Year of Mistaken Discoveries
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Authors: Eileen Cook
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To Bailey, you were an amazing dog.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is a solo event; publishing a book is a team sport. I have a great team to work with, including you as the reader. Without you to read the book, I’m just a person sitting around making stuff up and talking to myself. No one wants to be that person, so thank you.
I have to thank Anica Rissi for believing in this book when it was just an idea, and Liesa Abrams for making sure it went from idea to completed manuscript. The entire crew at Simon Pulse is fantastic to work with, so thanks also go to Michael Strother (my cupcake partner in crime), Bethany Buck, Anna McKean, Amy Jacobson, Karina Granda, and Annette Pollert (and her dad).
My agent, Rachel Coyne, has been with me since the beginning. Thanks for the million things that you do, including laughing at my jokes.
To teachers and librarians who share their love of reading with others, in particular Jennifer Ochoa. Your passion for books inspires me.
I will always owe my parents for getting me addicted to books and my family for putting up with me. After writing this book, my cousin and her husband adopted, and I was blown away by the power of adoption to build new families. If you have any questions, or interest in adoption, please check out www.adoptionsupport.org.
This book is in part about friendship, and I am fortunate to have the most amazing friends. Special thanks to Jamie Hillegonds, Serena Robar, Joelle Anthony, Terra McVoy, Alison Pritchard, Shanna Mahin, Avita Sharma, Wendy Swan, Joanne Levy, Carol Mason, Robyn Harding, and Denise Jaden. To my best friend all through junior high and high school, Laura Sullivan: It’s amazing you know me this well and still put up with me.
And to my very best friend, my husband, Bob. I can’t imagine this adventure without you.
chapter one
I
t was clear that beer didn’t make my boyfriend a deep thinker.
“I never thought about it before, but Jesus was adopted.” Colton nodded slowly, as if realizing something very profound. Or he didn’t want to move too quickly in case he got the spins. “Joseph was, like, his stepdad.”
I tried to push down my sense of annoyance. He’d promised he wouldn’t get drunk tonight, and he’d already moved past drunk and into wasted territory. Then there was the fact that just about everything Colton did lately annoyed me. “What’s your point?”
I could see the wheels in Colton’s brain trying to churn their way through the waves of Budweiser and come up with a clear thought. “I’m pointing out you’ve got something in common with Jesus.”
“That is so cool,” Colton’s friend Ryan said. “It’s like that six degrees of separation thing.”
I managed to avoid rolling my eyes at the both of them. The party at Ryan’s was lame, and the revelation I had an inside connection with the Son of God wasn’t making it better. We were playing a game, two truths and a lie. You were supposed to say three things about yourself and make one of them a lie. The other person had to guess which one was made up. If they guessed correctly, you had to drink. If you fooled them, they had to drink. When it had been my turn, I’d listed:
—I’m in love with Colton.
—I’m adopted.
—I’ve already met my future roommate at Duke.
“I can’t believe you’re adopted,” Ryan said again. This was at least the third time he’d said it since I told him he guessed wrong. “How come you never told me before?”
My friend Lydia shoved him in the side. “Maybe Avery didn’t tell you because it’s none of your business, Mr. McNosy. Drop it, already.” She shot a smile over to me. She had picked up on how uncomfortable the whole conversation was making me. Lydia was one of those people who always tried to make things better for other people. She was like the Mother Teresa of our high school. Assuming Mother Teresa was a cheerleader and capable of tossing back Jägermeister shots.
There was no big reason I hadn’t told Ryan I was adopted before now. It wasn’t a deep dark secret that I didn’t want people to know; after all, I’d been the one to make it a part of the game. To be honest, I couldn’t always remember who knew and who didn’t. Now I wished I hadn’t brought it up at all. I’d assumed he would know that the lie was about Duke. Although I was obsessed with getting into Duke, I hadn’t even been accepted yet, let alone assigned a roommate.
“We should get going,” I said to Colton. I didn’t say anything about how earlier he had begged me for a ride so that he wouldn’t be out too late since he had practice the next day. “Or you can stay; it’s up to you.”
Colton sighed as if the weight of the world was pressing down on him. “Why do your parents treat you like you’re ten? We’re seniors. You’re the only person who has to be home by midnight on a Saturday.”
Proof of why my parents didn’t want me out late came bursting into the room. A group of guys from the football team ran through the living room, carrying on their shoulders some poor junior who was laughing hysterically. They went through the French doors that led outside and tossed the junior into the deep end of the pool. A cheer went up from the crowd. Someone had already dumped hundreds of packets of Crystal Light into the water, dying it a faint orange in honor of our school colors. Go Tiger Cats. Now that we were seniors and creeping closer to graduation, we were starting to get nostalgic for
the place we all kept saying we couldn’t wait to leave behind. When Ryan’s parents got back from Hawaii, he was going to be grounded for life.
