Wild Awake

enchanted flower. When I crouch to touch them, the paint splatters are smooth under my fingers, distinct from the roughness of the roof. I unscrew the last of the paint jars, the arsenic and ochre and gold, colors I would have hardly believed existed if she hadn’t brought them into my world. They splash onto the rooftop and scatter into a hundred different shapes, joining the cacaphony of colors. I don’t know what she would have painted with them and I guess I never will, but for now, like this, they are beautiful.
    I sit on the rooftop all night long, cradled in the broken lawn chair like a ramshackle bird in a plastic nest. Below me, the neighborhood tosses and turns like a person in a fever. The lamps burn too bright. The street sweats. A bottle breaks on a sidewalk. A police car howls through an intersection.
    I wrap my arms around my knees and cry and laugh for a very long time, but mostly I just hold myself very, very tightly, like a piece of dandelion fluff you’ve finally caught in your fingers after chasing it, leaping for it, again and again on a windy day. The universe, I realize, is full of little torches. Sometimes, for some reason, it’s your turn to carry one out of the fire—because the world needed it, or your family needed it, or you needed it to keep your soul from twisting into a shape that’s entirely wrong.
    So you go, and you come back with paint all over your hands and scabs on your knees and the lingering traces of a song few people have ever heard, echoing in your ears.
    I stay until the sky turns pale pink and a flock of small brown birds alights on the edge of the roof, chirping and whistling and flapping their wings. There’s a rumbling from the street as someone rolls up a metal screen. The sweetness of steaming buns fills the air: the Chinese bakery. I push myself up from the lawn chair and go to the place where the paint forms a brilliant carpet beneath my feet. The soul has a home of its own , Sukey said, and I want to live in that one . I feel, as I gaze down at the shining colors, that I am standing in a place I have been forever. A place I will leave without leaving. A place I will find, and yet search for, for the rest of my life.
    As I climb onto the fire escape, a blueness catches my eye, so slight and far away, I almost don’t turn my head.
    But I do stop.
    And I do look.
    And this is what I see: There, on the horizon, two ships.

Acknowledgments
    Thank you to my editor, Molly O’Neill, who was a lighthouse in the stormy seas of revision and a great mentor; and to my agent, Laura Rennert, without whose wisdom and encouragement this ship might have capsized many times over. I’m grateful every day to have fallen into such good hands and am deeply indebted to you both.
    Thank you to Lara Perkins and everyone at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency; my foreign rights agent, Taryn Fagerness; Barb Fitzsimmons, Lauren Flower, Tom Forget, Brenna Franzitta, Esilda Kerr, Casey McIntyre, Amy Ryan, Valerie Shea, Megan Sugrue, Katherine Tegen, Joel Tippie, and all the other wizards at HarperCollins who do the magical stuff that makes a book a book; Lynn Lindquist for encouragement in the early drafts; all the INTERN readers whose friendship has been an inspiration and an unexpected delight; and to friends and loved ones in too many cities to name.
    May your own adventures be rich and true.

Credits
    Cover photo (girl) © 2013 by Mohamad Itani / Trevillion Images, (city) Busà Photography/Getty Images
    Cover design and flower illustrations by Tom Forget

Copyright
    Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
    W ILD AWAKE . Copyright © 2013 by Hilary T. Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Smith, Hilary T.
    Wild awake / Hilary T. Smith. — First edition.
    pages cm
    Summary: “The discovery of a startling family secret leads seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd from