Supervision
Something is wrong with Esmé.
Kicked out of school in New York, her sister sends her to live with their grandmother in the small town she hasn’t visited since she was a child.
But something is wrong with the grandmother Ez hasn’t seen for years; she leaves the house at midnight, carrying a big black bag.
Something is wrong with her grandmother’s house, a decrepit mansion full of stray cats, stairs that lead to nowhere and beds that unmake themselves.
Something is wrong in the town where a child disappears every year, where a whistle sounds at night but no train arrives.
And something is definitely wrong with her cute and friendly neighbour with black curls and ice-blue eyes: he’s dead.
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Supervision
ALISON STINE
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Alison Stine 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com;
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015.
Alison Stine 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.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable 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.
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811359-9
Version: 2015-03-09
For my mom, who taught me how to read—and for Henry, who is a Story
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 8: Wickedness and Snares
CHAPTER 17: The Gift at the Table
Acid walked away the day he told me that he loved me.
He said those three little words, whispered them, and then the teacher slammed her hand on my desk, making me turn around and sit up straight and pretend to pay attention. By the time I glanced back, he had slipped out of the doorway into the hall, skipping class again.
I sat in the back at school. I felt different than everyone else. I wore different clothes. My school didn’t require a uniform, but I kind of wished it did. Acid wore expensive sneakers, but he’d had to scrimp for them, and I often saw him in the same shirt and jeans. Me, I was content to wear a sweatshirt, slipping the hood down over my face as far as I could, until I could hardly see.
The train the afternoon that Acid walked away was late, and when it came it was packed, only one seat in the back of the car I had chosen, near the operator’s booth. It was an hour’s ride home from school, forty-five minutes if I was lucky.
That was another way I was different: I was never lucky.
The subway rumbled and swayed. The car I was in emptied as more and more people got out. Hardly anyone got in as we traveled uptown. We were almost home when the train jerked and halted, and I was pushed into the sleeping man beside me. I moved away quickly, scooting over until my shoulder pressed against the side of the car. The man only snorted and went back to sleep.
The conductor’s voice came over the intercom, scratchy and garbled—but I knew what he was saying; I had heard it before. “This train is being held by supervision. We will be moving shortly.”
We were in between stops, and outside the window, the tunnel looked black. Inside the train, the lights flickered and went out. When they turned back on, there was something on the outside of the window.
Hand. It was a hand.
Someone was riding on the outside of the train.
I stood, my bag sliding off my lap and hitting the floor with a thud. The sleeping man grumbled. The operator came out of his booth and scanned the car.
I met his glance. “There’s someone out there.”
He didn’t look. “Kid, sit down.”
“Look!” I said.
Annoyed, he flicked his eyes in the direction I pointed, barely a glance. But the operator didn’t see. “Sit down,” he said. “We’ll be moving soon.” He opened the door to his little booth, and went back inside, muttering to himself, “Kids!”
I had heard about people riding on the outside of subway cars, trying to be funny, getting themselves killed. But when I turned to look again, to double-check, the hand was gone. I saw only the empty tunnel and the swinging work light. Why was it swinging, as if someone had knocked into it?
With a jerk, the train started moving again.
My stop was the last in Manhattan before the Bronx. My building was the last on the block before the highway, and our apartment was on the top floor, up five flights of stairs. No elevator. “It builds the muscles,” my sister had said when she was a dancer.
