Cover

Also by Rebecca Stead

First Light

Goodbye Stranger

Liar & Spy

When You Reach Me

Dedication

For every kid who sees two moons

The Sound of Corn

Just last weekend, my dad told me a story that explained one or two things about his wedding day. Not his first wedding day, the second one. The story was about him and Uncle Frank, when they were little.

They grew up in Minnesota, across from a cornfield where, every summer, the corn grew very quickly. Dad says the corn had no choice, because summers are short in Minnesota. It was either grow fast or don’t bother.

Every year, Dad and Uncle Frank would stand together in the corn, listening to it grow. No one ever believed them, but they could hear the leaves squeaking, stretching for sun. They both heard the corn growing, Dad said, and no one else did.

“You never told me that before,” I said. I liked thinking of them standing in the corn like that.

“I didn’t?” Dad was flipping pancakes. We have this new pancake griddle that covers two stove burners, so now he can make four at once. It’s great.

“Did you hold hands?”

“Who?”

“You and Uncle Frank. In the corn. So you wouldn’t lose each other.”

Dad snorted. “No. Have you ever seen Uncle Frank holding hands with anyone?”

You’d probably never guess they’re brothers. Uncle Frank is reddish-white, and my dad has a ton of brown freckles that give him a year-round face tan. Dad is a talker, and Uncle Frank…isn’t. Dad loves food, every kind of it, and Uncle Frank says if he could live on one hard-boiled egg a day, he would be happy.

—

If you want to know what the sound of corn growing explains about my dad’s second wedding day, I’ll have to tell a longer story, about a lot of things that happened two years ago, when I was ten.

It’s a story about me, but a different me, a person who doesn’t exist anymore.

I have seen Uncle Frank holding hands with someone exactly one time that I can remember.

Angelica

The summer I turned ten, my cousin Angelica fell from the sleeping loft at our family’s lake cabin. Uncle Frank says her head missed the woodstove by four inches.

She hit the floor with a bad sound, a whump. Then we didn’t hear anything. No crying. No yelling. Nothing.

Until, finally, there was the sound of Angelica trying to breathe.

Dad got to her first. Aunt Ess, Angelica’s mom, called from her room. “What was that? Dan? What was that?”

He answered, “It’s Angelica—she fell, but she’s okay. She got the wind knocked out of her, but I think she’s okay.”