After Read online

  After

  Harmel, Kristin

  Delacorte Books for Young Readers (2010)

  * * *

  * * *

  To my friends Kate Atwood, Carleigh Pearson,

  Cole Pearson, Luke Pearson, and everyone else

  who has lost a parent too soon.

  • • •

  And as always, to Carol Harmel.

  I couldn’t ask for a better mother.

  I love you!

  A BIG THANK-YOU

  To Kate Atwood, the founder of Kate’s Club in Atlanta, and to NFL quarterback Brian Griese, the founder of Judi’s House in Denver. Both of you lost a parent too soon, and you’ve turned your grief into something that has helped thousands of children. Your mothers would be so very proud of you. I’m honored to have become a part of your world.

  To the Pearsons: Susan, Carleigh, Cole, and Luke. This book, while not based on you, was inspired by the time I’ve spent with you. I’m so glad to call you friends; I feel like you’re my Atlanta family! And I’m so impressed with all of you; you’re all amazing, strong, kind people, and I can’t wait to see what wonderful things life brings you.

  To my wonderful editor, Wendy Loggia, who has once again helped beat a rough manuscript into shape. Your guidance is invaluable, and I’m glad to work with you.

  To my amazing literary agent, Jenny Bent; her assistant, Chris Kondrich; my film agent, Andy Cohen; and the wonderful Delacorte Press family, including Elizabeth Zajac, Krista Vitola, and Angela Carlino.

  To my People magazine editor, Nancy Jeffrey, who allows me to work on the kind of stories that inspire me, move me, and let me share the heroism of good people with the world.

  To my own family, especially Mom, Dad, Karen, and Dave, and to all my wonderful friends.

  To all of my many writer friends: It’s such a pleasure and honor to know all of you. Thanks especially to Megan Crane, Liza Palmer, Jane Porter, Melissa Senate, Sarah Mlynowski, Alison Pace, Lynda Curnyn, Brenda Janowitz, Lisa Daily, and Emily Giffin, who are truly wonderful people as well as wonderful writers.

  And to you, the reader. This book is about changing your own little corner of the world. I hope that you feel inspired. Thanks for reading!

  prologue

  The day my whole world changed started like any other Saturday.

  “Lacey!” my dad called. “Are you coming? It’s going to be dinnertime when we get there!”

  I looked in the bathroom mirror and made a face. He said the same thing every Saturday morning—but maybe that was because I took longer getting ready than anyone else.

  “Why don’t you just get up earlier?” My brother Logan, who was eleven months older than me, appeared in the doorway and looked suspiciously at my reflection. I knew he’d been sent up to get me. I was putting on a coat of mascara and paused to glare at him.

  “I need my beauty sleep,” I said, trying to sound haughty.

  He rolled his eyes. “No kidding,” he muttered. “I think you need a little more.”

  He was gone by the time I threw a tube of toothpaste at him.

  Five minutes later, when I came downstairs, my dad, Logan, and my little brother, Tanner, were standing in the hallway, already bundled up in their coats and scarves. It was unusually cold that day, even though it was only November fifteenth. There had been an early freeze, and it hadn’t worn off yet. My dad held out my pink puffer jacket, and as I stepped into the hallway and took it from him, he winked, one corner of his mouth jerking upward just a little. I knew he was trying to hide his amusement from Logan and Tanner.

  “What the heck takes you so long anyway?” Tanner said. “I’m glad I’m not a girl.”

  Logan high-fived him. My dad looked up at me. “Is Your Royal Highness finally ready?” he asked, bowing slightly.

  My dad always called me that when I took a long time to get dressed. Even though he sometimes pretended to be as exasperated as Logan and Tanner, I think he secretly didn’t mind.

  “Where’s my beautiful wife?” Dad singsonged as I zipped up my jacket. Mom rounded the corner, dressed in the same ratty pink bathrobe she’d had for years, the one she would never throw away because it was the first gift Logan and I ever picked out for her, when Logan was four and I was three and Dad took us Christmas shopping. We’d bought her a new one last Christmas, but she refused to switch over.

  She was in her usual state of morning messiness, with sleep-flattened reddish brown, shoulder-length curls flying every which way and her cheeks slightly blotchy before she made it to her vanity mirror and her tray full of makeup. I always wished that I had inherited her pretty hair and Dad’s flawless complexion, but instead, it was the other way around. I had Dad’s stick-straight dirty blond hair that always looked stringy if I didn’t use a curling iron on the ends (which I hardly ever had time to do considering I shared a bathroom with two boys) and Mom’s acne-prone skin. Thank goodness for Clearasil, but most of the time my face was sporting at least one major zit, usually in a totally unflattering location like the middle of my forehead or smack in the center of my chin.

  “You’re taking my family and leaving me?” Mom asked dramatically, clutching her hands over her heart. “Whatever will I do?”

  Mom said the same thing every Saturday when Dad took the three of us out to breakfast. He called it “Dad time,” and while we were out scarfing down pancakes at the Plymouth Diner, Mom was having her weekly “Mom time,” which apparently included sitting around in her robe, sipping a cup of coffee, and putting on a facial mask while she fast-forwarded through TiVoed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI and whatever else she’d dozed off watching during the previous week.

  “Your mom thinks we’re giving her time alone,” Dad would whisper to us while she pretended she couldn’t hear, “but really, it’s just a good excuse for the four of us to hang out and eat greasy bacon and hash browns, right?”

  It had been our Saturday-morning routine for as long as I could remember. And it was the highlight of every week. Dad, Logan, Tanner, and I would sit at breakfast and talk about school and our friends and stuff, and Tanner, who wanted to be a comedian when he grew up, would always tell some silly joke he had just learned from his friends or the Internet that week, and when we’d get home, the house would always be a little cleaner, and Mom was always in a good mood. If we didn’t have anything big to do, we’d all go out for a hike or a bike ride or to play tennis at the local country club, where Mom had insisted we needed a membership, against Dad’s halfhearted protests.

  Mom and Dad kissed goodbye, then she gave each of us a peck on the top of our heads, and we were off.

  “Everyone have their seat belts on?” Dad asked as he started the car. Logan climbed in beside him.

  “Yes!” the three of us answered in unison. Dad turned and grinned at Tanner and me in the back, buckled his own seat belt, and put the car in reverse. As we pulled out of the driveway, he beeped the horn at Mom and blew her a kiss.

  “Cheesy!” Logan and I chorused. Tanner laughed.

  Mom smiled, waved from the doorway, and went inside.

  It took three minutes for us to get out of our neighborhood, Plymouth Heights, and onto a main street. It’s weird how normal everything still was in those final minutes. We saw Mrs. Daniels walking down her driveway to pick up the newspaper, and she waved at us as we passed. Dad and Logan waved back. I noticed Jay Cash and Anne Franklin, two kids from Tanner’s grade, playing basketball in the Cashes’ driveway. Anne tripped on her shoelace just before we passed, and I turned my head slightly to see if she’d start crying. She didn’t. Logan was absorbed in flipping through the radio stations, finally settling on the classic-rock station, which was playing the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” one of Dad’s favorite songs. He started to sing along, and when the chorus e
nded and a guitar solo began, Dad glanced at Tanner and me in the rearview mirror and grinned.

  “You guys would love California,” he said. “Maybe we’ll go there someday and surf.”

  “I want to surf!” Tanner exclaimed. At age eleven, he had just discovered skateboarding, and he had announced more than once at dinner that when he turned eighteen, he was going to move west, bleach his hair blond, and learn to catch waves. I had to admit, it was a fun fantasy to have in the middle of a Massachusetts winter.

  “I know!” Dad laughed as the light on Mayflower Avenue turned green and he eased his foot off the brake and onto the gas. He put on a fake surfer accent. “Hang ten, dudes!”

  It was the last thing Dad ever said.

  I think I saw it an instant before it happened, but my throat closed up, and there wasn’t time to open my mouth or even to scream before the Suburban plowed into the driver’s side of the car, hitting us with such force that the whole side crumpled, pinning me up against Dad’s seat. It was like everything was suddenly compressed into a much smaller space than it had been a second ago. I felt a terrible pain along the left side of my body, shooting from my upper leg, up my side, and down my shoulder into my arm. I screamed and felt Tanner grope for my right arm.

  The world felt dark and hazy. I couldn’t see anything, just shapes, and everything sounded muffled. I wondered for a second if I was dying. Far away, I could hear Logan yelling and Tanner crying. But I couldn’t hear Dad. Why couldn’t I hear Dad?

  My throat felt like I’d swallowed cotton balls, and my mouth wasn’t responding when I tried to make it work. I opened and closed it a few times, but I was only gurgling, not talking. I remember being terrified, and when I look back now, I think it was pure fear that kept me from being able to speak. When I finally did, there was only one thing that came out of my mouth.

  “Daddy?” I whispered weakly. I hadn’t called him that since I was twelve.

  It was the last thing I remember saying before everything went black.

  • • •

  When I came to, I was in the hospital. I didn’t know how much time had passed. But I think I already knew about Dad. I don’t know how—I didn’t see him again after the Suburban hit us—but maybe when you’re that close to someone, you can feel it when they’re not there anymore. That’s what I think, anyhow.

  It took me a few moments to focus on Mom’s face as I gradually swam to the surface of consciousness. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face was blotchier than usual. I couldn’t help noticing that she was still wearing the tattered pink bathrobe over her pajamas, which seemed strange and out of place in public. Mom was a lawyer in Boston, and she never left the house looking anything less than completely put-together.

  The hospital room was white and almost uncomfortably bright under big fluorescent lights. I licked my lips and realized I couldn’t feel my body.

  Mom jumped up and leaned over me. She looked scared.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she blurted out. “You broke your left femur—that’s the big bone in your thigh—in two places, and you have a few broken ribs and a broken left wrist, but they say all the bones should heal just fine.”

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked slowly, in a voice that sounded too thick to be my own.

  Mom’s lower lip quivered and she bit it, like it was the only way she could stop it from shaking. Her eyes filled with tears again.

  “Lacey, baby,” she said softly, sitting on the edge of my bed and reaching for my hands. I couldn’t feel her. I couldn’t feel anything. “The accident was really bad.”

  I stared at her for a minute. She hadn’t answered me. “Where’s Dad?” I repeated. “Where are Tanner and Logan?”

  She blinked at me a few times. “The boys are in the waiting room,” she said. “Uncle Paul’s with them. They’re going to be okay. Tanner broke his arm, and Logan had to get stitches, but they’re fine.”

  I remembered Tanner reaching for me just before everything went black. He must have been scared about me. “But Dad?” I asked again, my voice rising a little bit as panic began to set in.

  “Dad …,” Mom began, and then stopped. She took a big breath, glanced away, and then looked back at me with eyes that seemed foggy and lost. “The car … hit right around the driver’s seat,” she said slowly. “The doctors did everything they could, but …” She stopped, unable to say it.

  “Daddy died,” I completed her sentence, feeling tears well up in my eyes. “He died, didn’t he?”

  Mom nodded. A pair of fresh tears rolled down her face, one for each cheek, like skiers racing to the bottom of the slopes. I remembered the last thing Dad had said, and tried to imagine her tears as graceful surfers instead, trying to ride a wave into shore. But then the tears dropped off her jawline and melted into her robe, and I had the sudden feeling that the imaginary surfers had fallen off the edge of the wave and disappeared forever. It was that image that finally made me burst into tears.

  Mom wrapped her arms around me, and we sobbed together, with no more words to say.

  Later, after Logan and Tanner had come in to see me and Uncle Paul had taken them home, Mom sat by my bedside and told me that Dad had lost consciousness right away. The doctors said he probably didn’t even see it coming and didn’t feel scared, and that he was never awake to hurt. It was, they told her, the most painless way to go. One second, he was driving along happily on a Saturday morning with his three kids, and the next, it was all over. He never knew. He never had a chance to say goodbye.

