The Shape of Thunder

Dedication

For Lillian Nour and Juniper Lee, who ask big questions

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One: Cora

Two: Quinn

Three: Cora

Four: Quinn

Five: Cora

Six: Quinn

Seven: Cora

Eight: Quinn

Nine: Cora

Ten: Quinn

Eleven: Cora

Twelve: Quinn

Thirteen: Cora

Fourteen: Quinn

Fifteen: Cora

Sixteen: Quinn

Seventeen: Cora

Eighteen: Quinn

Nineteen: Cora

Twenty: Quinn

Twenty-One: Cora

Twenty-Two: Quinn

Twenty-Three: Cora

Twenty-Four: Quinn

Twenty-Five: Cora

Twenty-Six: Quinn

Twenty-Seven: Cora

Twenty-Eight: Quinn

Twenty-Nine: Cora

Thirty: Quinn

Thirty-One: Cora

Thirty-Two: Quinn

Thirty-Three: Cora

Thirty-Four: Quinn

Thirty-Five: Cora

Thirty-Six: Quinn

Thirty-Seven: Cora

Thirty-Eight: Quinn

Author’s Note

Resources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

Cora

I like learning things. Especially about math and science, because they help explain why the world is the way it is. A famous mathematician once said, “Mathematics is the music of reason.”

I’ve always believed that. The best thing about math is that it makes sense. The actual best thing about math is that everything adds up, all neat and in order.

Here’s what I know about the number twelve: Twelve is four times three. Twelve is six times two. Twelve is ten plus two. This is all simple math, right? Elementary school stuff. Reason and logic. Twelve is also two less than fourteen.

Fourteen is how old Mabel was when she died.

I am twelve today. Someday in the future I will be more than twelve plus two. I will become older than my older sister.

There is no music in that fact. There is absolutely no reason. It does not add up, all neat and in order.

“You ready, Corrie?” Dad asks as he slips on his navy windbreaker. Grams is standing beside him in her puffy red coat. It’s not even that cold outside, and she’s been wearing it for ten minutes already. Grams is always ready before everyone else.

“We really don’t have to go.”

“Of course we do.” Dad gives me a smile and I know it’s supposed to look encouraging, but I can see the sadness leaking out behind it.

“Don’t be silly,” Grams says, draping an arm around my shoulder and pulling me close enough to her that I can smell her hair that always smells like lemons. Grams is the only person I know who washes their hair with a bar of soap instead of shampoo. “We always go to Pete’s.”

This is true. Going to Pete’s for birthdays has been a Hamed family tradition for as long as I can remember. We go—all four of us—Grams, Dad, Mabel, and me. We sit in the same back corner booth—the one with saggy cushions—and order chocolate milkshakes and an extra-large pizza. Whoever’s birthday it is gets to pick the pizza toppings.

For Mabel’s, we’d always get barbecue chicken. Dad usually picks veggie, though I think he only does that because he’s always trying to get everyone to eat more vegetables. (When Mabel and I were younger, he printed off a copy of a nutrition guide, circled the vegetable and fruits section, and hung it up on our wall—Mabel let it stay for a day, before ripping it down and replacing it with a picture of a rainbow she’d drawn at school.) Grams usually chooses whatever the monthly special is, and me? I pick cheese. Mabel used to say that cheese was boring, and well, the truth is, I’m a little bit boring.

Boring is okay with me. Boring is safe. Boring is your sister coming home from school like you expect her to.

“What’s this?” Grams says. She’s been idling on the porch, whereas Dad and I have already made it halfway down the driveway to where Dad’s car is parked. She picks up a cardboard box. There’s a thick piece of duct tape running diagonally across it to keep it shut. “Sweet pea, it has your name on it. Must be a birthday present.”

I give her a confused look. There’s no one besides Grams or Dad who would get me a birthday present. Maybe Owen. My stomach flips a little at that thought and then I feel guilty. Now, of all times, it’s not right for my body to be doing the new fizzy thing it does when I think of him.

Grams studies the box, holding it out toward me. I know exactly who the box is from the moment I see the chunky handwriting that slopes to the left. A sticky knot forms in my throat.

