Unteachable - Softcover

Raeder, Leah

 
9781476786407: Unteachable
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476786402 ISBN 13: 9781476786407
Verlag: Atria, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

An edgy, sexy USA TODAY bestseller about falling for the one person you can’t have.

Maise O’Malley just turned eighteen, but she’s felt like a grown-up her entire life. The summer before senior year, she has plans: get into a great film school, convince her mom to go into rehab, and absolutely do not, under any circumstances, screw up her own future.

But life has a way of throwing her plans into free-fall.

When Maise meets Evan at a carnival one night, their chemistry is immediate, intense, and short-lived. Which is exactly how she likes it: no strings. But afterward, she can’t get Evan out of her head. He’s taught her that a hookup can be something more. It can be an unexpected connection with someone who truly understands her. Someone who sees beyond her bravado to the scared but strong girl inside.

That someone turns out to be her new film class teacher, Mr. Evan Wilke.

Maise and Evan resolve to keep their hands off each other, but the attraction is too much to bear. Together, they’re real and genuine; apart, they’re just actors playing their parts for everyone else. And their masks are slipping. People start to notice. Rumors fly. When the truth comes to light in a shocking way, they may learn they were just playing parts for each other, too.

Smart, sexy, and provocative, Unteachable is about what happens when a love story goes off-script.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leah Raeder—known now as Elliot Wake—is the author of Unteachable, Black Iris, Bad Boy, and Cam Girl. Aside from reading his brains out, he enjoys graphic design, video games, fine whiskey, and the art of self-deprecation. Visit him at LeahRaeder.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Unteachable

1

WHEN you’re eighteen, there’s fuck-all to do in a southern Illinois summer but eat fried pickles, drink PBR tallboys you stole from your mom, and ride the Tilt-a-Whirl till you hurl. Which is exactly what I was doing the night I met Him.

It was the kind of greenhouse August heat that feels positively Jurassic. Everything was melting a little: the liquid black sky, the silver-gel-penned stars, the neon lights bleeding color everywhere. All summer there’s a carnival a mile from my house, in a no-man’s-land rife with weeds and saw grass, a sea of flat earth. It felt like the edge of forever out there. I cracked a tallboy and it echoed like a rifle shot. I took a swig of that pissy weak stuff, savoring the coolness. I was sitting on a picnic bench, watching the roller coaster go up and down and up again, the joyous screams phasing in and out like a distant radio station. Roller coasters scare me, and it has everything to do with me losing my stuffed bunny George when I was five. George fell from a hundred feet in the sky when I threw my hands up in cruel, careless glee. Mom sewed new eyes on, but I cried and cried and said he was dead until she let me bury him in the backyard. We made a coffin out of a Froot Loops box. Mom, so drunk she was crying, too, gave the eulogy.

So maybe part of why I was out here tonight was because I was tired of being a kid, stuck with kid fears and kid memories. Senior year would start in two weeks. I wanted to go in already an adult.

I pounded the last of the beer and crushed the can on the bench.

My name’s Maise, by the way. Maise O’Malley. Yeah, I’m Irish as hell. But you probably knew that from the drinking, right?

I went into the carnival. Apparently, a breaking news bulletin had just gone out about my legs: three pairs of wolf eyes looked over instantly, then moved down, up, down, the old broken elevator gaze. It’s always the older guys, too. But I’m kind of screwed up from growing up without a father, and I like when they try to daddy me.

Try being the operative word, as Mr. Wilke says.

But we’ll get to him.

I smiled at no one, sauntering past stalls stuffed with popcorn and pretzels and corn dogs, snow cones and cotton candy. The air was drugged with sugar and salt. It made my head spin. A bell rang nearby and someone whooped triumphantly. I passed the rigged games—milk bottles, darts—where people stubbornly threw money at the carny, desperate to win some giant lice-ridden teddy fresh out of a Taiwanese sweatshop.

Mr. Wilke says I’m both cynical and worldly for my age. I choose to take them both as compliments.

I wasn’t ready to face the roller coaster yet, so I rode the merry-go-round for a while, going for the full Lolita effect as I lifted a leg high and slowly, slowly draped it over a painted horse, reveling in how uncomfortable I made all the parents. One man kept glancing in my direction until his kid pulled his sleeve and snapped, “Dad!” I raised an eyebrow coolly. Too bad I didn’t have any bubble gum.

Finally the beer had charged up my blood. I marched over to the YOU MUST BE THIS TALL sign. The line was short. It was getting late, for a weeknight.

Then I saw the name of the roller coaster.

Deathsnake.

I almost turned around right there. Stupid, yeah, but PTSADS doesn’t care how stupid a trigger is.

If you need me to spell that out, it’s Post-Traumatic Stuffed Animal Death Syndrome. I thought it was pretty funny. Mom and the psychologist did not. The psychologist said I had substituted George for Dad and I actually had post-dad syndrome. I told her George was a fucking bunny.

Anyway, Deathsnake.

“You getting on?” the carny said. He had so much acne he looked like a halftone comic, like when you peer really close at a newspaper and everything that looked solid is just little dots.

I gave him my ticket.

The assholes on this ride had decided to take every single car except the front. Again, I almost turned around. I did turn, actually, and saw a guy behind me, so I turned back and got into the empty car because I was not going to chicken out in front of the entire universe. Best-case scenario: I close my eyes for four minutes and get a free blow-dry. Worst-case scenario: I fall from a hundred feet in the air, and there’s no sewing my eyes back on.

The door to my car opened.

It was the guy. He raised his eyebrows questioningly, and I shrugged. He got in.

At least I might die next to a hot guy.

Revised worst-case scenario: I throw up on him, we both die.

“You’re pretty brave,” he said, lowering the bar over us. “Must be a veteran, sitting up front.”

“It’s my first time,” I said. Well, first time on my own terms.

He smiled. It lit his face like a camera flash. “Mine too.”

Then Deathsnake lurched forward, toward doom.

It’s a trick, the way it starts. There’s a loud, creepy ratcheting, like some massive clockwork grinding beneath you, but the car just farts along inconspicuously. People behind us were talking about stupid shit. Some girl told someone to put away his phone and I prayed that he wouldn’t and that it was expensive. The guy next to me looked out over the fairgrounds as we ascended, and I peered past him, but my attention was split. Beyond him, a confetti of lights and fey music, all the ugly carny weirdness rendered magical thanks to distance. But my eyes kept catching on his face. From below it was traced with red neon, from above with metallic moonlight, sketching out a bold, almost sulky chin, lips that looked too soft and sensitive for a man. His eyelashes were a fringe of furry gold. I couldn’t see his eyes from this angle.

He looked over suddenly and I whipped my head away. “What a view,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” I mumbled.

I could feel him smiling.

“Oh, shit,” someone said behind us.

And we dropped.



I’m not going to do the whole roller-coaster/falling-in-love metaphor. I didn’t fall in love with him up there. Maybe I fell in love with the idea of love, but I’m a teenage girl. This morning I fell in love with raspberry jam and a puppy in a tiny raincoat. I’m not exactly Earth’s top authority on the subject.

But when we crested the first peak and the world sprawled beneath us like a tangled-up string of Christmas lights and then we plunged toward it at light speed, the guy and I reached for each other’s hands spontaneously and simultaneously.

And I felt something I’ve never felt before.

You can call it love, or you can call it free fall. They’re pretty much the same thing.



When Deathsnake glided to a stop, we both looked like we’d stuck our fingers in electric sockets. Einstein hair, Steve Bu­scemi eyes. The guy had screamed more than I did. I mostly laughed, at his screaming, at my fear, and finally at how good it felt to be alive right then and there. Not once had I thought of George or my mother or my sad life.

The guy—who I mentally upgraded to The Guy, capital letters—offered me a hand out of the car. We still had shit-eating grins plastered on our faces.

“Thanks,” he said.

“For what?”

“Helping me lose my roller-coaster virginity.”

I...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476786402
ISBN 13 
9781476786407
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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