Prologue
The first time Will Sterling saw Nora Clarke, he could barely see at all.
In the cool shade of the large maple tree he leaned against on that bright summer day, the whole world looked blurry to him—the leaves above him green but shapeless, the patio furniture to his left dull black but soft-edged, the building in front of him tall and sand-colored, the back doors for each apartment little more than dark, smudgy rectangles leading out to wood-built balconies whose slats looked wavy unless he squinted.
He’d gotten used to it, the blurriness, or maybe he’d never reallyhadto get used to it. He couldn’t quite remember a time when he didn’t have to narrow his eyes to bring things into focus, though he knew it’d been getting worse. He knew that sitting in the second row of most of his classes didn’t cut it anymore; he knew that last year he sometimes left third period—AP Lit, his only class with Caitlin, who liked to sit way in the back—with a thudding headache. He knew the dull white leather of the baseball had become the most important thing about it, that he saw it best against the bright blue of a clear sky, that he was more likely to get chewed out by Coach on cloudy days.
He knew he couldn’t always tell anymore, unless he was really up close to her, whether his mother was smiling.
But . . .glasses? Will Sterling in glasses? Out on the field, in those huge, sweaty-looking sports goggles Brandon Tenney wore?
He couldn’t come around to the idea, not yet. So all last year, he’d dodged the school nurse when she did eye exams, took notes off the person next to him instead of from the board or the projector screen, always asking—politely, he hoped charmingly—first. He crossed his fingers for sunny days.
He let his unreliable eyes drift back to the smudgy black rectangle he’d been trying his best to watch most closely, the one from which he’d made his unceremonious exit barely twenty minutes ago.
“Wait outside,” his mother had said in a sharp, unfamiliar voice, once it’d been clear that things weren’t going according to whatever plan she’d had when the day started. A two-anda-half-hour drive into Chicago, a city Will had never been to before, a promise not to tell his father, and not a single word of preparation for that moment when they’d stood in the dim first-floor hallway of this apartment building and she’d knocked on the door with a determined insistence that had almost felt rude.
“This is your uncle,” his mother had told him when a short, barrel-chested, wholly unfamiliar man answered. Will was close enough, eye level enough, to see the way the man’s mouth had dropped open slightly and briefly before he’d closed it and set his jaw against them both.
“My brother,” she’d added softly, a crack of emotion in her voice.
You have a brother?he’d thought, confused, blurry in his head, too, but still he’d stuck out his hand for the man—hisuncle—to shake.
“I’m Will,” he’d said automatically, politely, glad that his own voice had mostly stopped cracking over the last few months since he’d turned fifteen. It came out, to his own ears, sounding more grown-up and unsurprised than he felt inside.
But the man—hisuncle, his uncle he’dnever heard of—hadn’t taken his hand. Hadn’t looked at him at all. Instead, he’d stared at Will’s mother like she was a ghost, or maybe like she was alive, but back from the dead.
Inside the apartment, which smelled like cigarettes and the same furniture polish his mother used at home, no one had moved to sit down; no one had spoken. His uncle—Donny, his mother had finally supplied, since the man himself had shown no interest in further introductions—stood beside a brown recliner (lumpy but undefined, to Will’s unreliable eyes), his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. His mother had stayed near the door, and so had Will. She’d been waiting, he thought, to be well and truly invited in.
But even Will could see that wasn’t going to happen.
“I won’t do this with your kid here,” Donny had said finally, the first words Will ever heard him say.
Your kid, Will had repeated in his mind. He’d always been a good listener, at least, and he got the message. Maybe this guy Donny was Will’s uncle, but he sure didn’t intend to be any kind of family, and Will tried to tell himself that was fine by him anyway. After all, he was an only child, and up until this moment he’d thought his parents were only children, too. Other kids in his school had grandparents, cousins, big gatherings at the holidays. But the Sterling household, it was a small unit. Just the three of them. Not even a dog or a cat or a goldfish to complicate things.
Still, Will had felt a flush creep up his neck, a hot fire in his stomach, a tightness in the muscles of his arms. He was quick-tempered lately, easily angered. When he wasn’t preoccupied with thoughts of girls—Caitlin, mostly, but if he was honest he had a real wandering eye—he could be moody and distractible and sullen. If all the stuff his health teacher said in class was right, it was all part of growing up, but right then, he felt like there was a purpose to all his confusing, quick-fire emotions. Maybe he was only fifteen, but he was already taller than this Donny person, and he lifted weights for baseball. He didn’t like anyone speaking to his mother so sharply.
But that’s when she’d given herWait outsidedirective, and he’d been so surprised to be directed that way, to be . . . almostdisciplinedthat way. At home his parents had always been loose, accommodating, a little absentminded, and if Will thought it was less about a parenting style than it was about wanting some time for the two of them and their constant, sometimes exhausting affection for each other, well . . . at least he got to stay out later than other kids; at least he didn’t have to ask permission for everything, or to show anyone his homework at the end of the night, or to call when he’d be late coming home from practice.
So in his shock—from that moment, from all the moments that had led up to it—he’d gone. Out the back door instead of the front, the same smudgy black rectangle he watched now. He couldn’t rely on his eyes or on the bright July sunlight enough to count on being able to see if anything went wrong in there, so he’d left the glass door open behind him when he’d gone, only shutting the screen. He’d turned to the left on the rickety wood beneath his feet and taken the few short, also-rickety steps down from the first-floor balcony. He’d crossed a stretch of sunbaked grass to a leafy, too-large-for-the-yard tree.
And he’d waited.
Tried to focus his eyes and his mind.
What did it mean that he had an uncle he’d never heard of? What did it mean that his mom had come here—and brought Will along—without telling his dad? Come to think of it, what did it mean that things had been quiet at home lately, that his mom and dad sometimes seemed to have sullen moods to match his own, that they seemed to retreat even more often than usual into each other, closing their bedroom door and shutting him out, brushing off his questions when they’d finally emerge?
Maybe someone else would say divorce. A lot of Will’s teammates had divorced parents, one of them with a real messy situation that involved court appearances and social workers, the mom and dad constantly trying to out-parent each other, even from the bleachers on game days. But Will knew better than to think his own parents would split. The Sterlings were devoted to each other, devoted enough that in all their secret, usually smiling looks for each other, in the way they sat close all the time, in their touches and kisses and whispers, Will sometimes felt like a complication himself. Like an unwanted dog or cat or goldfish.
An interruption.
“Hey!” interrupted a voice from above.
A girl’s voice.
A perfect voice, somehow, even from that short, everyday word. It sounded like a laugh at liftoff.
He turned his head up toward it—on instinct, in anticipation.
