Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
Once, he’d hid out in the back of the adult section and nearly achieved his dream, managing to stay past closing time to 10:00 P.M., when he was found by a security guard, thrown into a cop car, and reunited with his mother. Kate had been underwhelmed—at least that was the way Quentin recalled it—his mother’s expression changing as soon as the cops left their home. “What the hell is wrong with you?” A roll of the eyes when he tried to hug her. Then off to the bedroom, the latest boyfriend, without a glance back.
Was that true? Like most people, Quentin so often lied to himself—out of protection or self-justification—to make himself the hero of his own story or at least someone deserving of sympathy . . . There were plenty of reasons for it. But regardless, it was difficult for him to put his trust in anything he hadn’t bothered to get on tape.
“This was what I wanted to show you,” Melanie said. She was standing at a long table to the left of the librarian’s station, in front of a section marked Our School, which held bound editions of the SRHS newspaper, as well as shelves of yearbooks in chronological order. Melanie was holding one of the yearbooks, thumbing through the pages.
“I knew about April Cooper when I first started working here,” she said. “I mean . . . she was probably the most famous person ever to have gone to Santa Rosa, which says a lot about this crappy school . . .”
Quentin moved closer. The yearbook was dated 1975–76. “She’s obviously not in here very much,” Melanie said. “She was only a freshman, and not exactly an activity queen.”
“How many pictures are in there of her?”
“Just one.” She laid the yearbook out on the table before him. It was opened to a spread titled “Freshman Homerooms.” Quentin’s gaze moved between the six black-and-white photos, but he couldn’t differentiate April Cooper from the other ’70s-era teens until Melanie tapped on her image with a bright red fingernail: a girl with delicate features and lank, dirty blond hair. She was short, but she slouched anyway, a baggy shirt and jeans swallowing up her frame. In the TV movie, April had been played by a twenty-one-year-old actress, and since photographs of the real girl were so scarce, that was the image that had stuck in most people’s minds: that of an overdeveloped young seductress, worldly beyond her years.