The Dark Side of Nowhere - Softcover

Shusterman, Neal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1442422815 ISBN 13: 9781442422810

Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

A classic science fiction novel from bestselling author Neal Shusterman is back in print.

Jason is having a bad day. The kind of day when you just don’t feel like yourself. Only for Jason, it’s not just a feeling. He really isn’t himself. Not anymore. Who is he? That’s the problem. Jason isn’t sure. And it’s not just him. Everyone in town is acting weird. His friends. His parents. Everyone. Billington is usually such a normal town. As Jason is about to discover, nothing will ever be normal again….

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Neal Shusterman is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty award-winning books for children, teens, and adults, including the Unwind dystology, the Skinjacker trilogy, Downsiders, and Challenger Deep, which won the National Book Award. Scythe, the first book in his series Arc of a Scythe is a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. He also writes screenplays for motion pictures and television shows. Neal is the father of four, all of whom are talented writers and artists themselves. Visit Neal at StoryMan.com and Facebook.com/NealShusterman.

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The Dark Side of Nowhere –1–

NOWHERE FAST
Ethan died of a burst appendix.

That’s what we were told—and we had no reason to doubt it. Everyone on the street had heard the way he screamed. The pain must have been unbearable. Even after his parents had rushed him off to the hospital, his screams haunted me for days.

We found out about it the next morning.

It was during science class. We were studying the astronomers, and somewhere between Copernicus and Galileo, the announcement came hissing over the loudspeaker. It was a shock—biggest one I could remember. I mean, in this day and age, to keel over from something as stupid as appendicitis. I couldn’t look over at his empty seat that morning. Although I tried to feel sad, all I could feel was angry.

Roxanne, the last in a long line of girlfriends that filled Ethan’s eighth- and ninth-grade years, was blubbering away. That made me angry too. I noticed the way she rubbed those eyes as she wailed, purposely smudging the mascara that she always wore. It made her tears thick and black, so everyone could see from a mile away how very sad she was—as if everyone should feel sorry for her, and not Ethan.

On the other hand, Paula Quinn cried silent tears that she quickly wiped away. It was classy. It was real. I watched Paula rather than look at Ethan’s seat or watch Roxanne’s Cavalcade of Misery.

In front of the room, Mr. Smith, our science teacher, spoke in solemn tones, using an all-knowing, all-comforting voice that he must have borrowed from Pastor Bob, our minister.

“We’ll all miss Ethan,” he said, “but we have to remember that he’s gone to a better place.”

Next to me, my friend Wesley flicked his hair back in utter contempt—a gesture he had learned from me—then he whispered under his breath, “Better place? I’ll bet.”

Up front, Mr. Smith lifted his eyes upward, as if searching for heaven in the flickering fluorescents. “Let us all observe a moment of silence in Ethan’s memory.”

I flicked my own hair back contemptuously, showing Wesley how it was done.

“Moment of silence, my butt,” I whispered to Wes. “Ethan would have wanted a moment of heavy metal.”

That made Wes snicker. It sounded so rudely loud in the silence that it made me snicker too, and my snicker set someone off on the other side of the room.

It wasn’t like this was funny or anything—but sometimes, when something hits you so hard, your head kind of starts ricocheting off every wall. Suddenly laughter and tears feel like the same thing.

More chuckles broke out around the room. Mr. Smith threw me a cold warning look, as if it were all my fault. “Jason . . . ,” he said, “don’t you dare.”

Then Roxanne turned to us with her raccoon eyes and wailed, “What’s wrong with you people!”

That did it. The raccoon eyes, Smith’s fluorescent gaze, and a dead friend. It was all so unreal, some confused part of our brains concluded that it must have been funny. Half the room burst out in snickers punctuated by sobs. Then my own brain took a bad ricochet, and I suddenly felt like heaving, so I burst out of the room, fighting to keep my breakfast from making a surprise appearance.

“Mr. Miller!” Smith shouted after me, but I was already out the door, with Wesley close behind.

I stopped when I reached the water fountain in the hallway, and bent down to take a drink, hoping to drown my gut into submission. Wesley punched a locker hard enough to make it rattle, but not hard enough to hurt himself. It’s a show, I thought, just like Smith. Just like Roxanne. I didn’t want to put on a show, so I drank from the fountain and I didn’t say a thing.

“This sucks,” said Wes, meaning everyone and everything. “What a lousy way to end the ninth grade, you know?”

As I stood up from the water fountain, Paula Quinn came up behind Wes. She was red in the face. No longer from crying—it was because she was angry. Angry like me.

“I just want you to know that what you did in there stunk, Jason,” she said, staring me down with furious eyes. “You’re real creeps, you know that?”

I could have just shrugged it off, or yelled back at her, or said something cold and clever. The thing is I just couldn’t do that to Paula. We weren’t like friends or anything. Although I did ask her out once. She turned me down. Ever since then, it’s been kind of weird between her and me. Like I respect her or something.

“I didn’t mean to laugh,” I told her. “I don’t know why I did, and I feel lousy about it, okay?”

She looked at me, and I guess she read some honesty in my face, because she didn’t seem as mad anymore. “Were you and Ethan friends from the time you were little?”

I nodded. Kids didn’t come and go from Billington very often. Not that we didn’t want to, but our parents had roots like oak trees—they wouldn’t dream of moving away. So most of us knew each other all our lives. Ethan, Wesley, and I were a famous threesome. The Trilogy of Terror, our teachers used to call us.

Paula, on the other hand, was a newcomer, having just landed in Billington four months ago. She was a pleasant glimpse of the world most of us only got to see on TV.

“You know what really gets me?” I said. “It’s that Ethan’s whole life began and ended in this poor excuse for a town. It’s pathetic. I don’t want to remember Ethan as being pathetic.”

“He wasn’t pathetic,” said Paula. “And this town’s not so bad anyway.”

“Yeah,” I said, “wait until you’ve been here for fourteen years—then we’ll see how you feel about it.”

Then came a voice from behind us—a deep voice, that boomed even when speaking in hushed tones.

“Ethan’s not dead,” said the voice. We turned to see Mr. Grant, who was the security guard and janitor at Billington Junior High. Grant was kind of an odd guy—a loner who never said much to any of us but always seemed to know everyone’s business. His words made us all hang on the moment, not knowing whether he was kidding or knew something we didn’t.

“He’s not dead, as long as we remember him,” he said, and then laughed—not just a chuckle but a deep belly laugh, like something was uproariously funny. It was far more inappropriate than my laughter had been. Well, I figured, what should we expect from a guy whose motto was “I’ll clean this school up one way or another.”

His laughter faded, and he scratched his reddish blond beard, which was always so neatly trimmed. “You belong in class,” he reminded us. “I suggest you get going.” Then he turned and walked off, his large key ring jingling from his belt like a psychotic wind chime.

As we made our way back toward class, Paula whispered into my ear, “That was too weird.” Turns out she was right.

If God threw a dart at the world and it happened to strike Billington, completely obliterating it, no one would notice and no one would care. In fact, I often thought it would be the best thing that could happen to this place. Smack in the middle of the state, Billington is on a highway that couldn’t be straighter if you drew it with a ruler, and whenever I heard people talk about going nowhere fast, I figured they were headed here, although I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1442422815
• ISBN 13: 9781442422810
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande