Just Like Fate

An Advance Reviewer Copy
Uncorrected Proof
Not for Sale

TITLE:
Just Like Fate
AUTHOR:
Cat Patrick and Suzanne Young
IMPRINT:
Simon Pulse
ON-SALE DATE:
8/27/13
ISBN:
978-1-4424-7271-6
FORMAT:
Hardcover
PRICE:
$16.99 / $19.99 CAN
AGES:
14 up
PAGES:
304

Aladdin • Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Beach Lane Books • Beyond Words • Libros para niños • Little Simon
Little Simon Inspirations • Margaret K. McElderry Books
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,
or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products
of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Simon Pulse hardcover edition August 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Cat Patrick and Suzanne Young
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Designed by Hilary Zarycky
The text of this book was set in Bulmer.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
TK
ISBN 978-1-4424-7271-6
ISBN 978-1-4424-7273-0 (eBook)
No trees in sight, just concrete

There are exactly sixteen minutes left in math class when there’s
a faint double knock on the classroom door, and we all perk
up. Through the window I can see the office assistant with the
frizzy hair standing timidly, like she’s afraid of even herself.

We watch curiously as Mr. Pip lumbers over, wiping his
perpetually sweaty forehead as he goes. He opens the door two
feet at best, and I almost expect him to ask the woman in the
hall for a secret password. She whispers something, then hands
over a tiny piece of pink paper. I know that pink: It’s a hall pass.

Someone’s getting out of here early.
“Caroline Cabot, please report to the office,” Mr. Pip says
in his nasally voice. At the sound of my name, I drop the piece
of strawberry-blond hair I’m twirling and, eyebrows furrowed,
look across the aisle at Simone.
“What’d you do now, Linus?” she asks with a twinkle
in her dark eyes. The guy one row over wakes up when she
speaks. Simone’s like a half Asian Marilyn Monroe with Angelina Jolie lips—guys are constantly checking her out.
“You should talk,” I say, reaching down to grab the backpack stuffed into the basket beneath my seat. “You’re the one
with the monogrammed chair in the principal’s office.” Simone’s had detention three times this year already, but as far as
the office is concerned, I’m a good girl.
On my way out, I look back at Simone and waggle my
phone in her direction. She makes a face to acknowledge that
texting me later is obvious just before I slip out of sight.
I think of detouring through the science wing for a
glimpse of Joel, but the rule follower in me takes over and I
head straight to see the principal. On my way there, I picture
Joel and Lauren breaking up—maybe she has a fling with a
guy her own age at the community college—and him falling
madly in love with me. I laugh at myself as I push through the
doors of the main office.
Then I see the look on Principal Jones’s face.
Immediately I feel it: Something’s wrong.
“Caroline,” he says, his deep vibrato at odds with his soft
expression. “Your mother called.” He stops, motioning at the
chair near the window. “Here, sit.”
My stomach twists. Principal Jones is nothing short of
intimidating, and this unprovoked kindness is like a flashing
neon sign that reads
brace yourself
. I slowly lower into the
chair, even more alarmed when my principal turns to face me.
“Your grandmother’s in the hospital,” he says. “She had a
stroke and your mother—”
I don’t hear the rest because I lean forward, my head
between my knees like there’s an impending plane crash. My
throat seizes, and I make a sound halfway between a moan and
a whimper. I was just with my grandmother this morning, rolling my eyes when she told me to put my cereal bowl in the
sink.
Why did I roll my eyes?
“Is she okay?” I ask, tears coming faster than I can blink
them away.
“I’m not clear on the details. But your mom said your
brother would be here to pick you up and then—”
“I can’t wait for him.” I stand, pulling my backpack over
my shoulders. “Which hospital?” Panic has my heart racing, my skin prickling. Principal Jones is stumbling over his
words, but I don’t have time for this. I have to see Gram. “St.
Mark’s?” I ask impatiently.
When he nods, I dash out of the office, not stopping even
when the assistant calls after me from the front desk. I’m a bundle of fear loosely held together by purpose. As I jog through
the empty halls, I take out my phone and text my brother.

The hospital is a massive maze, and at the very moment that I
wonder how I’m ever going to find Gram, Natalie appears out
of nowhere.

“Where’s Teddy?” she says, grabbing my arm from
behind like a mugger. My sister’s wearing jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, and her dark-framed glasses. As usual, she looks
more forty than almost twenty.

“I drove myself.”
“You were supposed to wait for him,” she snaps.
“Well, I didn’t,” I snap back. It’d be nice if our animosity

were a result of the tension of the moment, but unfortunately
this is our brand of sisterly love. Teddy is the older sibling
who took me to R-rated movies before I turned seventeen;
Natalie’s the one who told on me for sneaking out. In a nutshell, she sucks.

“Gram’s on the third floor,” Natalie says through permanently pursed lips. “Come on.”
We ride the elevator in silence. When the doors open, my
sister walks purposefully down one long corridor, around a
corner, and down another. My stomach clenches tighter and
tighter with each room we pass. I try not to look at the people
inside—to wonder how many of them are dying.
I try not to wonder whether Gram’s dying.
She was already weak from the chemo treatments she
finished a few months ago. But she was better. The doctors
assured all of us that she was better.
As warm tears run down my cheeks, I’m suddenly twelve
years old again. I’m on my grandmother’s front porch with a
suitcase, asking if I can live with her. My parents’ divorce is
getting uglier by the day, and I don’t want to be their pawn to
hurt each other. I’ve opted out. And when Gram agrees, I am
struck with relief and gratitude. She’s always been my rock; I
can’t lose her.
“Here,” Natalie says, gesturing toward a door open a
crack. I nod and take a deep breath of antiseptic air, then follow her in. I can’t help it: I gasp. Seeing Gram in a hospital
bed is like a punch in the gut.
“Hi,” I say, desperately trying to keep the despair out of
my voice, the tears from my eyes. But when Gram raises a
skinny, veiny arm and waves, I can’t hold back. I rush to her
bedside, crying the kind of tears that don’t care if they make
you look ugly.
“Stop that now, Caroline,” Gram says, reaching out to
hold my hand with the arm that’s free from the IV. Her hand is
the same one that makes me breakfast, but it feels alien. Cold.
Frail. Even worse, her words are coming out funny—slurred
somehow. She sounds like she’s drunk. “I’m going to be fine,”
she says, but “fine” sounds like “fline.”
“Yes,” I say, knowing if I say more, I’ll start blubbering again.
I’m still holding Gram’s hand when Mom walks in with
my little sister, Judith.
“Where’s Teddy?” Mom asks when she sees me. Apparently, whether or not my brother is inconvenienced is what’s
really important here. The funny thing is that Teddy won’t
care—he’s the most laid-back one of all of us.
“She didn’t wait for him,” Natalie mutters to Mom in that
annoyingly soft voice she uses when she’s only pretending to
be discreet.
“Well, you’re here now,” Mom says, sighing at me.
“Coco!” Judith says, dropping Mom’s hand and rushing toward me. She hugs my leg, and I squeeze her as best I
can without letting go of Gram. I run my palm over her baby
blond hair and smile.
“Hi, Juju,” I say. “How are you?”
“Mama gived me juice,” she says proudly. At two and a
half, she’s all belly and bum; she stands like an adorable troll
doll, beaming at me. Then she looks at Gram. “We bringed
you juice, too, Gamma!”
Judith runs over and grabs a juice box from Mom’s gigantic purse, then returns to the bedside and tosses it up onto
Gram’s lap. Gram beams back at her. “How thoughtful of
you,” she says. “Thank you, Judith.”
Julif.

I look away from Gram’s face when I realize that one side
is sagging lower than the other. Thankfully, a nurse comes in
right then and says he needs to check her vitals.

“Let’s all step out for a minute,” Mom says, giving me a
look that tells me I’m coming with her, whether I like it or not.
“We’ll go get a snack and be back in a few minutes, Mom.”

“All right, then,” Gram says, releasing my hand. It feels
like I’ve just taken off my coat in a blizzard. I want to grab hold
again, but the nurse has already moved in with his pushcart
full of tools. “See you.”

