Love Sucks and Then You Die
Author: Michael Grant; Katherine Applegate
Date: 2013-09-10 12:58:35+00:00
Keywords: retellings; General; Young Adult Fiction; Romance; Novella; Technology; Action & Adventure; Science & Nature; Fiction; Short Stories; Science Fiction; Young Adult; Science Fiction Fantasy
Description: In this short-story prequel to Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant's Eve and Adam, fifteen-year-old E.V. (Evening) doesn't know where she fits in to the universe. After a particularly disastrous school dance experience, she's begins to wonder if she fits in at all. She did bloody the school heartthrob's nose and all because he tried to kiss her. Having been accused of being a "frigid bitch," E.V. begins to question her place in the cosmic world of relationships and dating to little avail; her CEO mother is emotionally unavailable, her dad is dead, and her best friend thinks true love exists
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Rights: All rights reserved

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Teaser

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

About the Author

Copyright

On Sunday morning, April 24, at 8:43 A.M., the Earth is 4.54 billion years old, give or take a few hundred thousand, and it’s looking pretty good, all things considered.

E.V. Spiker on the other hand, who is 15 years, 3 months, two days, and a few random hours old, has had better mornings.

Her hair is matted, her mouth scummy. She reeks of B.O. A bloody, sequined dress from Saks lies like a contorted corpse on her bedroom floor.

E.V. yawns, stretches, flips open her laptop. Three minutes and thirty-two seconds elapse, during which she checks Facebook, Reddit, and McSweeney’s, before she opens her in-box.

From: Brizley, Bob <shootthebriz@hotmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, April   24 1:12 AM

To:   Spiker, Evening <espiker15@me.com>

Subject:   wtf?

look, e.v., if you didn’t want to kiss me, all you had to do was say no, not go all freaking ninja … i have a deviated septum now & thx to u i may never smell again … plus i’m out like 260 bucks if u count the corsage and the smirnoff & dry cleaning the rental tux which my mom says they may not be able to get the blood out of … i mean i drive a bmw 3, E.V., i could’ve taken karina instead & she probably would have put out … at least she wouldn’t have decked me in front of the entire school … you deeply suck, e.v., and i don’t unfortunately mean that literally …

E.V. studies the missive from Bob. She is troubled by the punctuation, but surprised by the correct use of “literally.” Bob, a junior, is a star on the water polo team, solidly built, and passably charming, but he is taking his freshman English class for the third time.

E.V. considers forwarding the e-mail to Aislin, her best friend. Aislin witnessed the whole unfortunate incident: the head butt to the nose, the crimson gush under the twinkling mirror ball, the backward fall, the collapse of the henna tattoo table.

The theme of the dance had been “Arabian Nights,” which explained the henna table and the Magic Carpet Ride photo booth, but left the Mardi Gras beads and roulette wheel open to interpretation. E.V. and Aislin agreed that the suggestion they’d submitted to the dance committee—“Life Sucks and Then You Die”—would have made for a more compelling decor.

While Bob was stuffing napkins up his nose, Aislin had done what any best friend would have done: She’d dragged E.V. to the bathroom, wiped Bob’s blood off her corsage, and high-fived her for disrupting an otherwise tedious, overly chaperoned evening.

The head butt had been unintentional mostly, a gut reaction to Bob’s closing in for a kiss during the first slow dance of the evening. Something about the look of expectation on his square-jawed face had bothered her, his certitude, the inevitability of the whole thing.

She’d snapped. Lost it. Maybe it was the green apple vodka–Dorito breath, the cheesy boutonnière, the Jurassic Era Clapton (you look wonderful tonight.…). Maybe it was the half dozen chocolate chip cookies she’d scarfed down in rapid succession when no one was looking, the torture chamber heels Aislin had convinced her to wear, the smell of stale sweat and Axe deodorant.

Maybe it was the zit mushrooming near Bob’s left nostril.

Or maybe she will never know what set her off.

E.V. considers brushing her teeth, or downing a Red Bull to get the synapses firing. She has a buttload of homework to do.

Instead, she lies inert, staring down at her dress. Twelve minutes and thirty-three seconds pass, during which she wonders if she is, in fact, as Bob had so graciously suggested to her departing back, a frigid bitch.

With a sigh, E.V. forces herself to click on her history homework folder.

All week, they’ve been creating a time line of the Earth’s history. Her teacher calls it “The Big Picture: Big Bang to Right Now.” The line E.V’s created stretches on for pages. Algae get inches. Dinosaurs, a nice, healthy chunk. There’s no room for the Renaissance.

Her life would not register on this line. The entire history of modern humans barely registers.

Ms. Leach had warned them: You will find this exercise humbling and surprising.

E.V. clicks back to her e-mail.

She stares at her laptop screen and begins to type.

From: Spiker, Evening <espiker15@me.com>

Sent: Sunday, April 24    8:56 AM

To:   Brizley, Bob <shootthebriz@hotmail.com>

Subject:   Re: wtf?

Bob:

I will be happy to cover the costs of dry cleani–

E.V. stops typing. Her mother is rapping insistently on her door. She doesn’t wait for E.V. to yell “Come in.”

She never does.

Terra Spiker looks elegantly fatigued in her Prada suit. She is the CEO of a pharmaceutical company worth billions. She always looks elegantly fatigued.

“Were you at work all night?” E.V. asks.

“A crisis. My head biochem is a cretin.” Terra waves a hand dismissively.

She trains her gaze on E.V.’s bloody dress. “What happened? Were you deflowered?”

“My virtue remains intact.”

“You’re all right, though.” It’s not so much a question as a command.

“Yep. Minor skirmish. I ran into my date’s nose.”

Terra puffs her lips and lets a bit of air escape. “You’re still taking the pill, Evening? And your condoms are up to date? Condoms expire, you know. Like milk.”

“You do understand, Mother, that I have never even been kissed?”

“Forewarned is forearmed.”

Terra approaches the bed. She strokes E.V.’s head the way an allergic person pets a cat. Satisfied her maternal duties have been executed, she heads for the door.

“I’m going to take a bath and head for bed. Do you have plans?”

“Homework. I might hook up with Aislin later.”

Terra exhales. “Aislin is a—”

“—drunken slut. Yes, I believe you’ve mentioned that.”

“Actually, I was going to say ‘slutty drunk.’”

E.V. ignores her. It’s more efficient that way. “Speaking of slutty, do you remember your first kiss?”

“No.”

“Everyone remembers their first kiss.”

“Firsts are highly overrated. First kiss, first intercourse, first…” Terra says with a shrug, “marriage.”

E.V. frowns. Her father, having died several years ago, is not exactly in a position to defend himself.

Terra slips off a Jimmy Choo and rubs her heel. “Why do you ask?”

“I just feel like I’m behind the curve,” E.V. says. She points to her laptop. “Look at this time line. I mean, tick tock.”

Terra glances at E.V.’s screen. “You gave the Cretaceous Period too much space. Also the Triassic.”

“My point is: I’m not keeping up with my peer group.”

“Pfft. You’re only seventeen.”

“Fifteen.”

Terra pauses, calculating. Milestones are not her strong point.

“I’m emotionally delayed.” E.V. realizes she must need more sleep. She does not talk about feelings with her mother. Her mother is a businesswoman. She does not like feelings. She cannot patent them.

Terra purses her lips. Twin frown lines make it clear she’d prefer to be drawing her bubble bath.

“Aislin says I’m too much of a perfectionist about guys,” E.V. adds. She is beginning to feel quite sorry for herself.

“Aislin will happily bed any carbon life form with a credit card.”

“Maybe I am too picky.” E.V. tries unsuccessfully to comb her fingers through a knot in her hair. “I keep thinking if I wait long enough, the perfect guy will materialize. You know: fate. Kismet. True, perfect love.”

“Let me tell you what true love amounts to: pheromones and a nice Cabernet.”

“You loved Dad.”

“Yes, well. To err is human,” Terra says. She half smiles.

E.V. hopes it’s wistful, but she doubts it.

“Today’s his birthday, you know,” E.V. says softly.

“Is it?” Terra asks, and then she is gone.

“Thanks,” E.V. murmurs to her empty room. “I’m so glad we had this little pep talk.”

History homework beckons, but first, E.V. rereads Bob’s e-mail. She searches the trail of ellipses for a reason she might have accepted his invitation to the dance in the first place. He’d seemed … not unpleasant. Sweet, in a Labrador-like way. Although his douchey e-mail indicates she may have misjudged him.

In fairness, she had just humiliated him in front of the whole school. The BMW remark notwithstanding, he was probably just venting. In any case, douche or not, she owes him some kind of explanation, doesn’t she, or at least some cash for the dry-cleaning bill?

E.V. stares at the e-mail, starts to push DELETE, then hesitates.

She turns back to the time line and moves the Cretaceous boundaries. Her mother is, of course, right.

*   *   *

On Sunday afternoon, at 4:37 P.M., E.V. sits at a Peets in a beach town north of San Francisco. She sips her latte and considers the crowd. Lots of Sunday tourists. Day-trippers and lovers, heavily paired. There is much hand-holding and butt-cupping.

At least that’s how it seems. Maybe it’s just the way the search engine in her brain works these days.

Aislin is late, but she’s texted a couple times. E.V.’s phone vibrates. It’s another text:

April 24 4:38 p.m.

Sorry, Antonio came over, might be

little late for cafeen.

Spelling is not Aislin’s favorite thing. Antonio is Aislin’s favorite thing. This month, anyway.

On her time line, E.V. marks the emergence of the first reptiles. She’s been working for eleven minutes when she feels a hand—Aislin’s, heavy with silver jewelry—on her shoulder.

Aislin is impossibly leggy, gorgeous, and turning E.V., by default, into the adequately pretty friend. Generally, E.V. is okay with that, but she bristles a little today at the heads turning to take in Aislin’s entrance.

As she sits, Aislin thrusts her cell into E.V.’s face.

“Did you see this shot of the Bob beatdown?”

E.V. sighs. “It has a name now?”

“A hashtag, too. Plus somebody, I dunno, maybe Maira, got some great video of Bob going ballistic.”

E.V. sips her latte, blinks, narrows her eyes. “Read the room, Aislin. Seriously not in the mood.”

“Sorry. But in a few days, it’ll be funny, right?”

E.V. rubs her eyes. “In a thousand years, give or take.” She slams her laptop shut. “Did you finish the history time line for Leach?”

Aislin cups her hand in her chin. “What’s a time line?”

“Yeah, I kinda thought so. The point is: It’s depressing, is all. The irrelevance of everything. Of us. We’re all just blips. Grains of sand on a massive beach.”

Aislin scarfs a sip of E.V.’s latte. “Which means Bob is just a blip, too.”

“He’s not even a blip. He’s not even a zit on a blip.” E.V. stares hard at her friend. “I am not a frigid bitch, you know.”

“No. That’s your mother’s area of expertise.”

“Are you in love with Antonio?”

Aislin examines a fingernail. “I’m in lust with him. It’s much easier to have fun when you’re not so picky, you know.”

“I’m not picky. I’m just … holding out for true love.”

“That’s very noble.”

E.V. drops her head on the table. “I am going to die alone with hundreds of cats, aren’t I? They’ll consume my rotting flesh. I’ll be nothing but bones when you find me.”

Aislin puts her hand on E.V.’s arm. “Grab your drink. ’Tonio’s double-parked. Let’s go for a drive. You need to clear your head.”

“I’m kind of not in the mood to sit in the backseat and watch you guys exchange bodily fluids.”

“Where do you want to go?” Aislin asks. She picks up E.V.’s computer and her latte. “Anywhere you want.”

E.V. considers. “The cemetery.”

Aislin wraps her arm around E.V.’s shoulder. “You are some kind of fun, girl. Bob doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

*   *   *

At 5:34 P.M., Antonio parks his mother’s boyfriend’s Honda in the Ocean View Cemetery parking lot. As E.V. leaves the car, he is already unbuttoning Aislin’s blouse.

“Guys. Seriously?” E.V. inquires, slamming the door. “Um … cemetery? Dead people? Respect?”

“Sorry, E.V.,” Aislin says, possibly chastened.

E.V. hasn’t been here in a year, but her father’s grave is easy to pick out. He was a sculptor, and his headstone is one of his own works, a smooth, round granite piece riven by a deep fissure.

E.V. sits on the damp grass. He’d died in a car crash, one of those awful, late-night-knock-at-the-door moments in life. She’s over it, as over it as anyone can be.

He was a fine artist and a good man, probably flawed, because apparently everyone is. E.V. likes to draw, and that came from him most likely, along with the belligerent hair and the unpredictable temper. He loved her a lot, probably even loved her mother.

E.V. looks past the neat path of graves to a line of eucalyptus trees. A guy about her age is standing between two small gravestones. A blond, surfer type, shorts, black T-shirt, muscular. He drops two flowers—nothing fancy, just roadside weeds—one for each grave, and then walks away.

E.V. watches him go. Something about the way he moves, deliberately, purposefully, makes her stare. Maybe it’s the way he strides past the gravestones without looking at them.

Maybe it’s the way he pauses to take in the trees, the ocean, perhaps even her.

Two seconds pass, maybe three. A blip, and then he vanishes.

E.V. starts to cry. After a while, she collects herself. She feels a little better, lighter. Crying always helps.

She is climbing into the backseat of Antonio’s car when she sees a black sedan driven by her mother’s chauffeur, Joe.

