The Secret Year
Authors: Jennifer R. Hubbard
The start of something . . .
“I can tell you how you’re luckier than Austin Chadwick.”
“This ought to be good.”
She took another couple of steps toward me, close enough now that I could smell her shampoo, a soapy peach scent that I got to know very well later. She counted on her fingers. They were long and white, with perfectly curved nails. I wanted to touch them, but I didn’t. “One, you’re smarter than Austin. Two, you’re probably
not
an alcoholic. Three, you’re better looking than he is. Four, you’ve got the balls to wade out into the Willis River with me.”
“That’s some list.”
She laughed low in her throat and took one more step, and now I could feel the heat coming off her skin. “You still think Austin has it better than you? You’d rather be sprawled out on the floor of the country club men’s room than here with me?”
“Not especially.”
That’s when she kissed me.
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JENNIFER R. HUBBARD
SPEAK
Published by the Penguin Group
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2010
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011
Copyright © Jennifer R. Hubbard, 2010
All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Hubbard, Jennifer R.
The secret year / by Jennifer Hubbard.
p. cm.
Summary: Reading the journal of the high-society girl he was secretly involved with for a year helps high school senior Colt cope with her death and come closer to understanding why she needed him while continuing to be the girlfriend of a wealthy classmate.
ISBN: 978-0-670-01153-7 (hc)
[1. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 2. Social classes—Fiction. 3. Secrets—Fiction. 4. Death—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Diaries—Fiction.]
I. Title
PZ7.H8582Sec 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009015179
Speak ISBN 978-1-101-57616-8
Book design by Sam Kim
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
chapter 1
Julia was killed on Labor Day on her way home from
a party. I didn’t get to see her that night. I used to meet her on Friday nights, but I was never invited to the parties that she was invited to. We’d meet on the banks of the river, clutch at each other in the backseat of her car, steam up her windows and write messages and jokes to each other in the fog on the glass, and argue about whether to turn on the A/C. Sometimes we swam in the river late at night when the water was black and no one could see us. We did all that for a year, and nobody else knew.
There were a couple of reasons we never told anybody about us. For one thing, she lived up on Black Mountain Road, in a house that was five times as big as mine. With servants. And a computerized alarm system that looked like it should’ve been running the space program instead of protecting one house. At my place, we just had a sign my father tacked up in our yard that said
TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT
. We didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway. I lived on the flats off Higgins Farm Road, where there were no farms left anymore, in a house with my father’s junked cars all over the yard. Every couple of years the township gave my dad a ticket and tried to get him to clear out our property, but he basically told them to go to hell. When I was little, I liked to play in those cars. I used to imagine I could help get them running again. But by the time I was fifteen, I realized those wrecks were never going to move again unless they were dragging behind a tow truck.
Anyway, that was the biggest difference between Julia and me: Black Mountain versus the flats. Not that we were Romeo and Juliet or anything. Nobody was trying to keep us apart. My family wouldn’t have cared if I’d gone out with her. Julia’s family probably would’ve hated me, but they wouldn’t have locked her in her room. It was what her friends would’ve thought that bothered her, I think. Besides, she already had a boyfriend: Austin Chadwick. His name always sounded fake to me, like the kind an actor would give himself. She was with him that last night.
Austin lived on Black Mountain, too, with his expensive car and his expensive clothes. I have to admit, though, the cars and clothes didn’t bother me as much as the way he strutted around like he was
entitled
to what he had, instead of realizing he was born into it, dumb-ass lucky.
Was I jealous that he could go anywhere he wanted with Julia, that they ate at the same lunch table and made out in front of the drinking fountain? Hell, no. I didn’t want to be her boyfriend. Things were better the way they were. She used to drive down to the bridge near my house in her little black car, and I’d meet her there. I guess I would’ve liked to
talk
to her at school, though. Not to have to pretend we didn’t know each other. When she passed me in the halls, her eyes would glide over me like I was part of the walls. That turned me cold. I liked to break that glide, to catch and hold her eyes.
Usually nobody else was looking, but once her friend Pam noticed. She nudged Julia, leaned in, and whispered in her ear. Julia laughed and flipped her hair back as if to say, “Who, that guy? I was just staring into space, and he happened to be in the way.”
I heard about the accident a few hours after it happened. It was Labor Day—night, actually. The house was too quiet because my brother, Tom, had just gone off to his first year of college. I wasn’t used to the stillness yet. Before, I had always heard his stereo, or his hammering away at weird projects, like the twelve-foot abstract wooden “sculpture” he built in the backyard.
I was on my bed, listening to the rain and trying to decide whether to go into the kitchen for another bowl of cornflakes (and hear my mother say for the ten millionth time, “Colten, do you have a tapeworm?”) or keep lying there and fall asleep, which would mean waking up starving around two in the morning.
The phone rang then. I rolled over to grab it. “Colt?” my friend Sydney said. I knew she recognized my voice, but she always sounded tentative, as if she might’ve dialed the wrong number.
“Hi, Syd.”
“Did you hear about the accident?”
“What accident?”
“Up on Black Mountain Road. Julia Vernon got killed, and Pam Henderson’s in the hospital.”
I sat up. “Who told you that?”
“Kirby. The Hendersons called her to babysit Pam’s brother when they went to the hospital.”
I got out of bed and started to walk up and down the space between my bed and desk. “Are you sure?”
“All I know is what Kirby said. She seemed pretty sure.”
I didn’t say anything. I kept pacing.
“I bet they were drunk. There was a big party at Adam Hancock’s all day—his parents are in Greece.”
“Were they in Austin’s car? Was he with them?”
“No, it was just the two of them, in Pam’s car.”
Well, they sure as hell couldn’t have been in Julia’s. I knew her car was in the shop, and I also knew why, but I couldn’t tell Syd any of that.
“What else did you hear?” I asked.
“Not much. But Kirby thinks Pam is going to be okay.”
Syd wasn’t part of the Black Mountain crowd any more than I was. After all, she lived on the flats, and she hung around with people like me. But she kept tabs on the Black Mountain kids as if she were a reporter for a celebrity gossip show. Syd got her information from friends like Kirby Matthews, who lived at the base of Black Mountain and didn’t fully belong to either the mountain or the flats crowd. Most of the time, when Syd told me the latest from the grapevine, I couldn’t care less. That night I did care. That night I wanted to know everything.
I got off the phone with Syd as soon as I realized she didn’t know any more than she’d said already. I called Julia’s cell phone. I had never done that unless I was sure she wanted me to and sure she’d be alone. Now I called anyway. I wanted her to tell me the gossip was wrong, that she was fine. I would’ve even been happy to have her pissed at me for calling.
Nobody answered. I got her usual message. “Hi there, it’s Julia, and my phone’s off because I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t want the rest of civilization listening to my calls. Leave a message, the juicier the better, extra points for creativity, and I’ll listen to it when I’m alone.” I hung up before the beep and sat on my bed, trying to figure out what to do next.
I couldn’t help thinking of the last time we’d seen each other, the fight we’d had. We’d made up afterward, but it was one of those fights where the other person’s words burn right into you, where apologies don’t keep them from scarring. But I didn’t want to think about that now. So even though all the details threatened to rise up and run through my head again, I squashed them down. I focused on trying to find out what had happened, whether she was really dead.
I had an old black-and-white TV in my room. “Museum quality,” my brother Tom always joked, but it was good enough to get me the eleven o’clock news. Yes, there had been an accident on Black Mountain Road. They showed the car, gnarled metal that looked like it could’ve once been Pam Henderson’s car. One fatality, the passenger. The driver had been taken to the hospital. No names were being released yet.
One fatality, the passenger. I knew then. But some part of me didn’t believe it, and in the days after that I kept waiting for more information, waiting for the story to change. Even when everybody knew she was dead, when the obituary came out and the funeral was scheduled, I kept expecting to see her in town, at school, at the bridge. Late at night, I’d call her cell number just to hear her voice in that recorded message. It took a few weeks for her parents to cut off the service. Every time I called, I was scared somebody in her family would answer the phone, but they never did.
Rumors about the accident filled the school halls. People said Julia was drunk that night but Pam wasn’t. Pam came out of the accident with a broken arm and a concussion. She supposedly told her friends that Julia wasn’t strapped in because she kept leaning out the window to throw up. I wasn’t a friend of Pam’s, so I never heard anything firsthand.
They said Pam went so crazy over the whole thing, seeing Julia die and all, that they shipped her off to a different school this year. I didn’t know how much of that was true, about Pam going crazy, but she wasn’t at the funeral. I managed to go; you didn’t need an invitation for that. Nobody asked me what I was doing there because so many kids from school had come, even people who hardly knew Julia. I stayed in the back.
Austin was there. Julia told me she was going to break up with him at the party, but she’d said that before. If she did break up with him, he sure didn’t show it. He stood with her family, held her mother’s hand, patted her brother’s shoulder. He went up to put a rose on her casket right after her mother did. He even stroked the surface of the casket like it was Julia’s skin.
I knew Julia, but nobody else knew that. We were good at keeping secrets. So after Labor Day weekend, I was the only one who knew about us.