Read the opening of Chapter One

Here is the beginning of it — the opening pages, exactly as they read in the book.

I want to say one thing before you read, because it's the choice I'd defend hardest in this whole book: nothing happens in Chapter One.

No mirror. No hallway. Nothing strange, nothing glowing, no inciting incident on page two to make sure you don't leave. Just two boys on a living room floor, extremely awake, having an argument they have been having since the third grade.

That's deliberate. A story like this only works if you would follow these two anywhere before anything asks you to. So the first chapter spends its entire budget on making you like them — on the bike dumped in the grass, the dog at the Fontenot place, the chocolate cake they finally admitted they preferred, and a disagreement about caves.

Watch for one small thing near the end. Dakota says a number that's wrong. Jr corrects it instantly, without looking. That habit is the reason both of them are still alive a hundred and thirty pages later, and neither of them notices it happening here.

Here's the opening of Chapter One.

---

Chapter 1: The Birthday Sleepover

Jr had exactly one rule for sleepovers: never fall asleep first.

It didn't matter that he was pretty sure Dakota had never actually done anything to the last kid who fell asleep first. It was the principle of the thing. Dakota Reyes had a look in his eye sometimes — a look that said he was doing math, and the math was about whipped cream, or a marker, or possibly both.

Weekends like this one mattered more than most people probably realized, since Jr and Dakota didn't actually see much of each other during the week. Dakota rode the bus to the middle school in town every morning, same as almost every other kid in Cypress Hollow. Jr had never set foot in a public school classroom in his life — his mom had homeschooled him at the kitchen table from day one — so Friday afternoons and weekends were about the only time the two of them got to just exist in the same space without a school bell or a lesson plan telling them what came next. It was one of maybe a handful of nights a year that felt like it belonged entirely to them.

It helped that Dakota lived about a mile down Route 9. He biked it most days — straight shot, no turns, one hill that didn't count — and the bike was lying in the grass by the porch steps right now where he'd dumped it at four o'clock, which was where he always dumped it, and which Jr's mom had given up mentioning. The only real obstacle on the whole mile was the dog at the Fontenot place, who had strong feelings about bicycles and no feelings whatsoever about people walking.

This year it was cake — chocolate, because they'd finally stopped pretending either of them liked vanilla just to be polite to Dakota's grandmother, who wasn't even there this year — and a movie neither of them had actually watched all the way through because they'd spent the whole runtime arguing about whether the main character's plan made any sense, which had evolved into a broader argument about whether any movie plan ever made sense, which had evolved into Dakota trying to convince Jr that he, personally, could survive a zombie apocalypse using only skills he'd learned from Minecraft.

"You would die immediately," Jr said, for maybe the fourth time that night. "Immediately. Day one."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that. You get distracted by shiny things. There'd be a zombie right behind you and you'd be like, ooh, is that a cave, I wonder what's in the cave."

"Caves are strategically important."

"Caves are how you die, Dakota."

"Not if you mine strategically."

"You wouldn't know strategy if it bit you. You've never even had to show your work on a test."

"Rude. I show my work. Sometimes." Dakota, upside down on Jr's bed with his feet on the headboard, tilted his head back even further to look at Jr properly. "Also you say that like your mom's flashcards make you some kind of tactical genius."

"They kind of do, actually."

"They really don't."

"They kind of do."

The argument had been running, in one form or another, since about the third grade, and neither of them had ever won it or expected to. It wasn't really about flashcards. It was about the fact that Jr had spent every school day of his life at a kitchen table with his mother, and Dakota had spent every school day of his life on a bus and in a building with four hundred other kids, and each of them was quietly, permanently convinced that the other one had gotten the better deal and was refusing to admit it.

Jr had heard the whole bus thing described enough times to have opinions about people he'd never met. Dakota had once asked, seriously, whether Jr got to do school in his pajamas, and had not fully recovered from the answer.

The thing about Dakota was that he did not require Jr to be interesting. That was the part Jr had never been able to explain to his mother, who worried about it in a general way, the way she worried about whether he got enough time around other kids. Jr got plenty of time around other kids. He got it at church and at the co-op and at soccer, and around other kids he was the homeschooled one, which meant every conversation started about three feet back from where it should have. With Dakota there was no three feet. Dakota had used all of that up in the second grade and never asked for more.

Which was how they could have an entire conversation out of nothing.

"Sixteen," Dakota said, apparently to the ceiling.

"No."

"You don't even know what I'm counting."

"I know it's not sixteen."

"It's exactly sixteen."

"It's fourteen," Jr said, "and you know it's fourteen, and you said sixteen to see if I'd correct you."

Dakota made a sound of pure satisfaction and didn't deny it. There were fourteen glow-in-the-dark stars on Jr's ceiling. There had been sixteen once. Two of them had come off in a pillow fight when they were nine and had never been found, and the argument about whether the missing two still counted had been going on for three years, and both of them could have started it from a dead stop in a dark room in under four words.

---

That's where the sample ends — the chapter runs on from there. Chapter Two is still the same night — the two of them getting up to brush their teeth, stepping over the dogs, walking down a hallway Jr knows so well it has never once surprised him. Eleven steps in the daytime. He has counted it enough times at night to be sure it isn't just him being tired.

The book is out now.

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