–1 0 +1 - World Book Day | World Book Day is a ...€¦ · A CIP catalogue record for this book...

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9781408872932_1stpass.indb 3 29/06/2016 12:2332529_reduced_129x198mm.indd 3 29/06/2016 12:35

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Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in October 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in the USA in September 2016 by Bloomsbury Children’s Books1385 Broadway, New York, New York 10018

www.bloomsbury.comdaniellepaigebooks.com

BLOOMSBURY is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Danielle Paige Hale 2016

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

All rights reservedNo part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopyingor otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 7293 2

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, SuffolkPrinted and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

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To my family, Mommy, Daddy, Andrea, Josh, Sienna, and Fi, and every girl who wanted to be a princess but became a queen . . .


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FIRST KISSeS SOMeTIMeS WAKe slumbering princesses,

undo spells, and spark happily ever afters. Mine broke Bale.

Bale burned down a house when he was six. He was a patient

at the Whittaker Psychiatric Institute like me, and he was also

my only friend. But there was—he was—something . . . more. I

told him to meet me where we could be alone, at the one place

where we couldn’t see the iron gates that hemmed us in. Our

kissing would have a time limit, though. The time it took for the

White Coats to notice that we were gone.

Bale met me in the darkest crook of the hall, just as I knew he

would. Bale would meet me anywhere.

We were clumsy at first. My eyes were open. He had not

leaned down quite far enough. And then we weren’t clumsy at

all. His lips were warm, and the heat washed over me. I could

hear my own heartbeat in my ears. I leaned into him and felt his

body against mine. When we finally broke apart, I rocked back


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on my heels and looked up at him. I felt myself smiling. And I

rarely smiled.

“I’m sorry, Snow,” he said, looking down at me.

I blinked up at him, confused. He was kidding.

“It was perfect,” I asserted. I was not the type to be mushy.

But he was not allowed to joke about this. Not ever this.

I pushed his shoulder lightly.

“I see what you are now,” he said, grabbing my hand and

holding on a little too tight.

“Bale . . .” I felt something snap in my palm, and a sharp pain

ran up my wrist and arm. I cried out, but Bale just looked at me

with steady eyes, his grip and gaze suddenly cold and unyielding.

Not like a prince at all.

It took three orderlies to get him to let go of my wrist, which

I later learned was broken in two places.

As they pulled him away, I noticed through the double- paned

windows down the hall that it was snowing. It was too late for

snow. It was May. But it was upstate New York, and weirder

things had happened. The snow stuck to the glass and melted.

I touched the cold pane. If things had played out differently,

the snow would have been a perfect punctuation to a perfect

moment. Instead it made it that much worse.

Bale went on the cocktail after that. I went on it, too, after

they refused to let me see him. That was the usual procedure

for Whittaker kids who never outgrew their imaginary friends,

the dream catchers and time travelers, the cutters and kids who

couldn’t eat or couldn’t sleep. And for me, who tried to walk

through a mirror when I was five. I still have the scars on my face,


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neck, and arms from the shards of glass, though they’ve faded

now to faint white lines. I assume Becky, the girl next door who I

had dragged through the mirror with me, still has them, too.

Dr. Harris said they’d found pills under Bale’s bed. He hadn’t

been taking his meds. He couldn’t help what he did to me.

I wasn’t sure that was the whole truth, and I didn’t care. The

broken bones were temporary. What stuck with me was that

perfect first kiss. And the shock of what he had said.

That was a year ago. Bale hadn’t spoken since.


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one

In the dIstance I could see a tree that seemed to scrape the sky in

every direction, with gnarly branches and the strangest, almost lumines-

cent white wood. the bark was covered from top to bottom in intricate

carvings. I had seen this tree before. I felt a pull to walk right over to it

and run my fingers along the carvings. But instead I turned away from

the tree toward a loud, constant crashing sound: water. It was running

fast and deep. I looked down and saw that I was hovering on the edge of

a steep, rugged cliff, when something or someone came at me from behind,

shoving me hard.

I fell and fell and fell until my body hit the water. It was freezing

cold. cold like none I’d ever felt. the water cut at me like little needles

piercing my skin. and then when I could not stand it a second longer, I

opened my eyes and saw something in the murky deep: tentacles and gills

and gnashing teeth coming at me in the icy blue.

My arms flailed. I needed air. Which was worse? that thing in the


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water or drowning? I opened my mouth to scream as the thing reached

me, wrapping its icy tentacles around my ankle.

When I woke that morning, Vern, one of Whittaker’s orderlies,

was standing over me.

“Hush, child,” she said quietly. She had a syringe in her hand,

and she was prepared to use it.

I caught my breath and threw back the covers to check my leg

for the mark made by that thing in the water. The sheets were

drenched. But it was my sweat. There was no mark and no water

creature to blame.

“Snow?”

The orderlies—or White Coats as we liked to call them—

weren’t really our friends even though they were the only

people we saw every single day. Some of them spoke to us. Some

mocked us. Some laughed and moved us from locked room to

locked room like furniture. But Vernaliz O’Hara was different.

She treated me like a person even when I was a completely

drugged- out vegetable and even when I had the shakes. She

didn’t know which person I was at the moment, hence the

syringe.

“I’d rather not knock you out today. Your mother is coming,”

Vern said in her maple- syrupy Southern accent. Her low, long

brown ponytail swung behind her as she stepped away from my

bed and slipped the syringe back into the pocket of her scrubs.

Looking up at her, I marveled at how close her head came to the


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ceiling. At six feet nine, she was an abnormally tall woman. I half

expected to feel a breeze from the whiplash of Vern’s hair.

Depending on which patient you asked, Vern was a giantess.

Or an Amazon. Or a Jörd, the giant Norse goddess who gave

birth to Thor, the god who sometimes shows up in comic book

movies. I’d looked up Vern’s condition in Dr. Harris’s collection

of old encyclopedias in the library. Vern suffered from acro-

megaly, a hormonal condition that occurs when too much growth

hormone is produced by the pituitary gland, which resulted in a

larger- than-everyone- else Vern. But “suffered” was the wrong

word. Vern owned her size, and it made her the perfect muscle

for Whittaker. No patient could find his or her way around the

wall of woman she was. Not even me.

I held out my hand. “Fine,” I mumbled.

“She speaks,” Vern assessed, her oversize green eyes lighting

up with surprise.

Vern wasn’t being sarcastic for a change. Because of the meds,

I didn’t speak often these days except for swear words. And also

because I didn’t have anyone I wanted to talk to. except my

mother when she was visiting . . . and of course, Bale.

Vern was the only one of the White Coats I could even stand

to be around.

I had bitten Vern once—right after Dr. Harris had told me I

couldn’t see Bale last year. I had expected Vern to treat me differ-

ently after that, but she didn’t. She was the same kind Vern. I

always wanted to ask her why. But I never did.

“Did you have the dream again?” Vern asked with the same

level of anticipation she had for the next episode of the end of


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almost, one of her “stories” that we watched during supervised

recreation hours.

I shook my head, a lie my body told automatically. They

encouraged talking about the subconscious at Whittaker. But I

didn’t like to. I was determined to keep my dreams mine and no

one else’s. even though they were often twisty and dark, they

were the only place I got to be close to Bale. I had slipped and

told Vern once. A fact she would not let me forget.

Last night’s dream had been Bale- free. And a little stranger

than usual. The tree was in it again, huge and looming, taking up

the whole sky. Then there was that thing . . . The memory of it

flooded in, distracting me, pulling me back into the cold, dark

water. Patiently, Vern waited for me to sit up, pulled out a fresh

pair of Whittaker gray sweats for me to wear, and sighed a heavy,

breezy exhale that denoted her disappointment.

I slipped out of my paper- thin cotton pajamas in front of her

and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the plastic mirror on the

door of my closet. Since the kiss, I was still searching for what-

ever it was about me that had spooked Bale.

My face looked the same to me. Brown eyes. Pale skin

because of the lack of sun. The trail of white scars tracked down

one side of my body, most densely on my left arm. Despite

multiple surgeries, my arm and torso would forever bear the

weblike tattoo of the day that had brought me here.

The white streaks that wove through my ash- blond hair had

grown only more pronounced this year. Vern blamed it on the new

drug cocktail, but I didn’t see any other patients going gray, and

plenty of us in Ward D were taking the same prescription.


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“Maybe we should put some new art up. You’re really getting

good,” said Vern.

I shrugged, but I felt a surge of pride well up underneath the

gesture. I had begun drawing as therapy. But I kept doing it for me.

Sometimes I drew the other patients. A lot of my drawings

were of Bale. There were dozens of them, in fact. I drew the

inmates as they were and as they wanted to be. Wing thought

that she was an angel or something, so I gave her wings. Chord

believed in time travel, so I’d draw him anywhere or anytime he

wanted to be. He once told Bale that he “blinked” from place to

place. That was what he called it: blinking. He could come and

go from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in a

single blink. Time was infinite and different for him. I envied

him that. I would give anything to blink back in time to before

the kiss with Bale.

Sometimes I sketched Whittaker. The asylum had a lot of

rooms. But there was a dividing line between what the parents

saw and what the patients saw. My room was pretty spare: white

sheets and walls, a white cabinet, a full- length plastic mirror on

my closet door, plus a small white desk. The only decorations at

all were the drawings hung everywhere with duct tape. I had

Vern to thank for that. The rest of Whittaker looked like an

english manor —with high ceilings, fancy furniture, and wrought-

iron sconces along the walls. The irony was Whittaker wasn’t

that old. It was built sometime last century. And rural New York

was a far cry from england.

Sometimes I sketched my dreams, which ranged from stark,

blinding- white landscapes to creepy execution scenes that I


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couldn’t really explain. The worst was the one with me standing

on a mountaintop, and below me there were bodies, blue as ice

and covered in a blanket of snow. I was smiling in it, like I had a

secret.

Or there was the one with the armored executioner who was

wielding an ax, about to swing it into something—or someone—

off the page. I was proud of how I captured the blowback of

blood on his armor.

Dr. Harris thought drawing was a good way to channel my

anger and imagination by putting pen to paper and seeing the

“ridiculous” things in my head. By getting them out of my mind,

he thought it would help draw a dividing line between what was

real and what was just a fantasy.

It worked for a while, but ultimately Dr. Harris wanted the

drawing to be a gateway to my talking about my feelings. That

rarely happened—or at least not in the way that he liked.

“Almost time for visiting hours,” Vern pressed. She had turned

to her cart and was grabbing the familiar tiny white paper cup

that contained today’s pill.

“What’ll it be today, Vern. Sleepy or Dopey?”

I had affectionately named my myriad pills after some of the

seven dwarfs. each one corresponded to the effect it had on my

mood. Sleepy made me sleepy; Grumpy, etc. One by one, they all

came to represent—even Sneezy.

Today there was a green pill in the little cup.

“Happy.” I grimaced. That one didn’t really work anymore.

“You are chatty today,” Vern half questioned, cocking her

head.


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I pulled the nondescript hospital uniform shirt over my head,

and I pulled on the pants. Vern handed me the paper cup and

waited for me to gulp down the pill, which was so big that it

scraped down the back of my throat even with a sip of water.

Vern took back the cup and waited for me to open my mouth to

check that I had actually swallowed the pill.

In that half- a-heartbeat pause, a second of resentment flooded

in. It was that moment in our everyday routine that kept us from

being friends—that, more than the lock on the door or the

syringe in Vern’s pocket. It was her job to check, not to trust.

And it reminded me every day that even though she was the only

person who really talked to me, she was paid to be here.


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