Walker Callaghan doesn't know what happened to her. One minute she was living her teenage life in suburban Chicago...and the next minute, she was in a strange place and in a brand new school with absolutely no homework, no rules, and no consequences.
Walker Callaghan doesn't know what happened to her. One minute she was living her teenage life in suburban Chicago...and the next minute, she was in a strange place and in a brand new school with absolutely no homework, no rules, and no consequences. Walker Callaghan, 17, is dead. She doesn't go to heaven or hell. She lands at The Academy, a middle realm where teenagers have one thing in common: They were the morning announcement at their high schools because they died young.
These high school kids are now caught in a strange “in-between” zone where life hasn’t changed very much. In fact, this special teen limbo looks a lot like life in a quaint Michigan town complete with jocks, popular girls and cliques. "There are even cheerleaders in death," Walker observes. It's not a coincidence that the music teacher is a guy named Kurt who "used to have this band." The drama teacher, Heath, is crush worthy because back in his life, he starred in some superhero movie.
Principal King explains the rules -- there are none. Why? You can't die twice.
There is no homework. No tests. No SATS. You're just there to learn because the human brain isn't fully formed until you're 24.
By the way, you can't get hurt physically, so race your Harley off that hillside. But falling in love is the most dangerous thing you can do ...because no one knows how long you'll stay in this realm or what's next.
"Losing someone you love would be like dying twice," Walker says.
* * * * * *
Walker Callaghan has just arrived at the Academy after a tragic car accident. “Is this heaven or is this high school?” she asks.
She finds out her new life is a bit of both as she falls in love with tat-covered, bad boy Daniel Reid who is about to break the only sacred rule of this place. He's looking for a portal to return back to the living realm.
He needs just one hour to retrieve his younger brother who strangely never arrived at The Academy. Bobby is an Earth Bound Spirit, stuck at a plane crash site that took both of their lives as their rich father piloted his private jet nose-first into a cornfield on Christmas Eve.
Walker loves Daniel and risks it all to go with him.
Have they learned enough to outsmart dangerous forces while transporting a young child with them? Can their love survive the fragmented evil parts of themselves that are now hunting them down as they try to find a way back to the middle?
At the Academy, you learn the lessons of an after-lifetime.
EXCERPT
INTRODUCTION
I was there. And then I was gone.
My mother gave me no notice that we were relocating.
Suddenly, we had just moved without all that annoying planning and packing. Somehow my clothes were thrown into boxes with shoes that were missing mates. Someone had packed my books and CDs, and had even reached under my bed into that secret hiding place I counted on to protect my treasures; like the iPod loaded with the best and worst of everything from Nirvana to the Stones, plus my lucky green rabbit’s foot—because you just never knew when you would need a little extra luck.
My mother must have remembered the family photo album because there it was on our brand-new living room coffee table that I passed on the way to my very own bedroom and a bed I had never slept in a day in my life.
It was strange because we could barely afford to pay the rent each month, let alone buy something as nice as a hand-carved oak table imported from someplace far, far away. When I had looked, the tag didn’t say from where. It was just imported.
It was one of those times when you go from A to Z so fast that you hardly remember any of the in-between. Or as I—Walker Callaghan—senior at Kennedy High School in suburban Chicago and news editor of the school paper the Charger liked to say, “Maybe it’s not about the happy ending. Maybe it’s about the story.”
Flopping onto my new, handsome, four-poster bed with lovely little tulips carved into the wood, I thought it was so unlike my mother, the master planner, to do something this off-the-cuff. My mother was a woman who made a battle plan to go to the local 7-Eleven for almost-expiration-date milk. Even weirder was the fact that we had moved farther away than anyone imagined. A lot farther.
“So run this by me one more time, Mom,” I shouted. “I must have been heavily medicated or feeling really sorry for myself. We moved? You pulled the trigger. Bang-bang—relocation?”
I didn’t give her time to answer.
“A new school in my senior year of high school?” I called out to her on a murky, cold winter morning on Burning Tree Court.
Even though I was letting the heat escape and Mom had always said we didn’t live to “support Commonwealth Edison,” our old electric company, I still opened my bedroom window wide and found that the air drifting in was stun-your-senses Arctic cold. It smelled green and fresh outside and those dense marshmallow patches of white fluff in the sky could only mean serious snow because they were roasted dark on the bottom.
I tried to shiver, but couldn’t. I was perfectly warm despite the window and the fact that I was wearing faded jeans and a well- washed blue cotton tank that read: Normal People Scare Me.
In true dramatic fashion, I couldn’t resist needling the one 12
person responsible for our fate, our new house, and everything in it that was unknown and strange. “Mom, new school. Senior year. I’ll have no friends here. Are you trying to kill me?”
Without knowing how or why, I was now enrolled in this elite- sounding new school called the Academy, which sounded quite upscale and serious to a girl whose educational pursuits consisted of a generic public-school education outside of a big melting-pot city, where you were either rich (if you were lucky) or you were normal (if you were like everybody else). Our family worked hard at being desperately normal.
“Great, it will be a bunch of rich, stuck-up snobs who will hate me—and cheerleaders. There are always cheerleaders. They’re like cockroaches. You can’t get rid of them,” I concluded, yelling from my new room to hers, which was somewhere down a hallway that I had never really navigated before.
“I hear it’s quite fancy,” Mom called from her room. “A Callaghan going to a private school. Imagine.”
I didn’t have to imagine it as I was living it. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but when I had asked that question, Madeleine Callaghan, my mom, the mover and shaker in my life, had cringed and then cried hard into a brand-new washcloth she didn’t recognize—the thick kind we could never afford. The weeper was the one who had given me the odd-for-a-girl first name, which was her maiden name before she married my father, steel worker Sam Callaghan. We weren’t just blue-collar, but faded blue-collar from clothes that had far too many seasons of washings. In our family, the rule was “Don’t throw it out unless it’s dead-dead.”
Running my finger along the smooth wood of my expensive new dresser with the intoxicating just-cut-tree smell, I ducked down on the ground to read the label on the bottom. Imported from R-19877. Really? Did we win the lottery? And what was with the secret spy code?
“Honey, please, I’m begging you,” Mom answered after appearing in my doorway. “For once, let’s not do the Diane Sawyer investigation act. I can’t do twenty rounds of questions. Not today.” Her voice sounded thick like she had a cold, so I closed the window.
“There is no need to insult Diane who probably doesn’t even have a dresser this nice,” I replied.
“Walker, let me make you some breakfast,” Mom said. “Everything is always better after a little oatmeal and orange juice. You’ll see.”
About the author:
As Cindy Pearlman (her maiden name), Cindy is a well known senior entertainment journalist for the New York Times Syndicate, with stories appearing worldwide, and the Chicago Sun Times. A pop culture expert, her work has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, People, TV Guide, Elle and National Geographic, and many other publications. Cindy has co-written over 40 books for actors, musicians, athletes and wellness experts including several New York Times best sellers. She is the author of her own film anthology book "You Gotta See This." A native of Chicago, Cindy lives outside of Las Vegas.
3 comments:
I would really like to read this book; I loved the excerpt!:)
I am entering this for my sister and it sounds like a book she would really enjoy. Thank you for the opportunity to win.
I really enjoyed the excerpt, thanks for the chance to win a copy!
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