Grams must recognize the handwriting too because she says, “Oh, it’s from Quinn. Did you invite her to come with us to Pete’s?” Grams asks. She casts a quick glance toward Quinn’s house, which is right next door, like it has always been, even though I’ve spent the last ten months trying to pretend like it doesn’t exist.

I shake my head. I can’t bring myself to say words. Grams should know I didn’t invite Quinn. I haven’t talked to her since that day.

The day Mabel died. November 11.

Dad clears his throat. “You could’ve invited her.”

I know I’m about to get another big lecture from Dad and Grams about how I should still be friends with Quinn McCauley. The conversation always goes the same way: they tell me that I shouldn’t hold what Quinn’s brother did against her, that Mabel wouldn’t want me to punish Quinn.

The thing is, though, deep down, I think Mabel would hold a grudge against Quinn, and she’d expect me to, too.

It’s not that my sister was mean or anything, but she was what grown-ups call “a force.” When she got mad, she stayed mad. Even about silly, stupid things. She never forgave David Wilkes for breaking the ceramic bird she made in second grade, and she never forgave Addison Taylor for wearing the exact same red glittery dress as her to the eighth-grade end-of-the-year dance.

Mabel wasn’t always nice. She got mad a lot. Those two things are facts. You simply can’t argue with them.

That’s one of the things I hate the most about Mabel being gone. People want to remember her differently, perfectly. She was Mabel, my sister, my favorite person in the whole world, but she wasn’t perfect. I want to remember her as she was. My memory of my sister is a triangle, made up of bold lines but also sharp angles, and everyone else wants to remember her as a boring and simple circle.

I open the car door and slide into the back seat. Grams holds on to the package from Quinn, cradling it in her lap, as Dad steers the car out of the driveway. I keep sneaking glances at the box, wondering what could possibly be inside, even though I don’t want to be thinking about it.

I don’t want to be thinking about the McCauley family at all.

Outside the car window, the sun is hanging low in the sky, about to slip below the horizon, and it’s making a hazy orange trail. We drive by tree-lined streets and manicured postage-stamp–sized lawns where leaves have been raked into neat piles by the curb.

September, my birthday month. It used to mean new school supplies, freshly sharpened pencils and blank notebooks. School used to be a place that was safe. A place where I learned things. But last year, I learned the worst thing: no place is really safe.

So these days when I think of September, I think of it as the time of year when night starts earlier and lasts longer—a darkness that comes and doesn’t leave.

Dad steers the car along the road that will lead us to downtown. Chestnut, my hometown, is one of a collection of small Ohio towns that are along the old railway line, which means we have a little downtown-type square. It’s mostly shops and restaurants with one hardware store, and also a new fancy pet-food place that just came in. Grams thinks the pet food place is wild. “People are feeding their dogs more expensive food than I eat!” she says, but the store always seems to be crowded. That’s Chestnut for you.

Pete’s Pizza is in this downtown square. Dad parks the car and we all get out. He holds the restaurant door open for Grams and me. When I walk through, he says, “Twelve. I can’t believe my little girl is twelve. I’m probably going to have to stop calling you my little girl soon, huh?”

I blink the tears away from my eyes before Dad can see them. I have to be strong for him.

I’m the only Hamed girl left.

Dad gently presses his hand into the small of my back. As we walk toward the booth, I look over my shoulder. I spot our car in the front row of the parking lot. In the passenger seat, I can make out the shadowy outline of the cardboard box. The fading sunlight hits it in a way that makes it look like it’s winking at me.

I take a deep breath and turn my head away.

Two

Quinn

Dear Parker,

I only ever saw you cry once.

It was in the woods. It was after you helped me down from the tree.

Do you remember?

Dad always told us not to cry. Especially you.

The time I saw you cry, it wasn’t because you were sad.

I haven’t cried since it happened, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to cry when I see you again.

Your sister,

Quinn

It’s been three days since I put the box on Cora’s doorstep, and I still haven’t heard anything from her.

The last bell of the day rings, and I jolt toward the library. As I scramble to get there before anyone spots me, I imagine the scene being narrated by one of those voices from the boring documentaries we sometimes watch at school. The kind of voice that speaks in a stiff and funny-sounding way, like: Quinn McCauley races down the tiled halls in the hopes that none of her classmates will notice her before she has once again disappeared from view.

“Hi, Quinn,” Mrs. Euclid greets me as I walk into the library.

Before last year, I hardly ever went to the school library. Maybe because I’ve never thought of myself as a great reader or Language Arts student. Whenever I get one of my writing assignments back, there’s so much red on it, circling all the things I did wrong, that it looks like it’s bleeding. I mean, I think I have okay ideas. But I’m never able to get them down without lots of spelling and grammar mistakes or something else wrong.

I lose track of my thoughts a lot. I have so many of them that by the time it comes to write them down, it ends up coming out all wrong, and my teachers start to think I don’t have any thoughts at all.

I’m also never able to memorize facts from books, so I sometimes do badly on reading quizzes. I mean, I could tell you why I liked the book. Or why I didn’t. Or how I felt about the characters. But my teachers always want to know things like what color glasses the main character wore, and those are the types of details that slip my mind. Those are also the type of details my brain forgets when I get nervous. And I’m always nervous during quizzes.

Anyway, I didn’t think the library was for me. I figured it was only for kids like Cora who are really good at school.

But after last November, I started coming in here all the time. And when school started back up this year, I found myself here again. I’ve figured out that I kinda love the library. The long line of shelves, the quiet hum of the ceiling fan, and the smell. The library totally smells a certain way. Kind of musty, but also welcoming. It smells like a place where you can belong.

I sit down at a table in the back, and Mrs. Euclid pushes a cart of books toward me.

“We just got a book in that I think you’ll like.”

“Really?”

Mrs. Euclid smiles, and I notice her bright-colored purple lipstick. Mrs. Euclid is Black and wears her hair in long box braids that almost reach her waist. Today she has on earrings shaped like BB-8 and her shoes are ballet flats that look like mice. Mrs. Euclid always has the best shoes.

“It’s on your favorite topic. Time travel!” She reaches down and fishes a book off the cart. She hands it to me.

The cover has a boy standing in the middle of a light tunnel.

“He travels all the way back to the Jurassic era. Pretty cool, huh?”

I turn the book over in my hands. I stare at the boy on the cover, and irritation itches inside me. This boy did what I want to do. Also, for some reason, it’s almost always a boy on these type of books. Super annoying.

I point at the cover. “Isn’t that kind of a spoiler?”

“How so?”

“Because he’s standing in that light tunnel, so we already know that he managed to time-travel. Why should I read the book?”

Mrs. Euclid laughs a little. “I think the book is more about what happens after he time-travels. Not so much about whether or not he is able to.”

“Hm.” I’m not sure this book will be that useful for my research, but I thank Mrs. Euclid anyway.

I can hear kids talking in the hallway outside the library. Once upon a time, this was my favorite part of the day. School can be tough because it’s so much sitting.

But the end of the day was great. It’s when I got to see all my friends. Cora has always been my best friend, but I used to have other friends, too. Lots of them, actually. Like Scarlett and Ainsley, who I played soccer with on the weekends, and after our games, we’d beg our parents to take us out for ice cream, and then we’d have a sleepover at Ainsley’s house, building massive pillow forts in her basement.

And there was Jacob and Bea and Emerson, we’d all been friends since kindergarten. Last year before it happened, I ate lunch with them every day and then played tetherball with Bea at recess. I was always a better player than Bea, but I sometimes let her win when I knew she was having a bad day.

Now none of those kids talk to me.

They talk about me, sure.

But they don’t talk to me.

It’s okay, though. I even kind of actually get it. Like they can’t look at me and not see what my brother did. And I mean, I can’t look at me and not see what Parker did, so I don’t really blame any of them. Even though I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t feel like sandpaper scratching my skin every time one of them turns away in the hall, pretending like they don’t know me.

But like I said, it’s okay.

It’s okay because I’m going to fix it.

Mom has this lipstick that’s a shade of red called “Leading Lady.” Back before everything happened, when Mom still was busy with work, she would wear that lipstick. She said it was a bright spot that could get her through even the toughest and hardest of days. It was a fake-it-until-you-make-it sort of thing.