New Beginnings Read online

  To Carla, for always knowing how to lift my spirits.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Teaser

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “Ready …” said Gabby, stretching. “Set …”

  She got halfway through the word go! before her brother, Marco, took off.

  “Cheater!” she shouted, sprinting after him.

  The woods behind their house grew up instead of out; trees densely piled onto hills like the one Gabby and Marco Torres were racing up now. Marco was older by three years, but Gabby was quick on her feet and knew the shortcuts. Marco always took the paths, but Gabby climbed the un-paths, the places where roots and rocks made stairs up the side of the forest.

  “Come on, Gabs!” His voice rang out through the trees. “Keep up!”

  Her lungs burned as she ran, twigs snapping under her shoes. She had never beaten him to the top. Even when he didn’t cheat. But maybe today … She caught a glimpse of his bright blue T-shirt cutting between trees, and she sped up. She was so focused on catching him that she didn’t see the fallen branch until it snagged her sneaker and sent her stumbling to her hands and knees on the damp ground. She sprung back up, but by then, she’d lost him.

  His laughter rang out, and she sprinted on until she burst through the tree line, breathless, and grinning. “Marco!” she called. “I won!”

  But Marco wasn’t there. She stood at the top of the hill, catching her breath, waiting for her brother to get there and give her some line about letting her win. She waited, and waited, and waited.

  “Marco?” she called nervously, looking around the field.

  The hill was suddenly too still and too dark. The laughter that had followed her through the woods before reached her again, but it was twisted and wrong. It was her brother’s voice, but he wasn’t laughing anymore, not at all.

  He was coughing.

  Gasping.

  Choking.

  And that’s when Gabby woke up.

  She wasn’t standing on a hilltop but slouched in a stiff hospital chair next to a bed. In the bed, Marco was doubled over, coughing. A nurse rubbed his back with one hand and adjusted his IV with the other.

  “Hey there … Gabby,” Marco said between coughs. “Sorry … didn’t mean … to wake you.”

  “It’s okay,” Gabby mumbled, rubbing her forehead. “Bad dream. Are you all right?” she asked as Marco settled back against his pillow, his face flushed.

  “Right as rain,” he said, still struggling for air. “Don’t tell anyone, though,” he whispered loudly. “I don’t want them to kick me out.” The nurse toying with the machine laughed a little, and Gabby managed a thin smile. Marco was always joking.

  But the coughing fit had clearly winded him. He looked tired. These days, he always looked tired. Gabby knew it was because of the bad.

  When the doctors explained Marco’s condition to Gabby, they didn’t call the sickness by its proper name. They referred to it only as the bad, as if she didn’t know how to search the Internet and find out what the bad really was. Now she knew the proper term — osteosarcoma — but still found herself thinking of it as the bad. Not because she wanted to dumb it down, or make it seem smaller, but because it was easier for her to picture the thing attacking her brother’s body not as a many-syllabled word but as a monster.

  Monsters could be fought. And Marco was fighting.

  He looked at her and frowned his big-brother frown and said, “You were supposed to go home last night.”

  Gabby glanced down at her crumpled clothes and thought about how wrong it felt to call the new apartment home. Home was a place in the country with wooded hills and laughter and a healthy big brother. A place Gabby seemed to get back to only in her dreams. And as bad as the hospital was, the apartment was worse. It was a ghostly shell, empty and dark — their mom spent every free minute in the hospital with Marco.

  “I like it better here,” Gabby said, picking up the cheerful tone he’d dropped. “And the food’s good. Way better than Mom’s.”

  Marco chuckled carefully. “That may be true …” he said, letting out a sigh, “but you can’t keep sleeping here. Not with school starting tomorrow.”

  Not just school, thought Gabby. A new school.

  Grand Heights Middle School.

  The thought of starting seventh grade there filled her with a mixture of fear and hope. When Marco had first gotten sick last year, everything had changed. Not just for him but for Gabby, too. Suddenly she couldn’t go anywhere without being smothered by everybody’s concern. Teachers, classmates, friends — their pity became like a low wall around her life. People wanted to look over and say hi, but the wall stopped them from getting too close. That was the weird thing about sickness. Even when it wasn’t contagious, people kept their distance.

  Even Alice and Beth, who were Gabby’s closest friends, started acting strange around her. They got weird and quiet and went out of their way to be polite, and she hated it.

  When Marco got transferred to a new hospital in a new city over the summer, Gabby had almost been relieved to leave.

  Grand Heights Middle School would be filled with strangers, but it would also be a fresh start. Maybe she didn’t have to be that girl with the sick brother.

  Maybe she could just be Gabrielle Torres.

  Marco cleared his throat. He was looking at her expectantly, and Gabby realized she’d gone quiet. She did that sometimes.

  “¿Dónde estás?” he asked. Where are you? But what he meant was, Where is your head? Where have you gone? Come back.

  “Sorry, I’m here,” she said, blinking. And then she remembered. “Oh, hey, I got you something.”

  Gabby fetched a plastic shopping bag filled with school supplies from under her chair. She had picked them out herself. Her mom hadn’t been able to take her shopping, but the mall, like the apartment, like the school, like everything else, was in walking distance from the hospital. Gabby dug through the bag until she found the blue-and-white-striped notebook and pen. “For your homeschooling,” she said.

  “Hospital-schooling,” corrected Marco. He was fifteen, and should have been starting tenth grade at Grand Heights High. Instead, he’d be here with a tutor.

  Gabby dropped a fresh pack of colored paper on the pale hospital bed. “And this is for the rest of the time,” she said.

  Marco’s eyes lit up. He was an expert paper-airplane maker, and they spent the next half hour folding the paper into planes to throw from his third-floor window and into the parking lot below. Gabby had just succeeded in landing her third purple plane on a white minivan roof — Marco cheering her on — when the door opened behind them.

  “Gabrielle Torres,” said a quiet voice with mock scorn. “Are you letting your brother have too much fun?”

  She turned to see Marco’s new friend, Henry, coming into the room in his
wheelchair. Henry reminded her of paper. Not the rich, colorful kind that she and Marco had been making into airplanes, but a worn and faded white. He was pale to start with — she’d seen photos from when he was a kid — and paler from being sick, his hair a watery blond, and his eyes a gentle, washed-out blue.

  Gabby shook her head, and Henry tsked.

  “Didn’t he tell you,” Henry went on, wheeling himself up to the bed, “what’ll happen if he has too much fun here?”

  “They’ll kick him out?” ventured Gabby.

  “Exactly!” said Henry, knocking his knees against the metal bed rail. “You don’t want him to get kicked out, do you? Who would entertain me?”

  “You could have too much fun,” offered Gabby. “Then they’d kick you out, too.”

  Henry’s smile turned sad at the edges. “Nah, they like me too much to let me go.” His eyes fell to the plastic bag on the bed. “What have we here?”

  “School supplies,” said Marco. “Gabby starts tomorrow.”

  “Wow,” said Henry with a soft, soundless laugh. “School, already? Time really does fly when you’re having fun.”

  “Do you miss it?” asked Gabby. Henry was the same age as Marco, but she knew he’d been sick a lot longer, and a lot worse, and wondered how long it had been since he’d hefted a backpack onto his shoulder, or heard a shrill class bell.

  “Nah,” he said with a shrug. “Best part of being here is I don’t have to go to school.”

  Gabby didn’t believe him. She could see it tucked away in Henry’s eyes, how much he missed being a normal teenage boy, even if normal meant school and homework and chores. She could see it starting in Marco’s eyes, too, even though their mom was still dragging him through the motions so he wouldn’t fall too far behind. Henry looked as if he might never catch back up. The thought shot like a pang through Gabby’s chest, but she didn’t have a chance to dwell on Henry’s condition, because Marco started coughing again.

  Gabby winced as two nurses appeared out of the hospital cracks, one doing her best to get Marco settled, while the other wheeled Henry away. The bag of school supplies tumbled off the bed, and Gabby was on her hands and knees, trying to gather up the pens and notebooks, when her mom rushed in.

  “What is it?” asked Mrs. Torres, only adding to the commotion. “What’s wrong? Marco? Are you all right? How long has this been going on?”

  “He’ll be fine,” urged a nurse, but her calm somehow made Gabby’s mom more flustered, and Mrs. Torres gathered up the colored papers on the bed in a single sweep and dumped them into a chair. She muttered to Gabby in Spanish about making a mess as she rubbed circles on Marco’s back to help him breathe.

  Gabby backed out of the room and into the hall. She slumped against the wall beside the door, every muscle in her body tense, as if she’d been the one coughing. She looked down and realized she was still holding some of the school supplies: a pretty journal with music notes and a handful of pens. Through the door, she could hear the scene quieting, but Marco’s cough echoed in her head and she couldn’t bring herself to go back in — she’d probably just be in the way. So she stayed put in the corridor.

  Most of the halls on this floor were painted yellow or green, but this one was blue. Gabby liked the color because it made her feel like a little piece of outside had wandered in. She’d spent a lot of time in hospitals, and so often their pale walls and fluorescent lights reminded her that she was definitely not outside. Now, if she stared at the wall and let her eyes unfocus, she could almost believe she was staring at the sky on a nice day, warm and sunny and blue.

  Outside the hospital, it was a cloudy day.

  No blue sky. No sunlight. No shade. So it was strange when a shadow formed in the middle of the parking lot.

  It started as a blot and spread across the pavement. Even if there had been a sun out, casting shadows, there was no source nearby — no car, no lamppost, and certainly no person — to cast this particular one.

  The impossible shadow grew until it was roughly the size and shape of a twelve-year-old girl with long, wavy hair. And once it was done growing, the shadow changed. It went from dark to blinding white, as if a hundred lights had been turned on somewhere deep inside of it. And out of the light came a girl.

  In one slow, fluid motion, like coming up through water, the girl rose out of the mark on the ground. And when she was standing on top of the girl-shaped puddle of white, the blinding light inside went off like a switch.

  The girl looked down at her shadow approvingly.

  “Nice work,” she said to it.

  The shadow seemed pleased, fidgeting happily beneath her feet. The girl looked around, marveling at the fact she was here — even if here was a hospital parking lot on a cloudy afternoon — and a thrill ran through her at the thought of being somewhere.

  Being someone.

  There was only one problem.

  The girl in the parking lot didn’t know who she was.

  That is to say, she knew what she was, but this was her first day as a who. And now that she was a who, she couldn’t help but wonder what type of who she was. She brought her hands up in front of her face, as if they would tell her, and in a way they did. A blue bracelet circled her wrist, bare except for a pendant with a name carved on it in small, delicate script.

  Aria.

  She tested the word on her tongue a few times and liked it.

  “My name is Aria,” she told her shadow. It gave the slightest nod.

  And then she looked down at herself for the first time. She was delighted to find she was wearing a green shirt and a white skirt with pockets and a pair of bright blue leggings that ran right into her sneakers. The laces on the shoes were white, until Aria — she really did like the name — decided she’d rather have purple ones. As soon as she thought it, color began to seep down the shoestrings, turning them violet.

  Aria smiled and caught up a chunk of her hair, holding it in front of her eyes so she could see the color. Even in the gray day, flecks of coppery red glittered in the brown strands.

  Delightful, thought Aria. She let the strands slip from her fingers as her eyes (a greeny blue, even though she didn’t know that yet) drifted up to the white building that loomed in front of her. It was very large, and she bit her lip and wondered how she would find whoever she was looking for in a place that big.

  Well, thought Aria decisively, one thing at a time.

  First, the shadow.

  She couldn’t just run off and leave it there in the lot (well, she could, but that would be strange). So she located its head behind her, and its feet in front of her, and then she took two small steps forward so that her shoes nested cleanly into the shoes of the shadow instead of standing on its stomach. Aria then rolled from her heels to her toes and back a few times until she was sure the shadow had stuck, moving when she moved, stopping when she stopped, and behaving in all ways like a perfectly normal shadow.

  Once she was satisfied that it wouldn’t come loose, Aria smoothed her skirt, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and made her way to the hospital.

  A dozen steps led to a set of glass doors, and a man and a woman were sitting halfway up the stairs, huddled side by side despite the warm day. The woman seemed upset — very upset — and Aria wanted to help. But she couldn’t. She shouldn’t.

  Because there was no blue smoke.

  Aria knew she wasn’t supposed to get involved unless she saw the blue smoke. It was the reason she was here. The smoke would show her the person who needed her help. The fact the shadow had brought her to the hospital meant someone inside would be marked by it. The people on the steps weren’t. As sad as they seemed, they must not need the kind of help that Aria — or someone like her — could provide.

  Aria reached the revolving glass doors, and stopped. Not just because the door itself was strange and vaguely concerning. But because there, in the glass, she saw something for the first time. Herself.

  It was one thing, looking at the pieces —
hands, shoes, skirt, hair — but it was such another, bigger, better thing to see herself as a whole. Well, almost whole. Her eyes hovered on the empty space above her shoulders, the place where her wings should be … would be, once she’d earned them.

  Just then the revolving doors jerked into motion, and Aria jumped back as a man came through the turning portal. He left the glass spinning, Aria’s reflection coming and going and coming again. She darted forward, jumped back out on the other side, and found herself inside the hospital.

  The lobby was filled with people, some in white coats, moving briskly, and some in regular clothes, slumped in chairs. Others still were pacing or waiting or talking to one another or to no one. Aria scanned the crowd, but she didn’t see any smoke.

  “Good afternoon,” said a woman behind the desk. “How can I help you?”

  Aria approached the desk. “I’m just trying to find someone.”

  “Who are you looking for?” asked the woman.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Aria brightly. “I haven’t found them yet.” The woman frowned, but before she could say anything, Aria smiled and added, “Don’t worry. I’ll know them when I see them.”

  And with that she set off down the hall on the left.

  If the woman had been looking closely, she might have noticed that each of the fluorescent lights overhead grew a little brighter as Aria passed beneath them. Or that the scuffs on the linoleum faded under her shoes, leaving the floor clean and new. But she didn’t notice. No one did. They were small changes, the kind you sensed but couldn’t put your finger on. Aria made the world a little nicer just by being in it.

  She explored two floors in search of the smoke — scanning halls, peering through windows and around doors — until she stumbled upon a common room. Several children clustered around a TV, a few others sat around a table with a puzzle, but it was the boy by the window who caught her eye.

  He was pale and blond and wreathed in smoke.

  The dark plumes hung around him like a cloud as he stared out the window. But as Aria drew closer, she frowned. His smoke was the wrong color. Aria was meant to find blue smoke. But the cloud circling the boy’s shoulders was a dark, bruised purple. Almost black.