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Undone

Brooke Taylor
Chapters (34)
  1. Cover
  2. undone
  3. Dedication
  4. one
  5. two
  6. three
  7. four
  8. five
  9. six
  10. seven
  11. eight
  12. nine
  13. ten
  14. eleven
  15. twelve
  16. thirteen
  17. fourteen
  18. fifteen
  19. sixteen
  20. seventeen
  21. eighteen
  22. nineteen
  23. twenty
  24. twenty-one
  25. twenty-two
  26. twenty-three
  27. twenty-four
  28. twenty-five
  29. twenty-six
  30. twenty-seven
  31. twenty-eight
  32. twenty-nine
  33. thirty
  34. Acknowledgments

Cover

undone

brooke taylor

image

Dedication

To Dad, for your support and enthusiasm in all my many
endeavors but particularly in this one—I know you are cheering
me on still. XOXO

The Beginning

Kori came with a warning label—a black T-shirt that read: DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU HEAR ABOUT ME. On the day we became best friends, I was staring. Gaping. Gawking my geeky little eighth-grade eyes out. I’d expected the bathroom to be empty when I charged in with blue dye from an ill-fated lab experiment soaking through my Ruby Gloom T-shirt. I never expected Kori Kitzler to be standing there, tapping a cigarette out of a red-and-white box and asking me if I had a light.

My mouth dropped wide open. I don’t know which startled me more—that she really thought I smoked (at school!) or that she was actually speaking to me. From the moment Kori had transformed herself from squeaky-clean cheerleader-wannabe seventh grader to I-puke-cheerleaders-for-breakfast eighth grader, I was fascinated by her beyond any sane boundary.

I looked down, my eyes stalling on the warning stretched across her larger-than-most chest. I’d heard a lot of things about her. I’d heard that before school even started, she’d already had oral with half the junior high football team. I’d heard she dropped E with high school boys and had a three-way with two college guys. I’d heard she cracked a Tiffany lamp over Chelsea Westad’s brother’s skull just because he told her she couldn’t smoke pot in their house. I’d heard she threw up on the arresting officer and had lesbian sex while in the holding tank. I’d heard that while the rest of our class was singing “Kumbaya” and making really crappy jewelry at summer camp, she was pretending to dry out while in rehab. And I believed it all.

In response to her smirk, I braved direct eye contact. In the almost black of her eyes—like two shots of espresso, just as dark and just as deceptively calm—I expected to see my fascination for her spat back at me. But I didn’t. Under lazy, half-moon lids, her eyes were soothing, almost hypnotic. And in them, a serrated edge offering both protection and danger glinted.

“You don’t know it now.” She paused to take a drag (she had a light after all). “But you and I are connected.” She held the cigarette out for me. As I took it, a seductive curl of smoke rose up like a ghost between us. “We’re more alike than you think.”

Discretion is knowing how to hide that which we
cannot remedy.
—Spanish proverb

one

There they were—the worst words in all of the English language, scribbled in my mother’s perky handwriting. “Let’s talk.”