DEDICATION
For Kit and me, at sixteen
EPIGRAPH
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Back Ad
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Guide
Cover
Contents
Chapter 1
iii
iv
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vii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
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9
10
11
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328
one
THE FIRST TIME I MET HER WAS AT THE TAIL END OF ONE OF those endless weekday nights you could only have at a school like Sherringford. It was midnight, or just after, maybe, and I’d spent the last few hours icing my sprained shoulder in my room, the result of a rugby scrimmage gone horribly wrong just minutes after it’d started. Practices tended to do that here, something I’d learned in the first week of school when the team captain shook my hand so voraciously I thought he was about to pull me in and eat me. Sherringford’s rugby team had landed at the bottom of its division at the end of every season for years. But not this year, no; Kline had made a point of reminding me of that, smiling with every one of his strange little teeth. I was their white whale. Their rugger messiah. The reason why the school shelled out not just a tuition scholarship for my junior year but my transportation costs, too—no mean feat when you visit your mother in London every holiday.
The only real problem, then, was how much I hated rugby. I’d made the fatal mistake of surviving a maul on the rugby field last year at my school in London before accidentally sort of bringing our team to victory. I had only tried because, for once, Rose Milton was in the stands, and I had loved her for two passionate, secret, awful years, but as I learned later, the Sherringford athletic director had been in the stands as well.
Front row, scouting. You see, we had quite a good rugby team at Highcombe School.Damn them all.
Especially my cow-eyed, bull-necked new teammates. Honestly, I even hated Sherringford itself, with its rolling green lawns and clear skies and a city center that felt smaller than even the cinder-block room they gave me in Michener Hall. A city center that had no fewer than four cupcake shops and not one decent place to get a curry. A city center just an hour away from where my father lived. He kept threatening to visit. “Threatening” was the only word for it. My mother had wanted us to get to know each other better; they had divorced when I was ten.