Cover

Dedication

For Chris, Gwendolyn, and Ginger

MARCH

30

MY SISTER DINA’S last words were “I’m telling you, that hamburger tasted like it had boogers on it.”

My sister Siena’s last words were “Are you saying . . . it was a hambooger?”

My mother’s last words were “Tony, do you see that—”

My father’s last words were “Oh God—hold on, girls. Hold on!”

Then the car plunged off the side of the road and sank darkly into a drainage canal full of icy slush. And poof! the Radegan family was finished.

Well, except for me.

Apparently I didn’t get the memo.

I remember thinking, Mom, I can’t breathe. And then somehow I found myself gasping in the frigid air, dog-paddling, too dazed to know which way was up, fading in and out of consciousness, and then, at last, facedown and elbow-deep in a patch of frost-crunchy mud.

I turned to look for the others. The water was horribly still and silent, except for the occasional gurgle of air escaping from the car below like the belch of a beast that had eaten its fill.

The scene remained mostly quiet until emergency vehicles arrived. There were bystanders up on the road, people milling about at the top of the steep hill, pondering the horror of what they’d seen. Snippets of their shocked reactions reached my ears, oddly clear in the damp air—all those oh nos and I can’t believe its and one particularly heart-wrenching Merciful Mary, Mother of God. They didn’t come looking for me because it was unthinkable that anyone could have survived.

So I lay in the dark without making a sound, waiting and wanting to die.

Three months later, I was still waiting.

CHAPTER

1

MY TOOTHBRUSH WAS slime green, and the bristles, after only six weeks of use, were beginning to fray and spread outward. They also came unattached and got stuck between my teeth when I brushed, which I did, twice a day, for the full two minutes that my mother would have insisted upon had she been around to do so. The end of the toothbrush’s handle tapered to a sporty point, and the gold-embossed brand name, WALLYTEETH, was chipping quietly away. It was as if someone at the Wallyteeth factory had said, We want it to look like a toothbrush, but basically it should suck.

And it did. But what really bothered me was that someone else’s hair was taped to it.