“And don’t even think about touching Andrew’s old lady neighbor,” said Ned. “Because somebody cares about her now. We care about her now.”
The chuckle returned, soft and waiting, from the throat of one who has evil plans.
“Here are the films, Andrew,” said the instructor. “They are yours. So many choices, Andrew. You may keep them. Show them. Or destroy them.” The instructor smiled. “The films are brilliant, Andrew. You know they are. Do come to the party. I will send you an invitation.”
The shadow of him lessened, and thinned. For a moment there was smoke where the instructor had been and then there was nothing.
Nothing visible, anyway, thought Autumn.
There were only wrinkled napkins, empty Coke glasses, and cold pizza. No sense of evil lingered. Even knowledge and memory of evil began to fade.
I should write it down, thought Autumn, or hang onto a thread of it, because you cannot allow yourself to forget how easily it can touch you.
“Is he really gone?” whispered Ned. “Or just waiting? It can’t be this easy.”
“I think he’s always waiting,” said Autumn.
They trembled in the hot music-laden dining room.
“Waiting for what?” Andrew wanted to know.
“Choice,” said Autumn, who for one tiny sliver of time knew all the answers. “Waiting for when you have to make another choice, waiting to help you make the choice, waiting to step up and turn from smoke to flesh.”
Ned shuddered. Autumn in her cloak of knowledge was as terrifying as the instructor had been in his Cloak of evil. “What’s your neighbor’s name, Andrew?” said Ned. He spoke loudly and brazenly, shoving away smoke. “I’ll drop by and pretend to sell grapefruit for the marching band, or something, get to know her, make sure she’s okay.”
But Andrew did not tell him what he wanted to know. A funny hot greedy expression crossed Andrew’s handsome face. “Look outside,” said Andrew.
In the almost-empty parking lot, shadows gathered like a mob. Shadows drawing together to make themselves thick and strong, moving on, finding another SC.
Autumn leaped out of the booth and raced out of the restaurant and ran out into the parking lot, waving her arms like a person running through a flock of ducks on the grass, to make them fly away.
From inside she looked truly peculiar, a girl gone nuts, trying to scatter gravel.
But the shadows were gone.
Andrew was embarrassed for her. He hated it when people did stupid things in public.
“I guess you always look foolish when you’re trying to stop something nobody else sees,” said Ned. I’m in love with Autumn, he thought. She won’t ever love me back, but I can drive her home anyway. We can check on Andrew’s neighbor together.
Autumn and Ned drove away.
Andrew walked alone to his own vehicle. How tightly he gripped his films. He remembered how the principal had been so surprised that Andrew would bother to check on Mr. Phillips. He remembered that he had not, in the end, bothered anymore with Mr. Phillips. Nor cared anymore.
We all had darkness in us, thought Andrew Todd. All four of us stepped up when darkness appeared, and I, some of the time, even enjoyed the dark. Did Mariah enjoy it? Did Ned? Did Autumn?
Very lightly, he swung the camcorder back and forth. Just as lightly, his thoughts went back and forth. Which should he do? Which would make the better film? Light? Or dark?
Autumn had been right. There would always, always be a moment of choice: choice between kindness or cruelty … between entertaining one’s self or sparing others.
For a moment Andrew was very angry. You should be able to make one single choice and be done with it, not have this constant nagging at the bottom of your soul. Andrew looked down at the bottom of his soul. How great was the appeal of the darkness. How quickly the smoke of evil swirled up when you thought choice.
Andrew lifted the camcorder, and hugged it to his heart. The thought of future films and parties warmed him. He tried to run to his car. Shadows deepened around him. Catch up to the others, thought Andrew dimly. Get with Autumn and Ned, find Mariah and Julie and Bevin.
Stumble, whispered the instructor, and join the dark.
Andrew stumbled.
A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney
Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller The Face on the Milk Carton. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.
Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.
Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!
Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book, Safe as the Grave, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.
Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.
Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning The Face on the Milk Carton, about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993), The Voice on the Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book, Janie Face to Face, will be released in 2013.
Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the Mayflower.
The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”
Cooney at age three.
Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.
Ten-year-old Cooney won a local library’s summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrote reviews of Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison and Jean Craighead George’s Vison, the Mink. “What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention,” she recalls.
Cooney’s report card from sixth grade in 1959. “Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later,” she says.
Cooney in middle school: “I went through some lumpy stages!”
In 1964, Cooney received the Flora Mai Holly Memorial Award
for Excellence in the Study of American Literature from the National League of American Pen Women. “I always meant to write to them, and tell them that I kept going!” Cooney says. “I love the phrase ‘pen woman.’ I’m proud to be one.”
Cooney at age nineteen, just after graduating from high school. (Photo courtesy of Warren Kay Vantine Studio of Boston.)
Cooney with Ann Reit, her book editor at Scholastic. Many of the books Cooney wrote with Reit were by assignment. “Ann decided what books she wanted (for example, ‘entry-level horror, no bloodshed, three-book series,’ which became Fog, Snow, and Fire) and I wrote them. I loved writing by assignment; it was such a challenge and delight to create a book when I had never given the subject a single thought.”
Cooney with her late agent Marilyn Marlow, who worked with her on all of the titles that are now available as ebooks from Open Road.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1995 by Caroline B. Cooney
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-6770-7
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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EBOOKS BY CAROLINE B. COONEY
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Caroline B. Cooney, Night School
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