Mine - Softcover

Dawson, Delilah S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593373251 ISBN 13: 9780593373255

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A twisty, terrifying supernatural mystery about twelve-year-old, her creepy new home in Florida, and the territorial ghost of the young girl who lived there before her.

"A fiendishly creepy ghost story."--Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Dust & Grim

"Hide-under-the-covers terrifying, I loved it.”--Katherine Arden, bestselling author of Small Spaces

Lily Horne is a drama queen. It's helped her rise to stardom in the school play, but it's also landed her in trouble. Her parents warn her that Florida has to be different. It's a fresh start. No theatrics. But this time, the drama is coming for her.

Her new house is a real nightmare. . .

The pool is full of slime, the dock is rotten, and the swamp creeps closer every day. But worst of all, the house isn't empty . . . it's packed full of trash, memories, and, Lily begins to fear, the ghost of the girl who lived there before her.

And whatever is waiting in the shadows wants to come out to play.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Delilah S. Dawson thought she would be a visual artist but somehow ended up a writer. She grew up in Roswell, Georgia, and has lived all around the South, including Tampa, near where this book takes place. She has worked as a muralist, an art teacher, a barista, a reptile caretaker, a project manager, and a dead body in a haunted house, which was probably the most fun. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma and fourteen other books for teens and adults, as well as the comics Ladycastle, Sparrowhawk, and Star Pig. She loves gluten-free cake, adventures, the beach, Disney World, and vintage My Little Pony. She once kissed a camel named Louis. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @DelilahSDawson or visit her online at whimsydark.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.
Lily Horne was dying.
Literally dying.
Okay, maybe not literally.
But very, very theatrically.
“This is the end!” she gasped, swooning as much as her seat belt would allow. “World . . . going dark. Can’t breathe . . .”
She took a moment to try out various moaning and gagging sounds, making sure she had the absolute attention of her audience, before naturally pivoting into the dramatic death that always made her cry.
“I was aiming for the sky,” she sang, low and questioning, following it up with a sputter.
“Oh God, no more Hamilton,” her mom moaned.
With a final gasp, Lily went rigid, eyes flown wide in shock and terror, then exhaled and let her bones melt so that her body went limp and unnaturally twisted, held up only by the constricting seat belt. Waiting for a reaction, she kept her breaths completely silent, her chest barely moving--a trick she’d learned from a video by a corpse actor on YouTube--a guy who actually got paid to pretend to be dead. A little morbid, maybe, but it helped her land the part of Juliet last summer--and gave her a new possible career goal.
“You’re fine,” her dad said, pretending to be cheerful despite the fact that he was talking with his teeth clenched together. He glanced at her mom, who was quietly crocheting in the passenger seat, her head studiously down as she tried to avoid having this argument. Again. “Right, Laura?”
Mom looked up. “It’s going to be great,” she recited woodenly. “A new beginning.”
When Dad sighed, it was understood that he was disappointed in everyone--in Lily for being Lily, and in her mom for putting her in that first preschool production of Peter Pan and awakening her overly dramatic nature.
Would they respond this way, she wondered, if she were actually dying? Having a panic attack? Or a heart attack? If she just curled up and expired in the backseat without any of her telltale theatrics?
If so, they’d be sorry they hadn’t paid more attention.
As it was, she’d been sighing and flouncing and swooning and groaning around the house in obvious misery for weeks, ever since Dad had announced that they’d be moving to Florida. Lily didn’t want to move to Florida because it was an awful place and her new school probably wouldn’t have a drama club, or even a stage. Her Internet searches had revealed that there wasn’t a local theater in their new town.
She’d loved everything about Boulder, Colorado, from the audaciously wide skies and tall mountains to the startlingly sudden snowstorms and the fields full of popcorning prairie dogs. She’d especially loved their local playhouse--which was an actual Quonset hut, according to the many informational placards she’d read in the hallways over the years while in line to audition. She’d never wanted to leave--until she departed for New York or Hollywood. Now the deeper south they drove, leaving her entire world behind, the worse she felt. Colorado was full of bright surprises, but Florida seemed so old and withered. Everything here was too hot and shriveled to do anything but make swampy fart sounds.
Lily wouldn’t even let herself think about the reason they’d had to leave. Her dad kept insisting Florida was a chance to start over, so when she saw the blue Florida sign with the oranges on it, she closed her eyes and lifted her feet to jump into her new life. She felt it, the exact moment they crossed that invisible border. It was as if a barrier resisted her slightly, as if the hot summer sun rejected exactly who she was, or at least wanted to punish her for rejecting it first. When she put her feet down, she felt no victory.
The miles rolled by and the car inched along the cracked, lonely highway, deeper and deeper into central Florida, an adventurer crawling toward death in a desert while vultures circled overhead. Unlike the rush of stage jitters, this panic sat in her belly, heavy as a lump of cafeteria pizza that should’ve been good but was actually terrible. 
“Just a few more miles,” Dad said, even though it was perfectly obvious, thanks to the map app on his phone in its stand on the dashboard.
The setting sun slashed viciously through the car windows, and Lily tried to shrink away, as her pale skin sunburned easily. But with the rest of the backseat packed so tightly with bags and boxes, there was nowhere to hide. She was stuck. All the things she wanted--comfort, choice, freedom, the ability to be her overly dramatic self--had been taken away.
The motion sickness medicine they’d given her every four hours had worn off, and her cell phone was almost out of battery. She couldn’t even text her best friend, CJ, back in Colorado. The only thing she wanted more than for the car to stop was for Dad to just turn the old sedan around and head straight back to their empty house, the house where she’d grown up, where she knew and loved every brick, and where she’d arranged her big, walk-in closet into a stage. But she knew better than to say that out loud. Every time she brought up Colorado, her dad’s face went red, and his mouth pinched down, and he looked away. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d genuinely smiled at her.
“Are you excited back there?” he asked with the forced cheerfulness of a mall Santa. He’d been that way ever since he’d accepted the new job in Tampa, as if saying that this was a good move for the family a hundred times a day could make it true. His acting skills were extremely subpar.
“No. I told you: I’m dying,” Lily answered. “My heart--”
“You’re not dying. You’ve got to stop being so melodramatic. We talked about this.”
But . . . Lily’s entire life revolved around being dramatic, and . . . well, the panic wasn’t too far from the truth. She was out of Colorado for the first time ever, destined to die of an exploded heart in the state that--to her--only existed because of Disney World. She didn’t know anyone here, her parents were always angry at each other, her dad was always annoyed with her, and she had an entire summer to sit around, worrying about what would happen when she started eighth grade at a school that probably had no drama club and no fall musical.
And although she’d asked to see pictures of the new house, her parents had only shown her one--of the outside. Which meant there was something wrong with it. Her room was probably super tiny and didn’t have a closet.
Finally they turned off the highway, cruising past palm trees and plants that looked like giant pineapples.
“This is Land O’ Lakes,” her mom said--the first thing she’d spontaneously offered in hours. She couldn’t even pretend to sound excited. “Our new home.”
They passed stores and chain restaurants and, surprisingly, cows. The sun began to set, fiery orange and pink against a sky gone the soft purple of milk left in a bowl after eating marshmallow cereal. The streetlights came on as the car entered a residential area, and Lily noticed that most of the homes here hid behind high wrought-iron fences and heavy stone walls, like medieval citadels constantly under fire. Beyond the black bars, she sometimes caught a glimpse of kids riding bikes or swimming in pools surrounded by weird cages made out of screens.
But her dad didn’t turn the car into any of these comfortable, walled-off communities. He put on his blinker and slowed to turn down a mangy dirt road flanked by sharp bushes nestled in sand. Scrubby forest hid what lay beyond, and the headlights flashed over low branches dripping with grotesque gray moss that looked like witch...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593373251
• ISBN 13: 9780593373255
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland