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Back When the Light Went Out Save as PDF
Chapters (46)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Part One
  6. 1
  7. July 11
  8. 2
  9. July 11
  10. 3
  11. July 11
  12. 4
  13. July 11
  14. 5
  15. July 11
  16. 6
  17. July 11
  18. 7
  19. Part Two
  20. 8
  21. July 11
  22. 9
  23. July 11
  24. 10
  25. July 11
  26. 11
  27. July 11
  28. 12
  29. July 11
  30. 13
  31. July 11
  32. 14
  33. July 11
  34. 15
  35. Part Three
  36. 16
  37. 17
  38. 18
  39. 19
  40. 20
  41. 21
  42. Acknowledgments
  43. Excerpt from What You Left Me
  44. About the Author
  46. Back Cover

It had been Aidy, Bigs, Nick, and Ruby on Team One and Teeny, Harrison, and me on Team Two. Marley had intentionally broken up all the strongest pairings, and she wouldn’t listen to any arguments about the fact that Team One had more people. They found her first clue, a ribbon tied around her mailbox with BUGS HIDE THERE, CHILDREN PLAY THERE, WE HATE IT THERE written on it. They were supposed to leave it for our team to find, and they didn’t. They figured out Marley meant the pointless, fake playground ship at Cadence Park. Aidy bragged long and loud about making it past the first round so much faster than us.

I did what I had to do to defend my team.

“Forget I said anything.” Marley picked up her pace. “Trust me. The Adventure is going to have a different purpose this year.”

A small pebble imprinted onto the bottom of my foot. I didn’t dare dust off my arch and remove it. If I broke pace, Marley would leave me behind, and she wouldn’t bother to look back.

3

If silence could be seen, the particular quiet of the moments following my speech took the form of an ominous figure in the corner of a dark room, lurking and unknowable. The eerie quiet chased me as I ran away from City Hall and into the surrounding area. Crooked palm trees and flickering streetlamps loomed overhead like the world beneath them was hollow, and I was all that lived inside it.

I moved so easily. Too easily, I realized. Marley wasn’t with me. At least not that I could tell. She’d become such a part of me that even in her absence, I felt her like a phantom limb. I never knew where she went when she left. Or if she never left and I sometimes forgot how to hear her. Neither thought gave me much peace. What if I lost her one day too? Became like the rest of them, blissfully unaware of what was right in front of me. I second-guessed myself long enough for Nick to find me riding the current of the ditch alongside the road.

“Ollie! Wait up!” he yelled.

I slowed at the sound of his voice. He sprinted faster.

It felt so good to hear a different kind of worry attach itself to my name. And to hear it come from Nick Cline of all people.

When he caught up, he grabbed me tight. I breathed into his shirt. The fabric stopped the flow of air in my nose. That’s how far inside of him I tried to burrow. Because I was not the one who would slip away. If anyone ever bothered to pay attention, I always existed as a gallery of my own heartbreak, displaying Nick Cline on the shelf right below Marley. My hands clutched his shirt so tightly that the fabric nearly ripped.