine. With how slick those roads are tonight, it could have been a lot worse. Maine in winter is no joke.”

  She keeps talking, explaining that we’re in Greenvale Hospital, forty minutes from Lyndale, and about ten minutes from the crash site. That we were brought here by ambulance.

  “Can you sit up for me?” the nurse—a tag on her shirt says MEGAN—asks a few minutes later. Her voice is soothing and maternal, and it makes me feel small and safe. The way I did in elementary school, when my mom would look after me on days I was home sick. I slide up in bed, and she adjusts the pillows behind me, then lets me lean back. It turns out I’m not connected to any of the wires by the machine, so my movement is not restricted. But there’s a bandage on the top of my right arm—a cut, the nurse explains, but nothing too serious.

  Nurse Megan hands me two white tablets and a small paper cup half full of water. “Those will help with your head.”

  The pills are huge; I can still feel them in the back of my throat after I’ve swallowed.

  “So we’ve finally gotten hold of your mom. She was so, so worried on the phone, and I understand she’s on her way over as we speak.”

  Any other time, I’d roll my eyes at that. Of course my mom is so, so worried. Of course she’s jumped into her car, ready to come and save me from a thousand unseeable dangers, but right now, I only feel relieved.

  I could have died tonight.

  “And”—Nurse Megan scans the room and then picks up my viola case and hands it to me—“I believe this belongs to a Miss Addison Sullivan.”

  “Thank you,” I say, reaching for it. I’ve never been more grateful for the labels across the back and stitched on the inside. I open the case and immediately begin scouring every inch of my viola for scratches or dents.

  “The medics said they used it to ID you before they found your proper ID.”

  “Oh,” I say. I like the idea of that, of being found by my instrument—the same way I feel found when I play.

  “What’s the verdict? Will it live?” Nurse Megan asks with a chuckle, and I’m embarrassed to realize I’ve been holding my breath. But my viola looks fine.

  “I think so,” I say, shutting the case. “So, the other passengers…they’re here, too?”

  For some reason, the smiling boy’s face keeps appearing in my mind. I want to ask about him, where he is, but I realize I don’t even know his name. And is it creepy to do that? I mean, we had one conversation.

  “They are. Brought most of you in ambulances. A
re you worried about someone in particular?”

  “Yes. Well, no. I mean…we just met on the bus tonight. It’s not like we’re friends or anything.” Despite the water, my throat is still parched. “We talked a little. I just wanted to make sure he was okay.”

  If my rambling is evidence that my faculties are returning to me, I’m not sure being without them is any great loss.

  The nurse gives me a weird look now. Knowing. “I’ll see what I can find out for you. Do you know his name?”

  I shake my head. “But he’s tall. My age-ish. Big smile.”

  Nurse Megan is grinning at me now, like she missed the part where he’s a boy I just met, like any second now she’ll break into a soliloquy about young love or Shakespeare.

  Luckily, just then the doctor raps twice on the door and comes in. Dr. Kennedy is tall and in her mid-thirties, with fashionably cropped hair and tired-looking eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. It seems like she’s been up for hours, but she smiles kindly at me and says it’s nice to see me awake. I guess she saw me when I was first brought in. She has me sit up now and checks my reflexes, shines a light into my eyes, and exchanges medical-speak with Nurse Megan.

  “I think we’ll keep you overnight, Addison,” Dr. Kennedy says. “Just to make sure you don’t have a concussion and that that head is doing okay.” She inspects my right temple, which is not bandaged or anything, just heavily bruised. They don’t know what hit it, and I don’t remember, either.