Joe pulls into the lot and parks, then walks over to her father’s grave and places a white rose on the round headstone.

E.V. can just make out Terra through the darkly tinted windows.

Antonio takes a right out of the cemetery. They pass the surfer guy walking on the side of the road.

“Nice,” Aislin murmurs.

“Bitch,” says Antonio affectionately.

In two days, Eve will forget all about the surfer guy.

In one year, seven months, and sixteen days, she will encounter him again.

He will not be perfect, and he will not be a blip.

*   *   *

At 6:40 P.M. E.V. returns to her bedroom. She marks the moon landing on her time line. She labels the very end of the line “Right Now.”

E.V. examines her work. It’s thorough. Not perfect, but close. Leach will probably give it an A-, but she’s pretty ruthless, so you never know.

E.V. opens her e-mail and clicks on Bob’s note. For eleven seconds, she stares at it.

Four months from now, E.V. will not remember Bob’s name when she passes him in the lunchroom.

One year and eight months from now, she will realize that the head-butt incident makes a great first-date anecdote.

E.V. presses the DELETE key.

She lies back and closes her eyes, waiting to be humbled, waiting to be surprised.

1

I am thinking of an apple when the streetcar hits and my leg severs and my ribs crumble and my arm is no longer an arm but something unrecognizable, wet and red.

An apple. It was in a vendor’s stall at the farmers’ market off Powell. I’d noticed it because it was so weirdly out of place, a defiant crimson McIntosh in an army of dull green Granny Smiths.

When you die—and I realize this as I hurtle through the air like a wounded bird—you should be thinking about love. If not love, at the very least you should be counting up your sins or wondering why you didn’t cross at the light.

But you should not be thinking about an apple.

I register the brakes screeching and the horrified cries before I hit the pavement. I listen as my bones splinter and shatter. It’s not an unpleasant sound, more delicate than I would have imagined. It reminds me of the bamboo wind chimes on our patio.

A thicket of legs encircles me. Between a bike messenger’s ropy calves I can just make out the 30% OFF TODAY ONLY sign at Lady Foot Locker.

I should be thinking about love right now—not apples, and certainly not a new pair of Nikes—and then I stop thinking altogether because I am too busy screaming.

*   *   *

I open my eyes and the light is blinding. I know I must be dead because in the movies there’s always a tunnel of brilliant light before someone croaks.

“Evening? Stay with us, girl. Evening? Cool name. Look at me, Evening. You’re in the hospital. Who should we call?”

The pain slams me down, and I realize I’m not dead after all, although I really wish I could be because maybe then I could breathe instead of scream.

“Evening? You go by Eve or Evening?”

Something white smeared in red hovers above me like a cloud at sunset. It pokes and prods and mutters. There’s another, then another. They are grim but determined, these clouds. They talk in fragments. Pieces, like I am in pieces. Vitals. Prep. Notify. Permission. Bad.

“Evening? Who should we call?”

“Check her phone. Who’s got her damn cell?”

“They couldn’t find it. Just her school ID.”

“What’s your mom’s name, hon? Or your dad’s?”

“My dad is dead,” I say, but it comes out in ear-splitting moans, a song I didn’t know I could sing. It’s funny, really, because I cannot remotely carry a tune. A C+ in Beginning Women’s Chorus—and that was totally a pity grade—but here I am, singing my heart out.

Dead would be so good right now. My dad and me, just us, not this.

OR 2’s ready. No time. Now now now.

I’m pinned flat like a lab specimen, and yet I’m moving, flying past the red and white clouds. I didn’t know I could fly. So many things I know this afternoon that I didn’t know this morning.

“Evening? Eve? Give me a name, hon.”

I try to go back to the morning, before I knew that clouds could talk, before I knew a stranger could retrieve the dripping stump of your own leg.

What do I do with it? he’d asked.

“My mother’s Terra Spiker,” I sing.

The clouds are silent for a moment, and then I fly from the room of bright light.

2

I awaken to an argument. The man is simmering, the woman on full boil.

They’re out of my view, behind an ugly green curtain. I try to do what I always do when my parents fight, adjust my earbuds and crank the volume to brain-numb, but something is wrong. My right arm is not obeying me, and when I touch my ear with my left hand, I discover a thick gauze headband. I’ve sprouted long tubes from my arms and my nose.

“She’s my daughter,” the woman says, “and if I say she’s leaving, she’s leaving.”

“Please, listen to me. She’s going to be your one-legged daughter if you take her out of here.”

The man is pleading, and I realize he’s not my dad because (a) my dad was never a pleader—more of a pouter, really; and (b) he’s dead.

