Teenreads.com -- UNDONE by Brooke Taylor

UNDONE
Brooke Taylor
Walker Books for Young Readers
Fiction
Hardcover: 9780802797636
Paperback: 9780802720757
320 pages

• About the Book

“So, check it.” Kori handed me a laminated card as she slid into the seat next to mine two periods later. Supervised study was the only class we actually had together. It was “taught” by Coach Kent, who spent the majority of the hour reading the paper—in the men’s room. So there was minimal supervision. And even less studying.

“A license?” I asked.

“Correction: my license.”

“But, you’re not . . .” I held it up, turned it over. “It looks so real.”

“Should be. It is real. The guy at the DMV did it. All me. Well, except for the messed-up birth date.”

I eyed her, wondering if maybe this was the guy who was IM’ing her. I didn’t really want to hear, but I asked anyway. “And why would he do that?”

She returned my narrow-eyed stare, more playful than angry.

“I didn’t do anything sexual with him, if that’s what you’re insinuating. Although he is pretty cute.”

“So why’d he do it, Kor?”

“Kieren gave him a clean urine sample.”

“Gross. So, wait—Kieren’s clean now?”

Kieren is Kori’s older brother—he’s a senior. She has two—Kyle, who is perfect; and Kieren, who pretends to be perfect. Kori, who doesn’t give a shit about perfection, is the black sheep of the family despite all her mother’s bleaching efforts.

“Yeah,” Kori said as she rolled her eyes. “He wants to take his skateboarding to a”—she made finger quotes—“whole new level. Anyway, now I can go down to that club in LoDo I was telling you about.”

“The karaoke thing?”

“It’s not karaoke, it’s a real club, real band, actual singing. Bleeder Valve?

Remember, the band I told you about? Kieren’s going to drive me. Mom would shit a brick if she knew.”

I glanced at the fake ID in my hand. “Well, since you have a license and all, you could actually drive yourself, couldn’t you?”

“True. I’d have to get a car, though. The only one I could jack would be Park’s. It would be easy; he’d be too stoned to even notice.” She thought about it for a moment. “No. I couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t be fair.”

I snorted. “Honor among thieves?”

Her burgundy lip curled in a smirk. “Yeah. Something like that.” Then: “You know, Parker thinks the ID looks more like you than me.”

“Really?” I looked again at the ID. Now that I’d dyed my hair black and flattened it out with the Pro Style, Kori and I looked identical.

Lexi Devlin (my friend and yet also my mother’s biggest advocate— go figure) thinks I dyed my hair to upset my mom. But really, I did it to be different from her.

See, the thing with my mom—she was just seventeen when she got pregnant with me. So she’s got this chip on her shoulder. Like she has to prove to everyone that she isn’t the slutty, whitetrash girl they think she is. She totally overcompensates.

Like the way she always wears panty hose and pumps even though she’s on her feet all day, and all her how-to and self-help books so she can be an expert on everything—oh, perfect example—the Baked Alaska. Okay, so, she asked me what I wanted served for my tenth birthday. My reply—hamburgers and ice cream.

In the living room—full-on Martha Stewart decorations and not a speck of dust, and for dinner these bizarrely exotic vegetarian “hamburgers” with ciabattá-like buns. The whole spread could have made the cover of Bon Appétit. In our kitchen—half a wall burnt to a crisp, because who else besides my mother would even think about putting a blowtorch to ice cream?

It’s all about the illusion. And my mom would love nothing more than for me to appear, if not actually be, just like her— sunshine, white light, daisies, and doves.
And I wanted to be dark. Like Kori.

She’s got this sort of Lisa Marie Presley vibe going on, or a pre-sobriety Drew Barrymore thing. Those great lips, sleepy eyes, and haunting voice.

She’s got true darkness about her.

When I told her I envied her that, she told me, “You’ll never be the night, Serena, you’ve got so much warm light inside of you. You’re burning bright.”

She said it like it was a blessing, like she was the one who envied me.

Then she sang Shinedown’s “Burning Bright” like a lullaby. God, it sounded so cool drawn out of her ethereal throat. So poetic and perfect, just like Kori herself. The first time I heard her sing, it was pure, flesh-chilling awe, like hearing The Sundays’ version of “Wild Horses” after years of the Stones.

“You could use it, you know . . . if you ever have need,” Kori said as I handed her fake ID back. “If anyone questions you on it, just remember it has my address and we were born in ’87.” Kori and I have the same birth date. Twins separated at conception.

That’s my theory at least.

She scrutinized me. “And, of course, you’d have to remember that you’re me.”

Ever since Kori and I became friends, ever since she’d spoken those simple words—“We’re more alike than you think”—I’d been trying to find anything inside of me, anything at all, that resembled her.

Even with her fake ID, I don’t think I could ever forget that I was not her.

After all, she was the kind of girl who could get a fake ID, get up in front of a club full of people and sing, and I was so not that girl.

In fact, today I was the girl whose mother couldn’t even bother to have a verbal conversation with her. The girl who had to crack Da Sticky Note Code. In my experience with things like this, I’ve found it’s a good idea to have a defense strategy already in place. First I needed to figure out exactly what she knew. In English class, when Mrs. Talaber and her Aqua Nest hair started in on part five of her thirty-part series on sonnets, I decided to make a list of all the possibilities. Not that I’m all that big on lists or anything, but I’m not big on sonnets either. I decided to classify my crimes into three categories: Petty Offenses, Misdemeanors, and Felonies.

