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Back Undone Save as PDF
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

I snatched the Post-it off the refrigerator door and glared at it. Heh. It didn’t matter who said them—parent, teacher, or police officer—nothing good ever came of those words.

I returned to my bedroom to stick it with all her other “Let’s talk” notes. They’d curiously begun appearing two years ago. The day I came home smelling of cigarette smoke with a new best friend.

The look on her face when I brought Kori Kitzler—fallen angel of the eighth grade—home with me was just like those credit card commercials: priceless.

And I could tell exactly what Mom was thinking behind the fake smile she’d scrambled to plaster on: My daughter’s going to hell. What will people think of me?

Yes, if the growing mosaic on my wall was any indication, my mother believed the slope to hell was paved in yellow, blue, and pink—but mostly yellow—“ Let’s talk” Post-its.

Who was she kidding? There was no “let’s” about it.

Perched on the toes of my boots, I reached over my desk to add this latest addition and accidentally bumped into my keyboard. The distinctive sparking whoosh of my ancient CRT monitor coming to life pierced the air. Soon the smell of burning dust would rise through the plastic vents at the back. I’d asked for a Sony StylePro 20.1-inch flat panel for Christmas last year; under the tree I found a Conair Pro Style 2-inch flat iron. It probably would have been a good time for me to give my mom a “Let’s talk” Post-it.

I moved to power off the monitor, but stopped when an instant message blipped on the screen.

shaym: Kori?

If I wasn’t so late already, I would have responded. I would’ve asked who “shame” was, because I knew everyone Kori did. Would’ve asked why he thought my screen name was hers. Instead, I shut down my PC. The message disappeared from my monitor, but not from my thoughts.

Kori keeping someone from me meant one thing. She was using the hard stuff again. I wonder if she ever really stopped.

When I spotted the school, I sprinted. Only two weeks into my sophomore year and already I couldn’t afford another “Buenas tardes” in first-period Spanish. Maybe that’s what Mom’s note was for, I thought, and right as I did I ran smack into Josh Krivvy, computer gaming geek. Not to be confused with just any computer geek. Thanks to the Japanese-Version-Only gamers, it’s become a world divided. For the record, I’m a gaming geek of the development variety—a hacker, a code addict, a “sourceress”—but I play it down big-time at school, so I don’t end up like poor Josh.

Poor Josh!