Author: Marisha Pessl
Pub. Date: June 5, 2018
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Formats: Hardcover,
eBook, audiobook
Pages: 336
Once upon a time, back at Darrow-Harker School,
Beatrice Hartley and her six best friends were the cool kids, the beautiful
ones. Then the shocking death of Jim—their creative genius and Beatrice's
boyfriend—changed everything.
One year after graduation, Beatrice is returning to Wincroft—the seaside estate
where they spent so many nights sharing secrets, crushes, plans to change the
world—hoping she'll get to the bottom of the dark questions gnawing at her
about Jim’s death. But as the night plays out in a haze of stilted jokes and
unfathomable silence, Beatrice senses she’s never going to know what really
happened.
Then a mysterious man knocks on the door. Blithely, he announces the
impossible: time for them has become stuck, snagged on a splinter that can only
be removed if the former friends make the harshest of decisions. Now Beatrice
has one last shot at answers--and at life.
Excerpt:
Excerpt
copyright © 2018 by Wonderline Productions LLC. Published by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
CHAPTER 1
I hadn’t spoken to Whitley Lansing—or any of them—in over a
year.
When her text arrived after my last
final, it felt inevitable, like a comet tearing through the night sky, hinting
of fate.
Too long. WTF. #notcool. Sorry. My Tourette’s
again. How was your freshman year?
Amazing? Awful?
Seriously. We miss you.
Breaking the silence bc the gang is heading
to Wincroft for my
bday. The Linda will be in Mallorca &
ESS Burt is getting
married in St. Bart’s for the 3rd time. (Vegan
yogi.) So it’s ours for the weekend.
Like yesteryear.
Can you come? What do you say Bumblebee?
Carpe noctem.
Seize the night.
She was the only girl I knew who surveyed everybody like a leather‑clad Dior model and rattled
off Latin like it was her native
language.
“How was your exam?”
my mom asked when she
picked me up. “I confused Socrates
with Plato and ran out of time during
the essay,” I said, pulling on my seat belt.
“I’m sure
you did great.” She smiled, a careful look. “Any‑ thing else we need to do?”
I shook my head.
My dad and I had already
cleared out my dorm room. I’d returned my textbooks to the student union to get the 30 percent off for next year. My roommate had been a girl from New Haven
named Casey who’d gone home to see her boyfriend every week‑ end. I’d barely seen her since orientation.
The end of my freshman
year at Emerson College had just come and gone with the indifferent silence
usually reserved for a going‑out‑of‑business sale at a mini‑mall.
“Something dark’s a‑brewin’,” Jim would
have told me.
—
I had no plans all summer, except to work alongside my parents
at the Captain’s Crow. The
Captain’s Crow—the Crow, it’s called by locals—is the seaside café and ice
cream parlor my family owns in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, the tiny coastal
village where I grew up.
Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Population: You Know Everyone.
My great‑grandfather Burn
Hartley opened the parlor in 1885, when Watch Hill was little more than a craggy hamlet where whaling
captains came to shake off their sea legs and hold their children for the first time
before taking off again for the Atlantic’s Great Unknowns. Burn’s framed
pencil portrait hangs over
the entrance, revealing him
to have the mad glare of some dead
genius writer, or a world explorer who never came home from the Arctic. The truth is, though, he could barely
read, preferred familiar
faces to strange
ones and dry land to the sea. All
he ever did was run our little dockside
restaurant his whole life,
and perfect the recipe for the best clam chowder
in the world.
All summer
I scooped ice cream for tan teenagers in flip‑flops and pastel sweaters. They
came and went in big skittish groups like schools
of fish. I made cheeseburgers and tuna melts, coleslaw
and milk shakes. I swept away
sand dusting the black‑and‑white‑checkered
floor. I threw out napkins, ketchup packets, salt
packets, over‑21 wristbands, Del’s Frozen
Lemonade cups, deep‑sea fishing party
boat brochures. I put lost cell phones beside the register so they could be
easily found when the panic‑stricken owners came
barging inside: “I lost my . . . Oh .
. . thank you, you’re the best!” I cleaned up the torn blue tickets from the 1893 saltwater
carousel, located just a few doors
down by the beach, which featured faded faceless mermaids to ride, not horses. Watch Hill’s
greatest claim to fame was that
Eleanor Roosevelt had been photographed riding a
redhead with a turquoise tail sidesaddle. (It was a town joke how put
out she looked in the shot, how uncomfortable and buried alive under her plate‑tectonic layers of
ruffled skirt.)
I cleaned the barbecue
sauce off the garbage cans, the
melted Wreck Rummage off the tables (Wreck Rummage was every kid’s favorite
ice cream flavor, a mash‑up of cookie dough, walnuts, cake batter, and dark chocolate nuggets).
I Cloroxed and Fantasticked and Mr. Cleaned the windows and counters and door‑ knobs. I dusted the
brine off the mussels and the clams, polishing every one like a gemstone dealer obsessively inspecting emeralds. Most days I rose at five and went with my dad to pick out the day’s seafood when the fishing
boats came in, inspecting crab legs and fluke, oysters and bass, running my
hands over their tapping legs
and claws, barnacles and iridescent
bellies. I composed song lyrics for a soundtrack to a made‑up movie
called Lola Anderson’s Highway
Robbery, drawing words, rhymes, faces, and hands on napkins and take‑out menus, tossing them in the trash before anyone saw them. I attended
grief support group for adolescents
at the North Stonington Community Center. There was only one
other kid in attendance, a silent boy named Turks whose dad had
died from ALS. After two
meetings he never
returned, leaving me alone with the counselor, a jittery woman named Deb who wore pantsuits and
wielded a three‑inch‑thick book called
Grief Management for Young People.
“‘The purpose of this exercise
is to construct a positive
meaning around the lost relationship,’ ” she read from chapter seven,
handing me a Goodbye Letter worksheet. “‘On this
page, write a note to your lost loved one, detailing fond memories, hopes,
and any final questions.’ ”
Slapping a chewed pen
that read tabeego
island resorts on my desk, she left. I could hear her on the
phone out in the hall, arguing with
someone named Barry, asking him why he didn’t
come home last night.
I drew a screeching
hawk on the Goodbye Letter, with lyrics to a made‑up Japanese animated film about a forgotten thought called Lost in a Head.
Then I slipped out the fire exit and
never went back.
I taught Sleepy Sam (giant yawn
of a teenager from England visiting his American dad) how to make clam cakes and the perfect grilled
cheese. Grill on medium,
butter, four minutes a side, six slices of Vermont sharp cheddar,
two of fontina. For July Fourth,
he invited me to a party at a friend of a friend’s. To his shock,
I actu‑ ally
showed. I stood by a floor lamp with a warm beer, listening to talk
about guitar lessons and Zach Galifianakis,
trying to find the right moment to escape.
“That, by the way, is Bee,” said Sleepy
Sam. “She does actually speak, I swear.”
I didn’t
mention Whitley’s text to anyone, though it was always in the back
of my mind.—
It was the brand‑new way‑too‑extravagant dress
I’d bought but never taken out of the bag. I just left it there in the back of
my closet, folded in tissue paper with the receipt, the tags still on, with
intention of returning it.
Yet there was still the
remote possibility I’d find the courage to put it on.
I knew the
weekend of her birthday like I knew my own: August 30.
It was a Friday.
The big event of the day had
been the appearance of a stray dog
wandering Main Street.
It had no tags and the haunted look of a prisoner of war. He was
gray, shaggy, and startled with every attempt
to pet him. A honk sent him skidding
into the garbage cans behind the Captain’s
Crow.
“See that yellow salt‑bed mud on his back paws? That’s
from the west side of Nickybogg Creek,” announced Officer Locke, thrilled
to have a mystery on his hands, his
first of the year.
That stray dog had been
the talk all that day—what to do with him, where he’d been—and
it was only much later that I found my mind
going back to that dog drifting into town out of the blue. I wondered if he was some kind of sign, a warning that
something terrible was coming, that
I should not take the much‑ exalted and mysterious Road Less Traveled, but the one well trod, wide‑open, and brightly lit, the road I knew.
By
then it was too late. The sun had set. Sleepy Sam was gone. I’d overturned the café chairs and put them
on the tables. I’d hauled out the trash. And anyway, that flew in the face
of human nature. No one ever heeded a warning sign when it came.
My mom and dad assumed I was joining them at the Dreamland
Theater in Westerly for the screwball comedy classics marathon, like I did every
Friday.
“Actually, I made plans tonight,” I said.
My
dad was thrilled. “Really, Bumble?
That’s great.” “I’m
driving up to Wincroft.”
They
fell silent. My mom had just flipped the Closed sign in the window, and she turned, wrapping her
cardigan around herself, shivering even though it was seventy‑five degrees out.
“How long have you known about this?”
she asked.
“Not long. I’ll be
careful. I’ll be back by midnight. They’re
up there for Whitley’s birthday. I
think it’ll be good for me to see them.”
“That’s a long way to drive in the dark,” said my dad.
My mom
looked like I’d been given a prognosis of six weeks left to live. Sometimes
when she got really upset, she chewed an imaginary piece of gum. She was doing
that now.
“Part
of the grieving process is confronting the past,” I said. “That’s
not the point. I—”
“It’s all right, Victoria.”
My dad put a hand on her shoulder. “But Dr. Quentin said not to put yourself in stressful situations
that—”
“We’ve established that Dr. Quentin is an idiot,” I said.
“Dr. Quentin is indeed an idiot,”
said my dad with
a regretful nod. “The fact that his name is one‑half of a state prison
should have been a red flag.”
“You know I don’t like it when you two gang up on me,” said
my
mom.
At
that moment, someone—some red‑faced weekender in seersucker shorts who’d had too many stouts at O’Malligan’s— tried to open the door.
“We’re closed,” my mom snapped.
—
That was how I came to be driving my dad’s ancient green Dodge RAM
with the emphysema muffler fifty miles up
the Rhode Is‑ land coastline.
Wincroft.
The name sounded like
something out of a windswept novel filled
with ghosts and madmen. The mansion was a
sprawling collection of red brick,
turrets, gardens, and crow gargoyles, built in the 1930s by a Great
White Hunter who’d supposedly called
Hemingway and Lawrence of Arabia his
friends. He had traveled the world
killing beautiful creatures, and thus Wincroft, his seaside estate, had never
been lived in more than a few weeks
in sixty years. When Whitley’s weird
ex‑second‑stepdad, Burt—commonly called E.S.S. Burt—bought it in
foreclosure in the 1980s, he gut renovated the interiors in an unfortunate
style Whitley called “if Madonna threw up
all over Cyndi Lauper.”
Still,
it wasn’t unusual to open a chest of drawers
in the attic, or a musty steamer trunk,
and find photographs of strangers
gripping rifles and wearing fox furs
or some weird piece of taxidermy—a ferret,
red frog, or rodent
of unknown species. This gave every visit
to Wincroft the mysterious feel of being on an archaeological expedition, as if
all around us, inside the floors, walls, and ceiling, some lost
civilization was waiting to be un‑ earthed.
“We
are our junk,” said Jim once, pulling a taxidermy
lizard out of a shoe box.
Leaving
the interstate, the road to get there turned corkscrewed and dizzying, as if
trying to shake you. The coast of Rhode Island—not the infamously uptight
Newport part, with the stiff cliffs and colossal mansions smugly staring down
at the tiny sailboats salting the harbor, but the rest of it— was rough and tumbledown,
laid‑back
and sunburnt. It was an old homeless beachcomber in a washed‑out T‑shirt who
couldn’t remember where he’d slept
the night before. The grasses were wiry and wasted, the roads salty and
cracked, sprouting faded signs and faulty traffic lights. Bridges
elbowed their way out of the marshes
before collapsing, exhausted,
on the other side of the road.
I still had their phone
numbers, but I didn’t want to call. I didn’t even know if they’d be there. All these months later their
plans could have changed. Maybe I’d knock
and Whitley wouldn’t answer, but her ex‑ second‑ stepdad, Burt, would, E.S.S. Burt with his too‑long, curly gray hair; Burt, who a million years ago had written
an Oscar‑nominated song for a tragic love story
starring Ryan O’Neill. Or maybe they would all be there. Maybe I wanted to see
the looks on their faces when they first saw me, looks they hadn’t rehearsed.
Then again, if they
didn’t know I was coming, I could still turn around. I could still go join my
parents at the Dreamland for His Girl
Friday, afterward head to the Shakedown for crab cakes and oysters, saying
hi to the owner, Artie, pretending I didn’t hear him
whisper to my dad
when I went
to the bathroom, “Bee’s really come around,” like I was a
wounded racehorse they’d decided not to euthanize. Not that
it was Artie’s fault. It was the
natural reaction when people found
out what had happened: my boyfriend,
Jim, had died senior year.
Sudden Death of the Love of Your
Life wasn’t supposed to
happen to you as a teenager. If it did, though, it was helpful if it was due to one
of the Top Three Understandable
Reasons for Dying as a Kid: A. Car accident. B.
Cancer. C. Suicide. That way, after you selected the applicable choice,
the nearest adult could promptly steer your attention to the range of movies
(many star‑ ring Timothy Hutton)
and self‑help books to help you Deal.
But when your
boyfriend’s death remains unsolved, and you’re left staring into a black hole
of guilt and the unknown?
There’s no movie or
self‑help book in the world to help you with
that.
Except maybe The Exorcist.
If I was a no‑show tonight, my old
friends would come
and go from Wincroft, and
that would be that. Not
showing up would be the
final push of that old toy sailboat
from my childhood, the one
shove that would really send it drifting
out toward the middle
of the lake, far from the shoreline, forever out of reach.
Then I’d never find out what happened to Jim.
I kept driving.
The twisting road
seemed to urge me onward, yellowed
beech trees streaking past; a bridge; the sudden, startling view of a
harbor where tall white sailboats
crowded like a herd of feast‑ ing unicorns before
vanishing. I couldn’t believe how
easily I remembered the way: left at the
Exxon, right on Elm, right at the
stop sign where you diced with
Death, run‑down trailers with strung‑up laundry and flat tires
in the yard. Then the trees fell away in deference to the most beautiful
kiss of sky and sea, al‑ ways streaked orange
and pink at dusk.
And
there it was. The wrought‑iron gate emblazoned with the W.
It was open. The lamps were lit.
I made the turn and floored it, oak branches flying
past like ribbons come loose
from a ponytail, wind howling through the
open windows. Another curve and I saw the
mansion, the win‑ dows golden and alive, all hulking red brick and slate, crow gargoyles perched forever on the roof.
As I pulled up I almost laughed
aloud at the four cars parked there, side by side. I didn’t recognize any of them—except for Martha’s
Honda Accord with the bumper sticker honk for general relativity. If pressed I could, with little
trouble, match the other cars with their respective owners.
I had changed so much. From the look of these cars, they had
not.
I checked my appearance in the rearview mirror, feeling im‑ mediate horror: messy ponytail, chapped lips, shiny forehead. I
looked like I’d just run a marathon
and come in last. I blotted my face
on the roll of paper towels my dad
kept in the door, pinched my cheeks, tucked the loose strands of
dark brown hair behind my ears. Then I was sprinting up the
stone steps and rapping the brass lion knocker.
Nothing happened.
I rang the doorbell, once, twice, three times, all in one crazy, deranged movement, because I knew if I hesitated at all I’d
lose my nerve. I’d sink, like some lost boot caught
inside a lobster trap, straight back
to the bottom of the sea.
The door opened.
Kipling stood there.
He was wearing a chin‑length pink
wig, blue polo shirt,
Bermuda shorts, flip‑flops. He was extremely tan and chewing a red drink stirrer,
though it fell out of his mouth when he saw me.
“Good
Lord, strike me down dead,” he said in his cotton‑plantation drawl.
About Marisha:
Marisha Pessl grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and now lives in New York
City. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, her debut novel, was a bestseller in
both hardcover and paperback. It won the 2006 John Sargent Sr. First Novel
Prize (now the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize), and was
selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book
Review. Her new novel, Night Film, comes out August 20, 2013.
Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Tumblr | Goodreads
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Tour
Schedule:
Week One:
6/1/2018- YA Books Central- Excerpt
Week Two:
6/4/2018- Two Chicks on Books- Excerpt
6/5/2018- Bookish Lifestyle- Review
6/6/2018- Tea With Mermaids- Review
6/7/2018- Trendy Simple Life- Review
6/8/2018- A Dream Within A Dream- Review
Week Three:
6/11/2018- Books Coffee and Repeat- Review
6/12/2018- Nerdophiles- Review
6/13/2018- Life of a Literary Nerd- Review
6/14/2018- Jena Brown Writes- Review
6/15/2018- Once Upon a Twilight- Review
Week Four:
6/18/2018- Here's to Happy Endings- Review
6/19/2018- Book-Keeping- Review
6/20/2018- A Gingerly Review- Review
6/21/2018- Cindy's Love of Books- Review
6/22/2018- RhythmicBooktrovert- Review
Week Five:
6/25/2018- BookHounds YA- Review
6/26/2018- Under the Book Cover- Review
6/27/2018- Smada's Book Smack- Review