With pen poised as if hanging on Mrs. Talaber’s every overly enunciated word, I gave it some thought.

Obviously it was something big enough to warrant a Post-it note parental conference. Since truly heinous crimes usually skipped the request for face time and went straight to an all-out in-your-face trial with immediate conviction, I could rule them out. So, logistically speaking, I was working with a casual sin. The type of crime that generally had a weeklong statute of limitations, because if I didn’t hear about it within a week, I considered it gotten away with and forgotten. That should have narrowed it down.

It didn’t.

Thanks to having Kori Kitzler as a best friend, a lot could happen in one week.
“Miss Serena Moore?”

I glanced up at the expectant Mrs. Talaber and her permanently pursed lips. I hadn’t heard a single syllable of her lecture. I slid my elbow over “Felonies” as she approached. “Yes?”

I felt the sudden pressure of everyone’s eyes on me, a feeling I never enjoyed. Which is why I could never be a cheerleader.

Well, that and I can’t do a herkie. Whatever the hell that is.

“What strikes you as different when reading this sonnet by Shakespeare?”

Time to fake it. I glanced down at the text in front of me and skimmed the poem, hoping that we hadn’t flipped pages while I wasn’t paying attention. I’m guessing she didn’t want my revelation on Shakespeare’s sexual orientation, so I hedged. “His obsession with immortalizing his lover’s youth.” Wasn’t that what all of his were about?

“Yes. Well, that is a very good analysis. Let’s give it some more thought, shall we? Miss Mancini, how about you?” We both turned to find Marci positively glowing—as any good cheerleader would—from the attention. “What strikes you as unique about this type of sonnet—as it pertains to today’s lecture?”

“The rhythm. It’s not a-b-b-a; it’s a-b-a-b.”

“Very good. Exactly.”

Whatever. At least I knew she wouldn’t be calling on me again, which was all the more reason to continue what I was doing. My brain scoured the past week, while I jotted down all of the possibilities. When I exhausted every potential crime, I categorized and tallied them. I tapped my pen on “Petty Offenses.” These consisted of things that could easily be defended with a simple yet effective, “Give me a break.” This week those included countless acts of illegal music downloads, six counts of looking at explicit photographs and lewd jokes online, lost effing count of using profanity (but, damn it, I’m trying), and one count of hacking into various JV cheerleader blogs to slam on the varsity cheerleaders, thereby creating a Kismet High civil war. (Although “hacking” is probably too strong a word, seeing as how they all had the same predictable password: Adrian17. What is it with cheerleaders and quarterbacks anyway?)

For the week’s misdemeanors I compiled one count of stealing a Twix from the Mini Mart, multiple counts of stealing beer from Kieren (let the record state—I was merely an accomplice), one count of changing the school’s motto on their master e-mail signature from “Achieving Excellence” to “Achieving Ecstasy” after The Rocky Mountain News did an exposé on the French club’s summer trip to Paris, four counts of allowing Kori to cheat off my Spanish homework, one count of ditching supervised study in conjunction with one count of Menstruation Fabrication so I could watch Maury Povich on Nurse Zimmerman’s couch, lost count of smoking cigarettes, and three counts of sneaking out after curfew and drinking aforementioned stolen beer. With cases of this nature, my defense strategy was a combination of repent and trivialize. Something along the lines of: “I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have done it. This was the only time, I won’t do it again, I promise.”

And just in case it might appear like I use my computer hacking skills only for evil, I’d like the record to reflect that I personally shut down two perverted seniors’ attempt at an “Up-Skirt” Web site by redirecting their URL to a site catering to a slightly different clientele—urm . . . I believe they call themselves Chubby Chasers.
Felonies have no real defense strategy; generally I just wing it. And by winging it, I mean a lot of yelling, usually something retro and eighties, like “It’s my body!” Since felonies tend to elicit an immediate reaction, I could rule them out of cracking Da Sticky Note Code. But for the record, this week there had been only one: the tongue piercing.

I still can’t believe I went through with it. I hate painful things. Hate pain. Detest pain. But Kori was giving me shit for always wussing out on her with stuff like this, told me it wasn’t actually pain I hate but the fear of pain and that it was about time I got over that crap.

Then she reminded me how pissed off my mother would be.

So I did it. And it hurt. Confirming that yes, I do hate pain. Actual pain.

I haven’t blatantly flashed it at my mom, but I don’t see how she can’t know about it. The first two days I sounded like Marlee Matlin whenever I spoke, and Random Acts of Blindness were not something she regularly practiced. Something had to be distracting her. I glanced over my list. Something was missing.

Oh. Add one count of hacking into the Peak County Medical database. I do this at least once a week, sometimes more. I don’t know what category it would fall under or if I even consider it an offense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t be scaling over their pisspoor firewalls, but it’s not like I’m looking at other people’s records, just my own. Specifically the record regarding my birth, and I wouldn’t have to do that if my mom weren’t so freaking evasive about it. I don’t know why I keep pulling the stupid record up anyway; it’s not like it has any of the information I need. But I’m determined to find out exactly who “unknown” is and why my mother has kept him a secret from me.