  After a while, Mom asked if I had any questions. I said no, but of course, that was a lie.

  I wanted to ask what would have happened if I hadn’t had to curl my hair or if I hadn’t insisted on putting on mascara or if I hadn’t purposely dragged my feet a little just to annoy Logan and Tanner. But I didn’t need to ask. I knew what would have happened. We’d be sitting at home right now, trying to figure out whether to play Monopoly or Life or whether to watch a movie. Dad would be trailing his hand lazily down Mom’s back in that affectionate way that sometimes made me and Logan smile and roll our eyes at each other. Mom would be getting up every few minutes to put dishes in the dishwasher or to start the washing machine. Logan and Tanner would be fighting over the remote control because Tanner wanted to watch a Pokémon DVD and Logan wanted to watch sports.

  Dad wouldn’t be dead.

  And it wouldn’t be my fault.

  chapter 1

  TEN MONTHS LATER

  “And then I told Willow that her shoes were totally the wrong color for that outfit and actually, the shirt is really hideous anyhow, and I couldn’t believe she was going to actually go out in that, never mind go to the movies with me, and then Melixa said to me …”

  Sydney droned on and on from the front seat as I tried in vain to tune her out. Her high-pitched, squeaky voice made that pretty impossible, though. My best friend, Jennica, and I had decided that she must be trying to attract boys by sounding like a squeak toy, but until recently, I’d been sure that it only attracted dogs and whales and whatever else could hear such a high frequency.

  But then she landed Logan, who apparently found squeakiness enticing. This pretty much meant that I was stuck with her, because she was now our official ride to school. Mom had refused to let me or Logan take our driver’s tests since the accident, so it was either the school bus or hitching a ride with Logan’s popularity-obsessed girlfriend.

  “Uh-huh,” Logan said patiently from the passenger seat, as if he were actually listening. As far as I could tell, Sydney was telling the longest story in the world about a bunch of senior cheerleaders who didn’t matter to me at all.

  “So what do you think?” Sydney finally paused for what I was pretty sure was the first breath she had taken since picking us up ten minutes ago.

  “Um …,” Logan began, his voice trailing off. I hid a smile. He obviously hadn’t been listening either. I watched in amusement as he struggled for words. “What do I think?” he said finally. �
��I think you’re the most beautiful girlfriend in the world.”

  Oh, gag me. I waited for Sydney to realize that he was completely copping out, but instead she giggled, turned a weird shade of pink, and glanced at me in the rearview.

  “What do you think, Lacey?” she asked. “Don’t you think Summer was acting totally slutty? I mean, considering she’s practically engaged to Rob Macavey?”

  I sighed. “I don’t even really know her.”

  “Everyone knows Summer Andrews,” Sydney said, looking at me like I was a mental patient.

  “Right.” I bit my tongue. What I wanted to say was that everyone knew who Summer Andrews was—the cheerleading, BMW-driving, shiny-haired queen bee of our school—but that there were few people she actually deigned to talk to. And I was not one of them. I was pretty popular in my own grade, but I was definitely more bookworm than beauty-pageant contestant, which meant that Summer and her crowd hardly knew I was alive.

  Logan was a different story. Since he and social-climbing Sydney had begun dating six months ago, he had come home more than once proudly reporting—out of Mom’s earshot, of course—that he’d gotten drunk alongside Summer Andrews and her clones, Willow and Melixa, at parties. Like that was some major accomplishment.

  But I refrained from saying any of this, because Logan would kill me if I did. He always seemed to be walking on thin ice around Sydney. I must have been making a face without meaning to, though, because Sydney glanced at me once more in the rearview and snorted.

  “Oh come on, Lacey,” she said. “Just because you’re too busy making straight As and going to student council meetings and whatever else you think is so important doesn’t mean that the rest of us can’t have a social life.”

  I simmered for a minute. I was good at shutting my mouth, pressing my feelings into a little lockbox inside, and turning the key. I took a deep breath, blinked a few times, and said, “Wow, look at that! We’re here already!”