“I have superior facilities, the best medical staff money can buy.” The woman punctuates this with a dramatic exhalation. It’s my mother’s trademark sigh.

“She’s in critical condition in the ICU after a fourteen-hour surgery. There’s every chance she’s going to lose that leg, and you want to move her? Because … what? It’s more convenient? Your sheets have a higher thread count? What exactly?”

I feel pretty okay, sort of floaty and disconnected, but this man, who I’ve decided must be a doctor, sounds a little freaked out about my leg, which, as it happens, doesn’t seem to be behaving any better than my arm.

I should probably reassure him, get my mother off his case—when she’s like this it’s best to retreat and regroup—but the tube stuck down my throat makes that impossible.

“I will not release this patient,” the doctor says, “under any circumstances.”

Silence. My mother is the god of painful pauses.

“Do you know,” she finally asks, “what the new hospital wing is called, Doctor?”

More silence. The contraptions I’m tethered to chirp contentedly.

“That would be the Spiker Neurogenetics Pavilion,” the doctor finally says, and suddenly he sounds defeated, or maybe he’s missing his tee time.

“I have an ambulance waiting outside,” my mother says. Check and mate. “I trust you’ll expedite the paperwork.”

“She dies, it’s on you.”

His choice of words must bother me, because my machines start blaring like a cheap car alarm.

“Evening?” My mother rushes to my side. Tiffany earrings, Bulgari perfume, Chanel suit. Mommy, Casual Friday edition.

“Sweetheart, it’s going to be okay,” she says. “I’ve got everything under control.”

The quaver in her voice betrays her. My mother does not quaver.

I try to move my head a millimeter and realize maybe I’m not feeling so okay after all. Also, my car alarm won’t shut up. The doctor is muttering about my leg, or what’s left of my leg, and my mother is burying her head into my pillow, her lacquered nails digging into my shoulder. She may actually be crying.

I am pretty sure we’re all losing it, and then, on my other shoulder, I feel a firm pressure.

It’s a hand.

I follow the path from hand to arm to neck to head, moving just my eyes this time.

The hand is connected to a guy.

“Dr. Spiker,” he says, “I’ll get her into the ambulance.”

My mother sniffles into my gown. She rouses herself, stands erect. She is Back in Control.

“What the hell are you doing here, Solo?” she snaps.

“You left your phone and briefcase behind when you got the call about the”—he jerks his chin toward me—“the accident. I followed in one of the Spiker limos.”

I don’t recognize this guy or, for that matter, his name—because, really, what kind of a name is Solo, anyway?—but he must work for my mother.

He looks down at me, past the tubes and the panic. He is scruffy-looking with too much hair, too little shaving. He’s tall and wide-shouldered, muscular, blondish. Extremely blue eyes. My preliminary taxonomy: skater or surfer, one of those guys.

I’d really like him to get his hand off me because he doesn’t know me and I’m already having personal-space issues, what with the tubes and the IV.

“Chill, Eve,” he tells me, which I find annoying. The first phrase that comes to mind involves the word “off,” preceded by a word I have absolutely no chance of pronouncing since it includes the letter “F.”

Not in the mood to meet new friends.

In the mood for more painkillers.

Also, my mother calls me Evening and my friends call me E.V. But nobody calls me Eve. So there’s that, too.

“Please reconsider, Dr. Spiker…” The doctor trails off.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” says the guy named Solo. He’s about my age, a junior, maybe a senior. If he does work for my mother, he’s either an intern or a prodigy. “Will you be coming in the ambulance, Dr. Spiker?”

“No. God knows what microorganisms are in that ambulance. My driver’s waiting,” my mother says. “I’ll need to make some calls and I doubt the back of an ambulance is the place. I’ll meet you at the lab.”

The doctor sighs. He flips a switch and my contraptions still.

My mother kisses my temple. “I’ll get everything set up. Don’t worry about a thing.”

I blink to show that I am not, in fact, worried about a thing. Not with the morphine drip taking the edge off.

Solo hands my mother her briefcase and phone. She vanishes, but I can hear the urgent staccato of her Jimmy Choos.

“Bitch,” the doctor says when she’s out of earshot. “I don’t like this at all.”

“No worries,” Solo says.

No worries. Yeah, not for you, genius. Go away. Stop talking to me or about me. And take your hand off me, I’m nauseous.

The doctor checks one of my IV bags. “Uh-huh,” he mutters. “You an MD?”

Solo makes a half smile. It’s knowing and a little smug. “Just a gofer, Doctor.”

