The Year After You Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Nina de Pass

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Elena Pancorbo

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in paperback in the United Kingdom by Ink Road, an imprint of Black & White Publishing, Edinburgh, in 2019.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pass, Nina de, author.

  Title: The year after you / Nina de Pass.

  Description: First American edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, 2019. | “Originally published in paperback by Black & White Publishing, Edinburgh, in 2019.” | Summary: Cara, consumed by survivor’s guilt after her best friend is killed in a car accident, is not convinced attending a boarding school in Switzerland will make any difference, but new friends Ren and Hector hope to break down her emotional walls.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019003342 | ISBN 978-0-593-12076-7 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-593-12077-4 (glb) | ISBN 978-0-593-12078-1 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Emotional problems—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Boarding schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P3745 Ye 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780593120781

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Clem, with love

  1

  If I’d known the temperature in exile would be this low, I’d have found it within me to put up more of a fight. Even if there was anyone to hear me now, the time for protest has come and gone; I’m a very long way from home.

  I allow the minutes to pass, watching as the soft, sticky snow is caught in the wind outside the taxi and, on its descent, is forced back high into the air.

  The driver my mother arranged to meet me at the airport, perhaps mistaking my silence for fascination, seems to decide it’s safe to speak. “Excited for your new school?” he asks, the words barely decipherable through his thick French accent.

  I don’t reply at once, allowing my finger to slide across the misted glass of the window. When I eventually do, I don’t bother to curb the sarcasm in my voice, knowing that the language barrier will mask it anyway. “Excited?”

  I don’t know why I phrase my response as a question. I don’t want to invite him to have a conversation with me, or for anything he says to be memorable. I want to forget him, just like I want to forget everything else.

  He laughs nervously before continuing. “Is it your first time in Switzerl—”

  The end of his question is lost. I watch in horror as he swerves out of the path of an oncoming truck and closer to the edge of the winding, narrow road up the mountainside. There are no barriers to the waiting abyss below, and I feel my body tense as I clutch at the door handle. Every muscle turns to glass as the car, losing its grip on the icy road, coasts to the right. I close my eyes, waiting for impact. Time converts to slow motion, and I wait to hear the screams. For the world to blur out of focus. For the earsplitting pop of the airbags deploying. For the pain.

  For a split second, I feel euphoric. Maybe I won’t survive this time.

  Instead, I feel the car veer back to the left, away from danger, and am drawn into real time as the driver resumes his nervous laugh. He sounds the horn too late, when the truck is a dot in the distance, and I catch him looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Crazy drivers,” he says with a repentant smile.

  I don’t smile back, anxiously tracing my fingers over the frayed edges of the seat belt, and find my most unforgiving stare. “Just keep your eyes on the road,” I snap.

  * * *

  —

  In the hour that follows, the driver tries again to engage me in conversation, but this time I ignore him, not bothering to disguise my hostility. I keep my eyes off the encircling Swiss mountains, focusing on bringing all my fear-frozen limbs back to life. Trying not to think about what could have happened. Or about the part of me that momentarily welcomed it.

  My mind is filled instead with a memory from eight months ago, when I woke up one morning in the hospital back in California to the sound of voices. My mother and one of the nurses were trying—not particularly well—to speak in hushed tones.

  “Cara’s psychiatrist, Dr. Burns, wants us to keep her in for a few more nights to observe her,” the nurse said.

  My mother, probably irritated by the inconvenience of my prolonged stay (the hospital was over an hour from where we lived), responded sulkily. “Why on earth would she need to stay? Her injuries are physical and, as the doctor said again this morning, relatively minor. The fact that she escaped with just a broken arm is a miracle in itself. But she did—now that she’s healthy enough to go home, that’s where she’s going.”

  “That’s the thing, though, Mrs. Cooper—”

  “Mrs. Blair,” my mother interrupted—as she always does when people call her by my father’s name. It took her no time at all to remarry after my father left, and even in the interim months, as I like to call them, she reverted to her maiden name.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Blair,” the nurse continued, “but Dr. Burns isn’t convinced that Cara is healthy. She’s concerned that your daughter is having suicidal thoughts.”

  I can almost imagine my mother’s eyes widening in horror at this, her glancing around to check no one we knew was in the vicinity. “My daughter is not suicidal!”

  To her credit, the nurse’s voice remained steady. “It wouldn’t be surprising if she were suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Cara has lived through a very distressing experience.”

  There was a long pause while my mother digested the nurse’s words.

  “It’s a mental illness—” the nurse continued.

  “I know what it is. I just don’t want to hear any more,” my mother cut in. “I am her legal guardian, so give me whatever forms I need to get her out of this place. Mental illness. Honestly. She’s in shock, not mentally ill.”

  “It would be against medical advice,” the nurse warned. “You’d have to sign a waiver.”

  My mother’s response was curt, all attempts at whispering put aside. “Then get me that waiver.”

  In retrospect, two elements of this exchange stand out. Firstly, that my injuries were described as physical. The physical pain of breaking my arm in four places was nothing compared to the other pain I experience daily when I remember what else was broken that night—something metal bolts can’t fix. Secondly, that this injury and the endless web of bruises that covered my body were described as minor. Nothing about the accident felt minor, and calling it so felt as though they were belittling it, making it seem as though it, in the grand scheme of things, didn’t matter.

  My eyes stay glued to the seat in front. I don’t want to risk looking out again at the scene whipping past the w
indows. The fact that I have gotten this far in my journey is a near miracle. Even so, I’m at the limits of my endurance and am relieved when I register the car slowing. As soon as we stop, I fling myself out into the open, hiding my hands behind my back so the driver won’t see they’re still shaking.

  “Your destination,” he says, gesturing up to the large building.

  It looks more like a Russian palace than a school: a flat-fronted, sky-blue façade of a building at least six stories high, with three golden domes on the roof. There are crumbling touches of the same gold paint around symmetrical, old-fashioned windows, and on the ground-floor level, mint-green and white-striped awnings protrude. I turn around, with the extravagant structure behind me, and look out at the view. There is a cable-car station to my right. I follow the wire supporting the still, suspended carriages until it is swallowed by a small town on a nearby mountainside.

  Now that my feet are firmly on solid ground, the descent between the two peaks doesn’t feel quite so perilous. The school itself does feel like a slight safety hazard, though; it’s dangerously close to the edge of the mountain, with just a waist-high pale blue iron fence to keep everyone penned in. Even then, as I notice the elaborate twists of the metal, it feels more like a decorative feature than a precautionary one.

  “Should I bring this in for you?” the driver asks as he unloads my luggage.

  “I’m fine,” I say quickly, pulling the one duffel bag I brought with me from his grasp and hauling it over my shoulder. At the last minute I look back and murmur a hesitant “Thanks.”

  He looks startled, so I turn away from him and head toward the entrance. As I get closer, two figures come into focus: a girl and a boy of around my age. The girl has a long stream of dark red hair that falls below her shoulders. Her skin is fair, like mine, but covered with freckles. The boy at her side is at least a head taller and lanky, but with a round, childish face and white-blond hair.

  “Let me take that,” the boy says, gesturing to my bag. His words sound strange and unfamiliar, tinted with another accent—perhaps something Scandinavian.

  “I’ve got it,” I say, then instantly regret it. This is exactly what my mother warned me not to do. It’ll be a clean slate for you, she reasoned. Nobody will know you there—you can go back to being yourself again. Her words had extinguished what was left of my fight. Surely she knows as well as I do that there is no going back. Yet now, despite the fact that I can’t fathom how I’ll pull it off, I resolve to try to seem normal in front of these strangers. I can’t smile, so I adjust my expression to the brightest one I know.

  “Welcome to Hope Hall,” the girl says.

  2

  “Everyone is in the conservatory—that’s why it’s so quiet,” the girl says with the faintest hint of a French accent. “I’m Ren, by the way, and this is Fred.” She gestures to the tall blond boy, who starts to give me an awkward wave, then pulls his hand down to his side as though he’s thought better of it.

  “Cara,” I say, and they nod in unison. They know this, of course: they’re my welcome committee. I wonder just how much they know about me.

  “As I mentioned, everyone is doing prep, so it’s the perfect time for a tour.”

  “Prep?”

  “Oh, sorry! I always forget some of the words we use sound a bit odd,” she exclaims with what seems to be genuine enthusiasm. I can’t help thinking she’s unusually pretty—just not in an obvious way. Her porcelain cheeks are tinged with pink from waiting out in the cold, the only blemish on her otherwise flawless skin. She’s petite, a few inches shorter than me, with a thin face and round, chocolate-brown eyes that make her look overeager. “God, sorry, and now I’m making you feel more alienated for being new—”

  “Ren, relax,” Fred says. He’s so tall that he towers over both of us, and when he speaks, he uses swooping hand gestures that teeter on awkward, like he doesn’t quite know what to do with such long, spindly arms.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I always talk at a million kilometers an hour when I’m nervous—”

  “Prep means homework,” Fred cuts in, suddenly businesslike, relieving Ren of what I imagine would be a wordy explanation. “It’s between seven and eight every evening. All year groups do it in the conservatory, so we’ll have free run of the place for the next forty-five minutes or so. We should probably get going, actually. Leave your bag here, and we’ll come back and get it in a bit.”

  Ren looks on gratefully as I let my bag slide off my shoulder and follow Fred farther into the school.

  * * *

  —

  Forty-five minutes isn’t even close to being enough time to tour the place. We start on the ground floor, making our way across dark-stained floorboards toward the classrooms. Like the school in its totality, nothing is generic about these rooms. Each one is drastically different—a mishmash of odd, old-fashioned furniture and different arrangements of around ten desks per classroom. They seem to all contain a fireplace or log burner, giving out their last dregs of heat at the end of the day.

  Everything is at odds with the associations of school that I’m used to—the metal detectors back home, the routine locker searches, the plastic chairs and white hallways. It disorients me, tilting everything I’ve come to know and making my already fragile composure harder to hold on to.

  We eventually walk out into a large, square courtyard, glistening with ice, at the back of the building. The school is built in an extended U shape, with this courtyard marking the center of that U. It’s framed on three sides by six floors of building, the fourth side composed of a wall backing up to the ever-darkening grounds, a lit path just visible through a stone arch carved in the center. I instantly realize what they meant by the conservatory. In the middle part of the building, the wall bordering the courtyard has been replaced by a glass one, rising at least five stories, made up of hundreds of individual panes. Every now and then, one of the clear glass panes has been swapped for a colored one. Through the glass, lit up from the inside, I can see into a vast, old-fashioned library that hasn’t been split into floors.

  “The conservatory,” Fred says.

  I feel him watching me closely as I nod, turning away from the numerous other stares no doubt directed our way. “How many students are there here?”

  “Just over two hundred.”

  “That few,” I say. “There were more than that in just my grade back home.”

  “You’ll find that won’t be the only difference here.”

  “The sports hall is over there,” Ren says, leading me to the stone arch at the back of the courtyard and pointing to a modern structure in the distance, only partly visible through thick trees. “And then, through here is the dining hall.” She pushes hard against double doors adjacent to the conservatory window, which don’t budge. “Damn.”

  Fred jogs over to the conservatory window to get someone’s attention, and I tuck my coat closer around me. There is a gap between my jeans and sneakers, and the biting cold sears my exposed skin.

  “It doesn’t usually snow at this time of year,” Ren says, gesturing to the light dusting of snow that floats lazily around us and is starting to collect on the window ledges. “Normally we get to November with a bit of green still showing.”

  Fred appears back at our side just as one of the doors gives way.

  A dark-haired boy holds it open for us. “Ah, if it’s not our new inmate—the U.S. transfer,” he says, his voice low and oddly loaded. I slip past him inside to the warmth, only looking up properly at him when we’re inside. He’s tall, with olive skin, high cheekbones, and swampy green eyes. A flash of something like recognition floods through me, but I cast it aside, as I definitely haven’t met him before.