“Can’t you text them and tell them you’re going to be late?” Colton suggested. “Just like a half hour. We’re having fun.”
I felt like pointing out that we weren’t having fun. He was. If I was really honest, I’d given two lies and only one truth. I wasn’t in love with Colton. What we had felt like a business arrangement. He was on the football team. I was a cheerleader. We were both popular. Our friends were going out with each other. It was like we were destined to date, regardless of the fact that we had almost nothing in common. When he asked me out last year, my two best friends had been so excited that I got excited too. There was no reason not to love Colton. He was good-looking and, despite the way he was acting at the moment, he was smart. He’d early applied to Harvard and was practically guaranteed a place. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; the problem was it didn’t go beyond that. I couldn’t even say I needed him to grow on me; we’d gone out for almost a year. I could tell the feeling was mutual. Colton liked me, but he didn’t love me either. We stayed together because there wasn’t really a reason to break up.
“Let’s play a different game,” my friend Shannon suggested. “We pick a person, and then we each write down two things that describe them on a piece of paper and put it into a bowl. The person has to draw from the bowl and guess who
would describe them that way.” Shannon got up from the floor, swayed for a moment, and then made it over to the hutch and grabbed the pad of paper by the phone. She started tearing off sheets and passing them around to the crowd that was in the living room. “Okay, we’ll start with Avery!”
“No, that’s okay,” I protested, but I was drowned out. Everyone scribbled something on their sheets and passed them to Shannon, who dumped them into a fancy crystal bowl that was on the shelf. I really hoped she didn’t drop it. It looked expensive.
“Okay, close your eyes and pick.”
I reached into the bowl and grabbed a slip of paper, reading it out loud for the group. “ ‘Super friendly and best gymnast on the cheer squad.’ ” I looked around the room. I spotted Liz near the back. She had pink lipstick on her teeth. Liz was a sophomore and an alternate on our cheer squad. She was nice, but she tried entirely too hard. You could smell the desperation to be liked coming off of her in waves. “I’m going to say Liz wrote this,” I said.
She squealed. “Oh my God! How’d you guess?” She glanced at the people around her. “I should have put down that she was smart, too, but I could only pick two things.”
I smiled. Figuring out it was her hadn’t exactly required the deduction skills of Sherlock Holmes. It didn’t hurt that she dotted her
i
’s with a heart. She had the handwriting of a sixth grader.
“Must be nice to have a girlfriend who’s a gymnast,” Ryan said to Colton with a wag of his eyebrows.
“Gotta love a girl who’s flexible,” Colton shot back, and the two of them clinked beer bottles.
I shot daggers at Colton.
“Keep the game going. Pick another paper,” Lydia called out, guessing that I was getting annoyed.
I grabbed another sheet. “ ‘She walks in beauty, like the night . . . and all that’s best of dark and bright,’ ” I read out. My forehead wrinkled. I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I looked around the room, but everyone else was looking at each other, trying to figure out who had written it. The words were in tight, all capital letters; it looked like it could have been typed. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Okay, fess up. Who said it?” Shannon slurred. She pouted when no one volunteered. “C’mon, the point of the game is to figure out who said what.”
I felt my cheeks burning. Suddenly I felt embarrassed, like I was the one who had said something private.
“Someone’s got a crush on you,” Lydia said in a singsong voice.
“Well, I’m not sharing.” Colton slapped me on the thigh.
I felt another layer of enamel grind down under my teeth. “I don’t want to play anymore.” I got up from the sofa and stormed off toward the kitchen, weaving my way through the crowd.
“Dude, you are in trouble,” I heard Ryan say as I walked out of the room.
The kitchen was cooler, no doubt due to the fact that someone had left the sliding door to the backyard wide open. A pile of leaves had blown in. Ryan was going to have to rake the kitchen in the morning. I poured myself a glass of water.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
I turned around and saw Brody Garret standing there. He’d transferred to our school at the end of last year, but he never bothered trying to fit in. He wasn’t a part of any of the groups at school. He wasn’t a jock or a nerd; he didn’t play in the band or go out for drama. He wasn’t a stoner or on the student council. He wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t unpopular, either. He always struck me as someone who was studying the rest of us for some kind of in-depth story on the modern high school. He had this way of staring at you that made you feel as if he was really seeing you. Seeing what no one else noticed.