Solo gathers up my bagged belongings and my backpack. Suddenly I remember I have AP Bio homework. A worksheet on Mendel’s First Law. When a pair of organisms reproduce sexually, their offspring randomly inherit one of the two alleles from each parent.

Genetics. I like genetics, the rules, the order. My best friend, Aislin, says it’s because I’m a control freak. Like mother, like daughter.

I have a load of homework, I want to say, but everyone’s buzzing about purposefully. It occurs to me my biology worksheet won’t be all that relevant if I’m dying.

I believe death is on the list of acceptable excuses for missing homework.

“You’re going to be fine,” Solo tells me. “Running 10Ks in no time.”

I try to speak. “Unh onh,” I say.

Yep. Can’t pronounce “F” with a tube in your mouth.

Then it occurs to me: How does he know I like to run?

3

SOLO

So. This is the boss’s daughter.

I’d seen pictures of her, of course. You can’t go into Terra Spiker’s office and not see photos of her daughter. My favorite’s this one where Eve’s crossing a finish line, all sweaty and flushed, with a killer smile on her face.

I glance down at the stretcher. Eve’s got a serious bruise coming up under both eyes. Still, you can see the resemblance to her mom. High cheekbones, big, deep-set eyes. Tall, slender.

That’s about it for similarities, though. Terra’s a total ice queen bitch: frosty blond hair, calculating gray eyes. Eve … well, she’s different. Her hair is sun-streaked gold, and her eyes are this mellow brown color.

At least I’m pretty sure they’re brown.

They’re a little wobbly at the moment.

There’s not a lot of room on the narrow bench in the back of the ambulance. I nearly go flying when they pull away from the emergency room and crank on the siren.

I grin. “Floor it, dude,” I yell to the driver.

The doctor sitting on the other side of Eve’s stretcher sends me a what the hell? scowl.

I know it seems wrong to enjoy this, but still: the siren and the zooming through the streets of San Francisco while all the other cars scatter? Very cool.

Besides, Eve’s going to be fine.

I think.

We’re at the bridge in no time. The bridge. The Golden Gate, still the best, never get tired of it. I fantasize sometimes how great it would be to ride a longboard down the cable. Yes, there would almost certainly be a long plunge to a hideous death. But before that it would be amazing.

I sit with my elbows on my knees, trying to hunch my shoulders forward a little. I have good shoulders, might as well reveal them. I know she’s checking me out. Fair enough, because I’m checking her out.

“Ah ahhh ahhhh!”

Eve cries out suddenly. She’s in pain. Bad pain. So it’s possible she’s not really checking me out.

“Doc,” I say, “can’t you help the girl out?”

He leans over to check the IV tube. It’s gotten kinked, the flow cut off. He straightens it and tears off strips of white tape to hold it in place.

“She’ll be better in a second.”

“Cool,” I say. I lean in close so she can hear me. “I got him to crank up the morphine,” I say, speaking loud and slow.

Her eyeballs kind of roll toward me. She doesn’t seem to be focusing very well. And for a second I think, whoa, what if I’m wrong? What if she actually dies?

All of a sudden it’s like I want to cry. Not happening, obviously—crying, I mean—but there’s just this sudden wave of sadness.

I shake it off as well as I can. But once you start seeing the Big D, the Reaper, sitting beside you, it’s very hard to stop.

“Don’t die, okay?” I say.

Her confused eyeballs are looking for me. Like I’m a target and she can’t quite line up the sights.

So I get close again and I kind of touch her face and aim her head at me. Unfortunately, I lean my other hand on her leg—the wrong one—and there’s some yelling from Eve and from the doctor.

Which makes it impossible for me to say what I had planned to say to reassure her: Don’t worry. I’ve seen things. I know things.

Your mom has powers.

She won’t let you die.

4

Operation? What operation?

They tell me it lasted fourteen hours.

I wasn’t really there. I was in a weird landscape of dreams, nightmares, and memories—with a little shopping thrown in.

I’m pretty sure I had an extended dream where Aislin and I wandered around the big Westfield Mall downtown on Market Street. Of course, it could have been a memory. It’s hard to keep track of the difference when your blood flows with whatever drug they use to separate your consciousness from your senses.

My new doctor, the one who arrived with the private ambulance, has on a lab coat that reads:

Dr. Anderson

Spiker Biopharmaceuticals

Creating Better Lives

It’s a chic low-sheen black. He looks like he should be foiling my hair, not checking my pulse.

Solo keeps staring at me. Not a she’s dead meat stare. More like he’s an anthropologist who’s just discovered a new tribe deep in the heart of the Amazon.

The road was a little bumpy over the bridge, but I’ve discovered I can surf the pain, feel it roll and crest and crash. If you think about something, anything, else, it’s not so bad.

The fact that I can think at all, when my leg has recently been—well, chopped off and glued back on is, I believe, the medical term—is kind of a miracle, and I’m grateful for the random thoughts that flood my brain.

Things I Think About, Exhibit A:

How I got a B+ on my oral report in bio, which sucks because it’s going to bring my grade down, and possibly my GPA, which means I won’t get into a decent college, which means I’ll never escape the clutches of my crazy-ass mother, and I know this really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, especially now, but that’s not the point, is it?

I’m pretty sure Ms. Montoya dropped my grade because of my intro: “Boys have nipples.” Perhaps this was news to her.

It was a risky ploy, sure, but when it’s second period and you’re the first speaker and the Red Bull has only ignited a handful of brain cells, you do what you have to do.

There were twenty kids in the room. When I moved to the front to tie my iPad to the projector, I’d say I had a total of eight eyeballs out of a possible forty watching me.

I delivered my opening line, and thirty-nine eyeballs were trained on me. Jennifer has one lazy eye, so I was never going to get all forty.

“Why?” I asked. I cued the first slide, which was of a boy’s chest. It was a fine chest, a very fine chest, and I knew it would hold the attention of the nine straight girls and one gay boy.

It was a cheap ploy, but sex sells. It always has, it always will, and in the context of a boring report day in my boring eleventh-grade biology class at boring Bay Area School of Arts and Sciences, a smooth, hard chest over rippled abs was just the ticket.

The way I had the presentation laid out, we’d see that slide two more times. We’d also see DNA molecules, a little video snippet of dinosaurs demonstrating the concept of survival of the fittest—because seriously, there’s no bad time to show bored kids some dinosaur-on-dinosaur violence—and the inevitable graphs, pie charts, and equations that would earn me a decent grade. And chest to keep my audience.

I thought I had the thing aced.

Wrong.

So, okay, I phoned it in a little. But still. A B+ after those abs?

Things I Think About, Exhibit B:

How I was supposed to bail out Aislin’s dirtbag boyfriend after school, which is why I was checking her latest frantic text when that out-of-place apple caught my eye, which is why I wasn’t looking where I was going, which is why I am now in an ambulance with an MD from Aveda and some guy with a perpetually smug look on his face.

Things I Think About, Exhibit C:

How I missed prom yet again. (I had a previous engagement, organizing my sock drawer while watching old Jon Stewarts on my laptop.) Aislin claims I didn’t miss anything: It was a total waste of a good buzz. Even with the purse searches and rent-a-cops, she managed to sneak in three separate flasks of lemon vodka.

I am a little worried about Aislin.

Things I Think About, Exhibit D:

How I can’t figure out the deal with this Solo guy. Is my mother using him as her stand-in? Is that his job?

Things I Think About, Exhibit E:

How Solo’s eyes have this distant, don’t mess with me edge to them. They’d be hard to sketch, but then, I can never get faces right.

Last week during Life Drawing, Ms. Franklin asked me if I’d ever considered majoring in art instead of biology.

I asked her for a new eraser.

Things I Think About, Exhibit F:

How Solo smells like the ocean when he leans close and smooths my hair.

Things I Think About, Exhibit G:

How Solo, once he’s done gently smoothing my hair, starts pounding out an incredibly inept drum solo on my oxygen tank.

Things I Think About, Exhibit H:

How I might never run again.

5

SOLO

We pull into Spiker Biopharm. It’s located on the back side of the Tiburon peninsula across the Golden Gate and down some windy roads. As you drive up it’s not mind-boggling or anything, because the road at that point is maybe two hundred feet up above the ocean, and the Spiker complex is more vertical than horizontal. It spreads down that steep slope from the road above to the water below. And it is big. From the water, it looks like the City of Oz had a giant baby with one of those big-city Apple stores.

The place is built around three massive spikes—as in Spiker, heh—with each of the spikes being an elevator array. Connecting them is a sort of ziggurat construction with terraces, open spaces, entire floors given over to gardens, sandy volleyball courts, a pool.

It is, without question, a great place to work. If you can get past some of the people.

And number one among the people you have to get past is the boss woman herself, Terra Spiker. Known throughout the campus as Terror Spiker.

That, to me, is a major clue someone should have gotten: If you’re going to name your daughter Terra, and if she’s going to grow up to be a psycho-bitch, people are going to start calling her “Terror.”

