I will never leave you, p.1
I Will Never Leave You, page 1
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 © 2024 by Kara A. Kennedy
Cover art copyright © 2024 by Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor
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.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kennedy, Kara A., author.
Title: I will never leave you / Kara A. Kennedy.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, 2024. | Audience: Ages 12–18. | Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: “A teen girl is being haunted by the ghost of her toxic ex-girlfriend, who gives her a chilling ultimatum—help her possess another girl or go down for her murder”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023052058 (print) | LCCN 2023052059 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-593-70746-3 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-593-70747-0 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-593-70748-7 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Ghosts—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | Psychological abuse—Fiction. | LCGFT: Ghost stories. | Thrillers (Fiction) | Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.K5045 Iaw 2024 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.K5045 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780593707487
Interior design by Ken Crossland, adapted for ebook
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CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Interlude: Six Years Earlier
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Interlude: Four Years Earlier
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Interlude: Four Years Earlier
Chapter Ten
Interlude: Two Years Earlier
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Interlude: One Year Earlier
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Interlude: Eight Months Earlier
Chapter Sixteen
Interlude: Seven Months Earlier
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue: One Year Later
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_147548048_
For Mom and Grandmom, and all the other unbreakable girls
I am the hermit.
I search for bones as the hawk circles
above my head.
My light is soft and low,
illuminating just as far ahead as is required
for my eyes to see.
This walk is mine alone.
You are not invited
where I am going.
—Anna Marie Tendler
PROLOGUE
NO ONE KNOWS Alana Murray like I do.
I was the one who held her hand on the first day of sixth grade, secret, so no one would know she was nervous. I was the one who edited her English papers for her. I was the one who kissed her behind a palm tree when we were fifteen, my heart cracking out of my rib cage.
I’ll be the last person to touch her casket before it’s lowered into the ground.
Funeral day dawns dark and cold and wrong, the Los Angeles sky clogged with watercolor gray. It won’t rain, and I won’t let myself cry. I practice in front of my bathroom mirror.
Alana died alone, I think, staring at my reflection until my eyes burn. She thought of you every second. How she hated you. How she loved you.
I sob until my throat goes dry, until I gag into the sink, fingernails scraping against the marble countertop. Then I wipe my makeup off with a warm washcloth, reapply my mascara, start all over. Alana always thought I cried too much, so today, I won’t let the tears come. Even though I know what people will say about a girl who doesn’t cry at her own girlfriend’s funeral.
Monster. Heartless.
I am. But not for the reasons they think.
During the service, Alana’s mom wears sunglasses with her black Chanel dress and ignores me. Lilies choke the inside of the funeral home. Everyone else watches me, whispers about me. Maya, the wind hisses my name, Maya, what do you know? I can feel it, a slow, creeping hate I might never outrun.
Outside it’s a sea of dark clothes and soft sniffles under shady trees, a small pile of red roses laid across the top of the casket. We surround Alana’s gravesite, and I can feel how the others loathe me because they think I know too much or too little. They track my movements and it feels like ice water dripping down my back.
Finally, everyone turns away, and the weight of their stares lifts. The cedar of Alana’s casket is warm under my palm, and I try to remember the way it felt to loop a strand of her hair around my finger, to brush my knuckles across her lips.
A handful of orange California poppy petals slip through my fingertips and scatter across the coffin lid. When I turn my back, I allow myself the smallest of smiles.
Because I know better than anyone that death isn’t the end.
Not for Alana and me. Not even close.
CHAPTER ONE
ONE WEEK EARLIER
ON THE MORNING I decide to break up with Alana, the sky is crystal blue.
We’re hiking the superbloom trail at Antelope Valley, our annual tradition. Liquid gold sunlight pours down on us, warming the pathway lined with electric-orange poppies bending in the wind. The gusts are almost strong enough to block out the obliterating desert heat. I was praying for rain last night, for a miracle that would cancel this outing, but the Southern California air is dry as ever.
“You’re so tense and weird today,” Alana says. She never breathes heavily on hikes. Everything she does, from schoolwork to hiking to insulting me, is effortless.
“Sorry.” I take a swig from my water bottle while her back is turned. “I’m just stressed.”
“Maya, what do you have to be stressed about?” Her brown ponytail swings. “It’s a beautiful day. You’re surrounded by wildflowers. Senior year’s basically over. You have me. Relax.”
I tilt my head back to face the sky. An eagle swoops overhead, low and silent. People come to see the famous superbloom from all over, cars lining the roads that feed to the Visitor Center. Ever since we got our licenses, we’ve made the trip up here each May. It’s our thing.
If I break up with her, I leave all that behind. I start all over again.
It’s what I need to do. I just don’t know if I’m strong enough to stand up to her.
On the trail, it’s quiet, but there are still plenty of hikers snapping photos and laughing. Everyone in the world is happier than me. At least there will be witnesses, I tell myself glumly, wiping the sweat off my forehead. Because I know what will happen when I initiate this conversation with Alana. Her anger, the way it accelerates so quickly it makes me dizzy. I can already feel the fear lodging in my throat, the kick-drum beat of my heart.
“Are you freaking out about graduation?” Alana asks, voice cutting through the quiet. “Because it won’t be a big deal. We’ll walk across the stage, we’ll get our diplomas.”
“Barely, in my case.” I bite my lip and focus on the California poppies spilling out before us. Graduation is next Saturday, only a week away. “That whole thing is still a secret, right? You didn’t tell anybody?”
Alana turns, walking backward, bouncing on the soles of her feet. Her sneakers are newer than mine, pristine despite the dirt path. Everything she touches stays perfect.
“Who would I tell?” she asks. “Besides, it’s your personal business.”
“And everyone else on the planet, when I stay here in LA this fall,” I mumble, kicking a pebble. It ricochets off my sneaker, lands in a cluster of poppies and blue forget-me-nots. “Do you know how shitty it feels, not getting into a single college?”
She pauses, waits for me to catch up. Beyond her is a sprawling wildflower field that goes on for miles, and in the distance, the white-capped San Gabriel Mountains. I swallow back that gnawing sensation I get at the sight of it. I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life and it never fails to knock me off my feet.
There was a time when I felt the same way whenever I looked at Alana. Now, the expectant set of her mouth floods my stomach with nausea. The copper taste of fear in my mouth, bitten back.
“You’re being dramatic,” Alana says. “Hardly anybody gets into Yale early decision. That was always a crapshoot.”
This is a well-trodden conversation, one we’ve revisited a hundred times over the past few months.
“And then, what? Five rejection letters during regular decision?”
“Something like that,” I say, like I don’t know the names of the schools by heart. Like I don’t recite them over and over in my head in a mantra of self-hatred before falling asleep.
“Well, it could’ve been worse.” Alana squeezes my hand and the knot in my chest loosens. Alana is nice to me, she is—this is proof. “Nobody in our class knows besides me. So you show up at the graduation ceremony and act like you have every right to be there, because you do. Be brave.”
I don’t know if I remember how to do brave things, I think, wiping the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead and squinting into the Mojave Desert sun. It’s almost impossible to believe that wildflowers can bloom in an environment like this.
Alana crouches down at the trail’s edge as a couple of hikers holding hands with a giggling toddler pass behind us. I watch her brush her fingers gently against the soft petal of a poppy.
“Speaking of college.” My throat constricts. Sunlight picks strands of gold out of Alana’s deep brown hair. “I was thinking that it…that it doesn’t…”
She mumbles something under her breath. It sounds like Here we go.
“What?” I ask, defensive.
“You’re going to give me a big speech about how we shouldn’t be together, right? Because long distance will be too hard?”
I’m silent.
She glances over her shoulder. “Am I wrong?”
“I just don’t see how it can work,” I whisper. “You being all the way on the East Coast for college…I mean, it’s ridiculous, right?”
She’s going to say I’m wrong, I tell myself, hope blooming in my chest. She’ll tell me that distance doesn’t matter, or better yet, she won’t go to Massachusetts at all.
“Yeah,” Alana says, thoughtful. She gets to her feet, brushing dust off her leggings. “Yeah, you’re right.”
A cold shock washes over me. “What?”
“We’re going to be almost three thousand miles apart for four whole years.”
I stare at her, feeling my hands start to shake. “You don’t think it’ll work either?”
“Maya, you literally just told me that you can’t see how it can work between us. Were you messing with my head?”
“No! I—”
“That’s really unfair.” Alana sighs, folding her arms. “After everything I’ve done for you this year? Protecting you from all the drama, all the—”
“Sorry,” I choke out. Ironclad panic squeezes my lungs. I can’t cry in front of her. I can’t.
The briefest of pauses, wind rustling through the wide-open fields.
“Are you crying?”
“No.” My lower lip is shaking, and when I blink, a fat, hot tear spills over my lashes, trickling down my cheek, dripping off my chin before I can wipe it away. Alana watches it fall through narrowed eyes. More than anything, she hates when I cry.
This is why I need to end things, no matter what it does to me. I’m not happy, and I won’t be any happier when she’s across the country. I will always be at her mercy.
I’m dry grass and she’s the wildfire. It takes nothing for me to burn.
“Sometimes I feel like…,” I start, but trail off. “Sometimes I feel like it makes me too sad, being with you.”
“This again? Seriously?”
“I just don’t think relationships are supposed to make you this sad.”
“What’s making you sad?” she asks. The words drip off Alana’s tongue, slow and lazy like honey. “Is it your spooky ghosts again?”
I flinch like she took a swing at me. I should never have told her about the paranormal encounters I had growing up. She’s always had a way of clinging to my childhood ghost anecdotes, like it was some kind of fun party trick and not a trauma I’d rather forget. “You know I haven’t seen them since I was a kid.”
She smirks. “Yeah, I know, Maya. You aren’t being haunted by anything except your inner demons.”
Goose bumps rise on my bare arms, thin hairs standing on edge even in the warm wind. Dimly, I’m aware of the other hikers ducking around us, trying to act like this never-ending wildflower field doesn’t make it possible for them to hear every word. This is what Alana does: latches onto the ghosts of my past and resurrects them as soon as I’m vulnerable.
I could escape right now if I wanted. But the thing about Alana is that even when I feel so trapped that I can’t breathe, she could give me a wide-open sky and I still wouldn’t run. I love her too much.
“Seriously,” Alana says again. “It’s a favor from the universe that you didn’t get into Yale. There’s no way you could’ve lived an hour and a half away from me. I bet you would’ve lasted, like, a week, and then you would’ve just followed me to Smith.”
“I would’ve been fine,” I insist, but it comes out more whiny than forceful. It kills me to say these words, a jagged pain shooting through my lungs. “I’ll be fine. We need to stop pretending that we…that we need each other.”
She gives me a skeptical look, condescension dripping from her gaze. “Like you really mean that. Who’s going to be there to protect you from your anxiety spirals? What would you have done if you’d seen one of those super-scary Instagram posts from Elise and the other girls from school having fun without you—proof that the world doesn’t revolve around you?”
She laughs at her own joke, but I just glare. Another ghost that needs to stay in the past.
“Why would you bring that up? You know how bad it hurt when—”
“Maya, I realize you’re perfect and we should all aspire to emulate your shining example, but honestly? You’re not the best judge of character.” Alana undoes her ponytail, brown hair ribboning in the wind. “Why else do you think you ended up losing every single one of your friends over the last few years?”
I stare at her, hating her so much it stings. Hands shaking, I step forward, sneakers scuffing in the dirt. I’m not actually going to hit her, but my heart is slamming against my rib cage, blood pooling in my cheeks, and I’m not so sure I can control what I do anymore.
“Hey,” a voice says behind me, and I whip my head around. There’s a hiker, blond and midtwenties, thumbs looped through her backpack straps. She looks embarrassed. “So sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to make sure—are you guys okay?”
I open my mouth, cheeks blazing hot, but before I can get a word out—
“Oh, I’m fine,” Alana says, crystal blue eyes widening. Out of nowhere, there’s a delicate tremble to her voice. “We’re just, um, talking about school. It’s no big deal.”
The woman doesn’t seem convinced. Her eyes flicker over to me, then back to Alana. “You’re sure you don’t need anything?”
She says this to Alana, not me.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your hike! Beautiful day.”
I watch the woman as she heads off down the trail, wildflowers blooming in raging colors all around her.
