Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Acknowledgments
Sample Chapter from ASK THE DARK
Buy the Book
About the Author
Connect with HMH on Social Media
Clarion Books
3 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10016
Copyright © 2018 by Henry Turner
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
hmhco.com
Cover illustration and design by Lisa Vega
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Turner, Henry, 1962– author.
Title: Hiding / a novel by Henry Turner.
Description: Boston ; New York : Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2018] | Summary: “When a teen boy who excels at being unseen finds himself hiding in his ex-girlfriend’s house, he uncovers carefully concealed truths about her, her family, and himself.”—Provided by publisher
Identifiers: LCCN 2017018451 | ISBN 9780544284777 (hardcover)
Subjects: | CYAC: Secrets—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Death—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.T877 Hid 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018451
eISBN 978-0-544-28622-1
v1.0318
For my wife and son
Chapter
One
I’m good at hiding. I think it’s what I’m best at. If you’re going to believe anything I say, I think you have to know that.
I’m very good at hiding.
I don’t just mean hide-and-seek, going in a closet or something. That’s just one kind of hiding.
Real hiding happens when everybody can see you, but they don’t notice you. That’s the real thing.
To do that, you have to be really aware of other people. You have to kind of get to know what sort of people they are to be sure they don’t ever look at you, or notice you.
It’s kind of hard to understand.
Of course, I find it easy to understand, because I’ve been hiding all my life.
In one way or another.
It all started when playing games as a little kid. I loved the weird sense of being totally alone behind a bush while whoever I was playing with was out there creeping around trying to find me. I loved watching them look. I felt so safe and protected, like the whole world had gone away, and I thought I never really wanted to be found.
But I no longer need a bush or a closet or a box or some obvious place—what everybody calls a hiding place. I feel I can hide anywhere, even when I’m standing right next to you.
There was a kid in my class who said the teacher always called on him when he didn’t know the answer. This was, like, the fourth grade. He was this kid who always sat in class leaning back in his chair really far like it might fall, and sometimes he scratched himself or even picked his nose like nobody else was even around, and these were of course the moments the teacher always chose to single him out.
But he didn’t think she called on him because of that stuff, or because he was sort of overweight and had a big fan of frizzy red hair and was definitely the most noticeable kid in class anyways.
She did it, he claimed, to embarrass him and show that he was stupid and just sort of blind to the world, and he thought she got a big kick out of doing it, like it was some sort of game for her.
How she treated him was pretty mean, I’ll admit that, but that wasn’t what I told him.
I said to him, “Well, there’re two ways to deal with that. Study, or learn to hide.”
“Hide?” he said. “I wouldn’t want to do that.”
We were in the cafeteria while we talked, eating lunch, and even then he was leaning back really far in his chair—I can’t remember whether he was picking his nose or not.
But I do remember he rolled his eyes and said I was a little nuts.
I couldn’t agree with that, so I went on to ask him if he knew why the teacher never called on me, whether I knew the answer or not.
“No,” he said.
So I told him.
I said I watched her. I always paid attention to her, even if I wasn’t looking straight at her. She never saw me drifted off like a sitting duck, waiting to be picked on. She never really saw me at all. I never got so comfortable that anybody would ever think I was blind to the world, but always stayed really well aware of it, and I would sit so still and watch her so calmly that she never noticed me and never thought of singling me out for anything.
I just wasn’t there.
For her, at least.
A better example is something I did three months ago—actually just a little less than three months ago; I mean the end of last May. It happened at this funeral, and it’s a perfect example of how I can sometimes walk around and never be seen by anybody.
Now, I call that hiding because I can definitely be seen if I want to. But I usually don’t want to.
The truth is, I never even meant to go to the funeral at all. I didn’t, really. I certainly wasn’t invited or anything. The thing is that I’d been walking around—it was a Sunday and this was almost three months ago, like I said, and I really never had anything much to do on Sundays anyways, especially right then after school had let out for summer.
I guess I wasn’t feeling too good at the time. My girlfriend had just broken up with me. You get the idea. So I was out just sort of wandering, telling myself I was not headed anywhere, when I found myself trudging up the hill from my house, passing this intersection at the top of it, and crossing the street into
