Wonders of the Invisible World - Softcover

Barzak, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385392826 ISBN 13: 9780385392822

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

STONEWALL HONOR BOOK • For fans of Patrick Ness and Tom McNeal comes a moving and page-turning novel that’s part ghost story, part love story. The lines between past and present, tales and truth, friends and lovers begin to blur when a boy's childhood friend returns to town. 

Aidan Lockwood lives in a sleepy farming community known for its cattle ranches and not much else. That is, until Jarrod, a friend he hasn’t seen in years, moves back to town. It’s Jarrod who opens Aidan’s eyes to events he’s long since forgotten, and who awakes in him feelings that go beyond mere friendship. But as Aidan’s memories return, so do some unsettling truths about his family. As Aidan begins to probe into long-buried secrets, he may not be able to control what else is uncovered. Aidan will need to confront a family curse before he can lay claim to his life once more.

“Brilliant storytelling that unearths new intersections of love and magic.” —New York Times bestselling author Scott Westerfeld

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher Barzak’s fiction includes the award-winning adult novel One for Sorrow, which was made into the major motion picture Jamie Marks Is Dead; the Nebula Award finalist The Love We Share Without Knowing; and the short-story collection Before and Afterlives, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. Christopher grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a Southern California beach town and the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University. Learn more about him at christopherbarzak.com.

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Chapter One

My Life in Paper

Here’s the thing: we’re all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children’s magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together--at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, in the family room--until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That’s us, that’s anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to.

Until, one day, someone called my name.

“Hey, Aidan. Aidan Lockwood!”

And I looked up, startled, as if I’d just woken from a dream.

I was leaning over, grabbing my copy of Hamlet from the bottom of my locker so I’d have it with me after history and not have to come back for it, when I heard my name. Normally I can recognize people by voice alone--a loud laugh from Aaron Anderson as he moves through the hallway with other basketball players flanking his sides, or the sound of Natalie Miller as she sings an old blues song in the choir room--but this was a voice I didn’t recognize. I could feel my brow furrow even as I pulled Shakespeare out of the locker and turned toward this voice, which, in a school as small as mine, should have been easy to place.

“Look at you!” the voice said, almost like a command. And after peering down at myself like I might have a stain on my clothes or some unknown wound gushing blood, I looked up and spotted the guy who’d said it.

He was my age, tall and lean, and he was carrying a couple of books under one muscle-braided arm as he came toward me, pushing a wave of floppy brown hair away from his even darker brown eyes. When he stopped in front of me, he said, “You haven’t changed a bit,” like we were old friends meeting for the first time in a long time. I looked around, hoping someone else would recognize him, would see him and say, “Hey, So-and-So, where have you been?”

But no one did. It might as well have been just the two of us in that hallway, two strangers looking at each other, blinking.

Two paper people in a high school background.

I cocked my head, as if looking at him from a different angle might help me place him, but it was no good. Eventually I had to give up on the idea of identifying him and say, “I’m sorry?”

He shook his head, biting his bottom lip a little. Then, after releasing his lip from the pinch of his teeth, he said, “I can’t believe it. You really don’t remember me, do you?”

“Should I?” I asked. And it was a serious question, though it probably sounded more serious than I meant it to. But here was the truth of the matter: there were only three hundred students at Temperance High School, freshmen through seniors, and this guy didn’t look like any of them.

“Jarrod,” he said, and I blinked a few times, hoping the name would register. “Jarrod Doyle?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Come on, Lockwood. We were best friends in elementary and middle school!”

The name sank into my memory, and like a stone thrown into a pond, it made ripples. Jarrod Doyle, I thought. Jarrod Doyle, who used to play catch with me at recess or pair up with me to run during gym, even though I sucked at anything remotely athletic. Jarrod Doyle, who used to have me over to his place to spend the night watching horror movies before his mom and dad split up and he moved away in the seventh grade, seemingly overnight, as if he’d never existed.

Christ. I did know the guy after all.

“Jarrod Doyle?” I said, trying the name out like a new word in French class. And as in French class, I couldn’t help but stutter the syllables a little. “No way. Where the heck have you been?” I asked. “Better yet,” I said in the next breath, “what the heck are you doing back here? It’s been, what? Five years?”

“Just about,” he said, grinning with obvious relief now that I’d finally remembered him. “I’m back home with my mom. Got tired of living with my dad and his girlfriend. Wanted to get back to my roots, if you know what I mean.”

I shrugged and shook my head, oblivious to anything but him standing right there in front of me. “No,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Been living up in Cleveland,” he said, and threw one hand out like he might be offering me official documents about his previous residence. I looked down, but his hand was empty. “That’s where my dad moved after he and my mom divorced. Remember? She went to rehab, he moved up there for a job and took me with him? I thought you knew all this. Hell, I thought everyone in Temperance knew.”

I shook my head, surprised that I didn’t know, though I should have, really. Temperance was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone else’s business even as it was happening.

“Anyway,” Jarrod said, “when my mom told me she’d gotten herself back together, I decided to come home for senior year.”

“Temperance over Cleveland?” I said, raising one eyebrow skeptically. “You must have something wrong with you.”

“No way,” said Jarrod. He rocked back on his heels and looked around at the ceiling and the rows of alternating white and blue lockers, our school colors, and took the place in like he was an exile who had finally been allowed to come home. “It’ll be nice to be with my mom again,” he said, looking down. “And, well, I’ve missed this place.”

Temperance is a town of around three thousand people who work dairy or beef farms, fix cars and tractors, grow corn and soybeans, or work in the last remains of the few factories that have hung on, making paint cans or cabinetry. I reminded Jarrod of all this, in case he’d forgotten, and said, “It’s not really the sort of place anyone moves back to.”

“It’s exactly the sort of place someone like me moves back to,” said Jarrod.

Sometimes when people leave places behind, they only remember the good parts. But I didn’t say that right then.

“So what have you been up to?” he asked, as if I could fill him in on the past five years before the bell rang for first period. Then the bell for first period did ring, and we looked up at the speaker perched in the corner of the hallway like we could melt it down to scrap metal with laser eyes and then keep on talking.

When we looked down again, I said, “What’s your first class?”

“French,” said Jarrod. “Ooh la la. What about you?”

“History,” I said. “You busy after school?”

“Hoping to talk to the coach about trying out for baseball.” I noticed only then that he was wearing an unbuttoned Cleveland Indians jersey with a black T-shirt underneath.

“You can do that tomorrow,” I said. “Meet me in the parking lot after last period. We can go somewhere to catch up.”

“Look at you,” he said again, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe I was still here, like he’d never left in seventh grade and we’d just spent the night before watching a horror flick in his mom and dad’s trailer, which had sat out on the edge of town on an old back road called Cordial Run. “I still remember the thirteen-year-old Aidan Lockwood who couldn’t throw a ball worth spit and saw the weirdest shit.”

I cocked my head and narrowed my...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385392826
• ISBN 13: 9780385392822
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 354
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland