Girl Last Seen - Softcover

Anastasiu, Heather; Brown, Anne Greenwood

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807581410 ISBN 13: 9780807581414

Verlag: ALBERT WHITMAN & CO, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Kadence Mulligan's star was rising. She and her best friend, Lauren DeSanto, watched their songs go viral on YouTube, then she launched a solo career when a nasty throat infection paralyzed Lauren's vocal chords. Everyone knows Lauren and Kadence had a major falling-out over Kady's boyfriend. But Lauren knows how deceptive Kadence could be sometimes. And nobody believes Lauren when she claims she had nothing to do with the disappearance. Or the blood evidence… As the town and local media condemns Lauren, she realizes the only way to clear her name is to discover the truth herself. Lauren slowly unravels the twisted life of Kadence Mulligan and sees that there was more to her than she ever knew. But will she realize she's unknowingly playing a part in an elaborate game to cover up a crime before it's too late?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Anastasiu is the author of the young adult sci-fi Glitch trilogy. She grew up in Texas but recently moved to Minnesota with her family. She teaches creative writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.Anne Greenwood Brown is an attorney by day and young adult novelist by night. Her works include the paranormal mermaid trilogy: Lies Beneath, Deep Betrayal, and Promise Bound. She lives in Minnesota.

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Girl Last Seen

By Heather Anastasiu, Anne Greenwood Brown

Albert Whitman & Company

Copyright © 2016 Heather Anastasiu and Anne Greenwood Brown
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8075-8141-4

CHAPTER 1

LAUREN

Cuppa Cuppa

Saturday, March 31

5:50 a.m.

The song ends.

Before the morning DJ can tell me what a grrrreat day it's going to be, I kill the radio and silence him. I'm not ready for words. Not this early. Not today. The parking lot outside Cuppa Cuppa is still cast in deep purple, the sun about as excited to start the day as I am. Which is to say, not at all.

I don't make any effort to unbuckle my seat belt. Instead, I reach into my bag and pull out a pen and small notebook. Purple sifted, sifted light. It's against doctor's orders, but I can't help humming as I scribble across the page. If I don't get the line down now, I'll forget it later. Then I write, Everything's gonna be all right, which will do for a rhyme. For now. I'll come up with something better later.

I toss the notebook onto the passenger seat and face the inevitable. I need to get out of the car. I have to get out of the car. I have to get out of the car. My shift starts in ten minutes, but I do not want to go back inside. Last night was crappy, and the memory of it is still going to hang thick in there, mixed with the smell of roasted beans and scalded milk.

I closed up the place after Kady's show, less than seven hours ago, then never fell asleep. I wonder if it's too late to call in sick. From the parking lot.

I pick up my cell phone and think about that, turning my phone over and over in my hands. The fact that I can think about anything is give-me-a-gold-star amazing because God knows my head is a twisted mess.

I glance up at the coffee shop again, then roll my eyes. This job is all I've got now. It's enough reason to get out of the car. Besides, a hot mug of rejuvenating decaf green tea might do me some good. Detoxify the night and all that.

I roll up the sleeves on my flannel shirt and push my glasses up my nose (too tired for contacts this morning). Stepping out of the car, I adjust the long strap of my bag across my chest. The tassels that hang from the bottom of the bag snag on the thick, black tights I'm wearing under my favorite cutoff shorts. It's not quite April. Still cold, but I'm so ready to be done with long pants.

The closed sign still hangs on Cuppa Cuppa's front window. I knock on the bright green door, and after a few seconds Charlie, my boss, lets me in.

"Good morning," I whisper.

I'm not whispering because of the early hour or because Charlie is hung-over — which he probably is. I've been whispering since Halloween. That's when I got food poisoning so bad I had to go to the hospital, which is where I picked up some lovely throat infection. I haven't been able to talk any louder than a rasping whisper since then.

"What's with the flannel?" Charlie asks. "Where's your uniform shirt?"

So much for trying to detoxify the memories from last night. Bam. Front and center. That didn't take long. "Um, hello? You told me to toss all the old ones out. You said the new ones had come in."

Charlie grimaces. "They have, but when I opened the package this morning, I saw that the logos say Pucca Pucca. I have to send them all back."

When I raise my eyebrows at him, he adds, "Hey. It wasn't my fault."

Ha. He probably screwed up the order. "Fine by me," I croak out.

"Jesus," Charlie says as the phone starts ringing. "How long are you going to talk like that?"

I shrug in response because I don't like going into the details, like how when things didn't get better with my voice right away, I had to see an ear, nose, and throat doctor. Like how the ENT first put me on total vocal rest for two months and handed me a mini whiteboard and a black marker. So I could continue to communicate.

I remember thinking, This has to be a joke, right? I mean, it had to be a joke. She was so blasé about the fact my life was ending.

But things only got worse when I told Kadence later that night. Or rather, wrote it on my whiteboard.

* * *

"But it will get better," she said, looking up from the board to my face. "Right?"

Hopefully, I wrote.

She glanced down at the word, then back up at me. "Hopefully?" Her voice rose, pitch by pitch with each syllable.

They don't know how long it will take. It'll just happen one day.

"That's all the doctor said?" she asked.

I understood Kadence's frustration. I had already bailed on three of our performances by that time, and we hadn't been able to record any new videos for our YouTube channel. She was getting irritated by how long I'd been out of commission. The same anxiety I'd felt when Kadence and I first became friends roiled through my belly.

I'd been on the cusp of Loserdom — with a capital L — when Kadence moved to town in seventh grade. She was popular within five minutes of walking in the front door. Why she picked me to be her best friend I'll never understand. That first year I lived in fear of her dropping me like a lead balloon. When I lost my voice, that fear came roaring back.

That's all, I wrote.

"So what do I do?" She twisted a long bit of magenta hair around her finger.

I sighed and used a tissue to clean off the board. Writing everything out was exhausting. So much went left unsaid. I wrote: What do you mean?

"It's been three weeks since we put out any new music. We have fans," Kadence said. "Fans with expectations. Have you looked at the views on our YouTube videos? We've gone from one-point-three million views on "Twisted" to only three hundred thousand on "Calliope," and the view count on all of them is leveling out. No growth. That's like a death knell. And in the comments, people are starting to ask when we'll have a new song."

They'll have to wait, I guess.

"Have you even tried to sing?"

I could only stare at her. Was she even looking at me? Did she not see this freakin' whiteboard? Tears pricked at the back of my eyes. I opened my mouth to say something but then closed it again. What did she expect of me? I couldn't even talk, for God's sake!

"Things are building for us, Lauren," Kady said, apparently not noticing my distress, "but Internet fame is fickle." She threw up her hands. "We either have to build on our momentum or forget it. It's about number of views. The numbers grow, or they go stagnant. We need new material."

This isn't my fault, I wrote, still fighting back tears. Kady never appreciated tears. She always snapped at me that the Major — her dad — hadn't defended this country for thirty-five years just so we could be crybabies. She only cried when it was useful, to get what she wanted. Like an extension on her math homework.

Kadence rolled her eyes. "I'm not saying you did this to me on purpose."

My eyebrows shot up. What did she mean, to her? I would've thought she'd be more empathetic. Kadence had once been hospitalized with a horrible allergic reaction to peanuts, and I'd visited her every day.

"We need a plan for going forward," she added quickly, so maybe she was empathetic enough that she could easily read my thoughts. I guess that was something.

Well, I can't sing. I'm not even supposed to play guitar. This was the most surprising part of the doctor's orders. I swallowed hard and looked away from Kadence.

"You can't even play guitar? You can't even play...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ALBERT WHITMAN & CO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807581410
• ISBN 13: 9780807581414
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar