Wild Awake (31 page)

Authors: Hilary T. Smith

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Girls & Women, #Social Issues, #Depression & Mental Illness, #Adolescence

BOOK: Wild Awake

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When I get to the Imperial, the doors and first-floor windows are boarded up. There’s a new chain-link fence blocking the building off from the sidewalk, with a flimsy plastic sign that says
PARAMOUNT PROPERTIES
. I roll to a stop, clenching the brakes so hard, my knuckles whiten. There’s something scary about seeing a building boarded up, especially if you know who used to live there—it makes you think about your house and all your friends’ houses, and imagine the people erased. I gaze up at the dark windows, and the nothingness I see there terrifies me more than the hotel ever did when it was full.

Where did Jasmine go, and Larry and Fink, and Jojo, the dog who trembles all over? Where would Doug have gone? They’ve been swept out like spiders, scattered to the streets. But even as my heart aches of think of it, another truth drops into my mind as clearly as a stone into a pool of water: If Sukey was alive, she would be right here beside me. She’d point to a fourth-story window and say, “I used to live in that one. Four-oh-nine.” I’d follow her gaze, hardly believing that my sister the painter had lived through such a time, when her only friends were an old man named Doug and a three-legged cat, and her studio was the rooftop of a derelict hotel.

We’d stare at that window for a long time, me on my red bike and Sukey on her green one.

“Let’s do this,” Sukey would say.

And we’d do what I’m doing now:

We’d hop the fence.

We’d scurry up the fire escape without looking down.

And we’d paint one last picture, together this time, in the place where Sukey had always stood alone.

I lock my bike to a lamppost and clamber over the chain-link fence with a clumsiness that would make a ninja cry. It snags at my pajamas and rattles more noisily than a half dozen garbage cans knocked over by raccoons. I land with a
thump
on the other side and hurry down the alley without pausing to investigate the scratches on my arms and the tear on my sleeve. This time, I don’t hesitate on the fire escape. It’s like the critical moment in capture the flag when you spy a spot of color on a tree branch and there is nothing to do but run, no matter who is chasing you or how the rocks tear at your feet, to grab it and claim it for your own. The fire escape clangs, my bag bounces against my hip, and I swallow the night air in gasping lungfuls.

Just when I’ve launched myself over the last few rungs of ladder and onto the roof, a car pulls up and a door slams. I drop to a crouch, my pulse a roar I am certain you could hear six stories down. A walkie-talkie crackles.

Security guard
.

My body reacts instantly. Before I know it, I’ve flattened myself against the roof, my arms and legs splayed out. Whoever’s down there walks up and down the block, leaving the car idling by the curb. My ears strain to catch every footfall, every scratch of static from the walkie-talkie.
Should have locked my bike farther away
. I think of all the places I’ve marked with paint—the bridge and the bike trail and the tree. Does that count as vandalism? Am I about to get arrested? I press my face into the roof, as if that could hide me any more than I’m already hidden, thinking,
please please please please please
.

The footsteps move back toward the idling car. The door opens and slams again, and after a thirty-second pause during which I am sure the person inside is dialing for reinforcement, the car drives off and the street is quiet.

The breath I was holding scrapes my throat coming out, as if it had been sharpened into a knife blade in my lungs. My first instinct is to grab my bag and climb down before I have any more close calls. But when five minutes pass and the car hasn’t come back, my tensed muscles relax. If Sukey painted here in broad daylight without getting caught, what are the chances of anyone checking the rooftop tonight?

I ease myself up and brush myself off, my ears buzzing faintly from adrenaline. Grabbing the bag, I fumble my way to the place where the drips from Sukey’s paintbrush have collected like the petals of an enchanted flower. When I crouch to touch them, the paint splatters are smooth under my fingers, distinct from the roughness of the roof. I unscrew the last of the paint jars, the arsenic and ochre and gold, colors I would have hardly believed existed if she hadn’t brought them into my world. They splash onto the rooftop and scatter into a hundred different shapes, joining the cacaphony of colors. I don’t know what she would have painted with them and I guess I never will, but for now, like this, they are beautiful.

I sit on the rooftop all night long, cradled in the broken lawn chair like a ramshackle bird in a plastic nest. Below me, the neighborhood tosses and turns like a person in a fever. The lamps burn too bright. The street sweats. A bottle breaks on a sidewalk. A police car howls through an intersection.

I wrap my arms around my knees and cry and laugh for a very long time, but mostly I just hold myself very, very tightly, like a piece of dandelion fluff you’ve finally caught in your fingers after chasing it, leaping for it, again and again on a windy day. The universe, I realize, is full of little torches. Sometimes, for some reason, it’s your turn to carry one out of the fire—because the world needed it, or your family needed it, or you needed it to keep your soul from twisting into a shape that’s entirely wrong.

So you go, and you come back with paint all over your hands and scabs on your knees and the lingering traces of a song few people have ever heard, echoing in your ears.

I stay until the sky turns pale pink and a flock of small brown birds alights on the edge of the roof, chirping and whistling and flapping their wings. There’s a rumbling from the street as someone rolls up a metal screen. The sweetness of steaming buns fills the air: the Chinese bakery. I push myself up from the lawn chair and go to the place where the paint forms a brilliant carpet beneath my feet.
The soul has a home of its own
, Sukey said,
and I want to live in that one
. I feel, as I gaze down at the shining colors, that I am standing in a place I have been forever. A place I will leave without leaving. A place I will find, and yet search for, for the rest of my life.

As I climb onto the fire escape, a blueness catches my eye, so slight and far away, I almost don’t turn my head.

But I do stop.

And I do look.

And this is what I see: There, on the horizon, two ships.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my editor, Molly O’Neill, who was a lighthouse in the stormy seas of revision and a great mentor; and to my agent, Laura Rennert, without whose wisdom and encouragement this ship might have capsized many times over. I’m grateful every day to have fallen into such good hands and am deeply indebted to you both.

Thank you to Lara Perkins and everyone at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency; my foreign rights agent, Taryn Fagerness; Barb Fitzsimmons, Lauren Flower, Tom Forget, Brenna Franzitta, Esilda Kerr, Casey McIntyre, Amy Ryan, Valerie Shea, Megan Sugrue, Katherine Tegen, Joel Tippie, and all the other wizards at HarperCollins who do the magical stuff that makes a book a book; Lynn Lindquist for encouragement in the early drafts; all the INTERN readers whose friendship has been an inspiration and an unexpected delight; and to friends and loved ones in too many cities to name.

May your own adventures be rich and true.

About the Author

Photo by Gabriel Jacobs

HILARY T. SMITH
wanders, but is not lost. Also known as the formerly anonymous publishing industry blogger INTERN, Hilary is now a full-time writer and wilderness lover. She wrote various parts of
Wild Awake
while living in a van, on a houseboat, and in an off-the-grid cabin seven miles from the nearest paved road. By the time you read this, she will probably be living somewhere new, but you can always visit her online at www.hilarytsmith.com.

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Credits

Cover design and flower illustrations by Tom Forget

Copyright

Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

W
ILD AWAKE
. Copyright © 2013 by Hilary T. Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. 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 HarperCollins e-books.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Hilary T.

Wild awake / Hilary T. Smith. — First edition.

pages cm

Summary: “The discovery of a startling family secret leads seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd from a protected and naive life into a summer of mental illness, first love, and profound self-discovery.”— Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-06-218468-9

EPub Edition April 2013 ISBN 9780062184702

[1. Family life—Fiction. 2. Mental illness—Fiction.] I. Title.