The way the complex is laid out, the floors are bigger below and smaller above. The bottom floor, Level One, is the largest space, the Orphan Disease Research Division. They focus on the many less-than-popular diseases that no one is ever going to get rich curing.

Whatever else you can say about Terra, she’s done some very major work down there on Level One. As in cures. As in people who were being eaten alive by some parasite or some germ are walking around alive today because of Level One. Because Terra Spiker said, “Screw profits, we’re throwing a billion dollars into beating this disease.”

The reason no one gets serious about investigating Spiker Biopharm? Because of what happens down there on Level One, that’s why. Because the psycho-bitch saves a bunch of lives.

On the other hand, the reason so many people think about investigating Spiker? Because of what happens on Levels Seven and Eight.

Me, I live on Level Four. My parents, Isabel and Jeffrey Plissken, were Terra’s business partners way back in the day, when all they had was a broken-down IBM, some petri dishes, and a dream.

I don’t remember them. It’s like that.

I could say Terra raised me, but that would be wrong. She’s no mother to me. She gives me a place to live, an education, a job at the lab.

She tolerates me.

She wouldn’t even do that if she knew.

Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant

What did you want to be when you grew up?

KA: A vet.

MG: James Bond.

KA: But we’ve accepted the fact that we’re never going to grow up.

What’s your favorite childhood memory?

MG: The best part of childhood is childhood’s end.

KA: I was not actually a big fan of childhood. I like to control my life.

What was your favorite thing about school?

MG: I did not like anything about school. Not a single thing.

KA: I liked the girls’ room because that’s where I would hide to avoid school.

What was your first job, and what was your “worst” job?

MG: Toys ’R’ Us—I had to get a fake ID to work at age sixteen. I was a stock clerk.

KA: I waited tables at a place where there was no privacy, not even to change into my uniform. THAT wasn’t great.

MG: We agree on our worst job, it was our last job before we were first published. We were cleaning toilets for a living.

KA: Mmm. Not fun.

How did you celebrate publishing your first book?

KA: Quitting the aforementioned cleaning gig.

Where do you write your books?

KA: I seem to need a new location for each book. At the moment, I have a desk in the living room, as close to the deck doors as I can get.

MG: I really like to work outside. So if weather allows, I work on our upstairs deck.

What sparked your imagination for Eve & Adam?

MG: Girl creates boy. That’s the meat of it. That was the coolness from our point of view.

If you could change one genetic trait in yourself, would you? What would you change?

KA: I have weak ankles. As a result, I was not able to pursue an athletic career. Well, that plus I have no athletic talent.

MG: I would change my tendency to put on weight. It’s a lifelong struggle. And it’s so boring losing weight.

What is your favorite kind of new technology?

MG: I want Google Glass. I’ll look like a huge dork, but I don’t care.

KA: I have a milk foamer. Okay, that’s not exactly cutting-edge technology. But I like it for coffee.

Who do you relate to more, Evening or Solo?

KA: Actually, we both like Solo. He’s a little weird. We’re a little weird.

What makes you laugh out loud?

KA: The movie Airplane!

MG: Ditto. Also The Book of Mormon, the Broadway show. That is my first-ever Broadway name-check.

What do you do on a rainy day?

MG: We both get depressed. Neither of us can stand overcast days.

If you were stranded on a desert island, who would you want for company?

MG: Katherine, of course.

KA: He is so well-trained. I’d like a slightly younger Sean Connery.

MG: Oh, well, if we’re going that way, then I’d want Sofia Vergara. Take that.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and what would you do?

KA: I’d like to go back to China. We adopted our daughter from China.

MG: Yeah, and I missed out on that trip since I stayed with our son. But, absolutely China, Japan, I’ve never been to the Far East.

What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?

MG: Well, we’ve been together for thirty-four years. I know that will make people roll their eyes, but that’s the biggest.

KA: Then, the kids.

MG: Then, our careers.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

KATHERINE APPLEGATE is the author of many books for children and young adults, including the Newbery Medal–winning The One and Only Ivan, and the award-winning Home of the Brave. You can visit Katherine on the Web at katherineapplegate.com.

MICHAEL GRANT is the author of the BZRK series and the bestselling Gone series. Together as “K.A. Applegate,” he and Katherine wrote the very popular Animorphs series. Eve & Adam is their first credited collaboration. Katherine and Michael live in Northern California with their two children and numerous unmanageable pets. You can visit Michael on the Web at themichaelgrant.com.

Copyright © 2013 by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate.

Published by Feiwel and Friends.

Feiwel and Friends is an imprint of Macmillan

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ISBN: 978-1-250-04058-9