"Shelter" by Harlan Coben, Chapters 1–6

The Bat Lady supposedly lived alone in the dilapidated house on the corner of Hobart Gap Road and Pine.

But standing there, watching her vanish back into her decrepit cave, I knew what she was telling me wasn’t true.

It’s your first day at a new school and you’re a girl who weighs probably two hundred pounds and you’re forced to put on gym shorts and then, to complete some inane group task, your new smaller classmates have to lug you like a beer keg for ten yards while you just want to curl up in a ball and die.

If life were a movie, this was the part where you’d start the music montage.

Some sappy song would be playing while they flashed to Ashley and me sharing lunch, talking, laughing, looking coy, holding hands—and ending with that first chaste kiss.

When some teachers call you Mister or Miz, it comes across as either patronizing or too formal.

The so-called outcasts who sat alone had been sitting alone for so many years that it wasn’t so much cruelty as habit.

She looked up at me with a face that could not look more sullen without actually being punched.

The one on my right—the name stenciled in cursive on his chest was BUCK—slapped me too hard on the shoulder and said, “Looks like you struck out, huh?”

Ms. Owens hadn’t forgiven me for the team-building fiasco.

When he found out that my father was dead and that my mom was having problems, he threatened to sue for custody.

I countered that if he did that, I’d run away—I still have enough connections overseas—or I would sue for emancipation.

I circled to the left because, like I said, the house tilted and if it suddenly collapsed, I didn’t want it to fall on me.

There, maybe fifty yards behind Bat Lady’s house, was what might have been a garage, painted in a brown-green that worked as camouflage.

He wore a dark suit and aviator sunglasses and looked as if he were either coming from a funeral or an elite member of the Secret Service.

Ema raised her hands in mock surrender and quickly moved out of sight.

The man with the shaved head kept doing the head pivot, like a surveillance camera, and then suddenly he jerked to the left and zeroed right in on me.

From the safety of my seat in the cineplex, I had scoffed at their idiocy and now, here I was, in Bat Lady’s lair, and someone else was here, in the basement.

And while I knew that it couldn’t possibly be true, I was willing to risk whatever, including my personal safety, if there was a chance, just the slightest chance, that there was an inkling of truth in what she said.

But another part of me—maybe the part of me that was millions of years old, the animal part, the primordial part that still relied on survival instinct—pulled up. The primordial animal looked at that glowing door and sensed danger behind it.

It conjures up our college prospects, growing older, getting a real job—our future.

While it never pays to generalize, those who appear not to be the most computer literate often rely on keeping old-fashioned notes so that they don’t forget stuff like user names and passwords.

If you were creating a graphic dictionary and needed a definition of demure, you would use her expression in this picture.

I figured that it would bond us, like pulling a thorn from his paw, but no matter what I felt about my uncle, I wasn’t about to sell my family down the river to appease Mr. Cro-Magnon.

There were contusions on his face, but he was conscious.

When we reached the bottom of Prema Estates, Spoon and I split up and headed to our respective homes.

Faded posters of basketball greats from the 1970s, guys like John “Hondo” Havlicek and Walt “Clyde” Frazier, adorned the walls.

I love the feel as I release the shot at the apex of the jump, the way my fingertips stay on the leather until the last possible moment, the way I slowly come back to the ground, the way the ball moves in an arc toward the rim, the way the bottom of the net dances when the ball goes swish.

Myron spun the ball on his fingers, staring at it a little too intently.

He looks so serene. I ask him if he’s okay. He says, sure, fine.

I visit my mother every day, except when their protocol doesn’t allow it.

For the past six weeks, she had been locked up in this place, detoxing, doing both group and individual therapy, taking pensive walks, exercising, eating right.

It was the kind of love that makes people jealous—and makes them cringe.

It culminated in a fight between the two brothers that ripped them apart in a way that meant they would never be brought back together.

She had learned how to prepare all kinds of exotic dishes during our years in exotic lands.