Playlist for the Dead
Here's what Sam knows: There was a party. There was a fight. The next morning, his best friend, Hayden, was dead. And all he left Sam was a playlist of songs, and a suicide note:For Sam – listen and you'll understand.Here's what Sam knows: There was a party. There was a fight. The next morning, his best friend, Hayden, was dead. And all he left Sam was a playlist of songs, and a suicide note: For Sam – listen and you'll understand.As he listens to song after song, Sam tries to face up to what happened the night Hayden killed himself. But it's only by taking out his earbuds and opening his eyes to the people around him that he will finally be able to piece together his best friend’s story. And maybe have a chance to change his own.Part mystery, part love story, and part coming-of-age tale in the vein of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Playlist for the Dead is an honest and gut-wrenching first novel about loss, rage, what it feels like to outgrow a friendship that's always defined you – and the struggle to redefine yourself.
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Copyright © Michelle Falkoff 2015
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015
Michelle Falkoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008110666
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008110673
Version: 2014-11-26
For Erik, in memory
Contents
ALL MY YEARS of watching TV made me think it was possible you could find a dead body and not know it until you turned the person over and found the bullet hole or stab wound or whatever. And I guess in some ways that was right—Hayden was lying under the covers, tangled up in a bunch of his lame-ass Star Wars sheets (how old were we, anyway?), just like he always was when I slept at his house.
Hayden had always been a hard sleeper; sometimes I had to practically roll him out of bed to get him to wake up. Which wasn’t easy—he was short and kind of round, and while I’m a lot taller, I’m more of a string bean kind of guy, and when he was out cold he was hard to move. When I saw him lying there I sighed, trying to figure out how to incorporate the apology from the night before, the apology I’d come over to give him, with the apology for dumping him out of bed onto the floor.
The sound of my sigh seemed loud to me, though, and it took me a minute to figure out why: Hayden wasn’t snoring. Hayden always snored. My mom, who’s a nurse, thought he had sleep apnea; the sound of his buzzing made it all the way down the hall to her room when he stayed at my house. She kept trying to get him to talk to his mom about getting some kind of mask that would help, but I knew that would never happen. Hayden didn’t talk to his mom unless he absolutely had to, and he was even less likely to ask his dad.
The silence in the room started to freak me out. I kept trying to convince myself it was nothing, that Hayden had just found a good position to sleep in that quieted his steady drone or something, but that would have been some kind of minor miracle, and even after five years of Hebrew school I didn’t really believe in miracles.
I gave his leg a little shove. “Hayden, come on.”
He didn’t move.
“Hayden, seriously. Wake up.”
Nothing. Not even a grunt.
I was just about to grab a stormtrooper’s head and pull down the sheets when I saw the empty vodka bottle on Hayden’s desk, standing in between his laptop and his model of the Millennium Falcon, just next to where he was sleeping.
That was weird—Hayden didn’t drink at all, not even at the few parties we’d been to. And from what I could tell he hadn’t had time to take as much as a sip from the keg last night. There was no reason for that bottle to be there. Unless he’d been even more bent out of shape than I realized; he could easily have taken it out of his dad’s liquor cabinet when he got home.
I felt my stomach churn with what I realized was guilt. That must have been why he wouldn’t wake up: he was hung over. Even through my guilt, I couldn’t help but start laughing. Hayden’s first hangover—I was going to give him so much shit for this when he finally woke up. Then I’d drag him off for a greasy breakfast and we’d make up. And everything would be fine.
Now he just had to wake up.
I moved closer to the head of the bed, sniffing cautiously in case he’d puked. The air smelled like it normally did in his house: overly disinfected, the pine scent overwhelming anything else. I swear his mom must have had cleaners come in every single day. I debated whether to roll him over or just pull the pillow out from beneath his head, but just as I went for the pillow I knocked over the empty vodka bottle with my elbow. It fell to the floor with a clang, taking down some other stuff with it.
I bent over to pick it up. No need to have Hayden wake up pissed that I’d made a mess; we had enough to talk about as it was. I grabbed the bottle, and then I saw a prescription bottle next to it and grabbed that too. It was a bottle of Valium with Hayden’s mother’s name on it. And it was empty. I didn’t know how many pills were supposed to have been in there, but according to the date on the bottle, she’d filled the prescription just a couple of days before. Which meant she’d gone through a whole bottle practically overnight.