Sheeu.
I swallow down the lump in my throat and follow Mom,
Judith, and Natalie out of the room. Teddy is walking toward
us from the elevator, and when he joins our group, he’s the
only one on the face of the planet who manages not to give
me crap about driving myself. Instead he nudges me with his
elbow and whispers, “She’ll be fine, Coco.”
And that makes me cry all over again.
When Judith is preoccupied, hopping from tile to tile in
the hallway, my mother talks in a detached voice. “I didn’t
want to say this in front of her, but they did a scan.” Natalie’s
eyes are round as saucers and Teddy crosses his arms over his
chest, listening intently. I feel light-headed.
Mom sighs heavily. “The cancer has spread. It’s throughout her abdomen, her lungs. Her brain.”
“Oh my God.” It’s all I can manage. Natalie reaches for
my mother immediately. I look at Teddy as he shakes his head
slowly.
“She’s weak from the stroke, and the cancer is everywhere,” Mom continues, letting go of Natalie. “The oncologist says she’s too far gone—that there’s nothing they can do
but make her comfortable.” My mother takes a deep breath
and meets my eyes. “She doesn’t have long.”
I want to ask specifically how long that means. I want to
ask why the chemo worked but then didn’t. I want to ask a
million things, but everything stills—even my vocal cords. In
that quiet, my thoughts are noisy: I’m losing my confidant.
I’m losing my best friend.
“Coco?” Teddy asks, like he said something before but I
didn’t hear him. It pulls me out. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say. My ears are ringing.
“Do you want to sit down?” he asks, nodding to the chairs
near the wall.
Natalie huffs, wiping the tears under her glasses. “It’s
always about you, isn’t it,” she murmurs.
The anger in my sister’s voice lights a fire in me. I’m so
sick of her telling me what to do, acting like I’m some inconvenience to the family. She’s been like this ever since the divorce.
I spin toward her, ready to strike back.
Teddy steps in before I tear into her. “Please,” he says
to both of us. “I can’t referee right now.” His shoulders are
hunched, and I realize that even my always-steady older
brother is crumbling, too. We fall silent and wait until the
nurse leaves before crossing the hall. My mother pauses outside the doorway and turns to face us.
“Not a word about what I told you,” she whispers. She
grabs Judith’s hand and walks back inside the room.

“Come out with me tonight,” Simone says at the beginning of
math. It’s been three days since Gram was transferred from
the hospital to the hospice facility—three excruciating days of
me being forced to attend school when I should be there by
Gram’s side.

“You’ve gone every night this week,” she protests. “You’ve
become a slightly unwashed hermit.”
“I still shower.”
“Sure you do.” She smiles, but when I don’t laugh, she
sighs. “Linus, I’m sure Gram will be feeling better soon.”
I turn to her. “People don’t get released from hospice,” I
say. “They’re giving her drugs to make her comfortable. But
she’s still dying.”
Too many drugs
, I think.
So many that half
the time, she’s out cold.

“I’m sorry,” she says softer, leaning in toward me because
Mr. Pip looks like he’s about to start class. “I’m not trying to
sound insensitive. I just don’t really know what to say anymore. No one close to me has ever been sick. You love your
gram—hell, I love her too. But it’s like you’re fading away, Caroline. You’re living at your mom’s, sleeping in your weird old
penguin bedroom—“

“Not by choice,” I interrupt. “My mom won’t let me stay
at my
real
house. At Gram’s.”
“I know,” Simone says, nodding. “And it sucks. Everything
sucks for you right now. That’s my point. Can’t you take one
night off ? We’ll do something fun. I hear there’s a party at—”
“No,” I say quickly, but without conviction. Then Mr. Pip
gives us a look and we’re forced to be quiet.
My eyes fall to my blank notebook. I feel heavy with guilt,
like there’s lead in my veins. Truth be told, I’d give anything
to go to a party, no matter where it is. I’d give anything to get
away from it all. I’m craving a break from my life. From my
grief. From my family.
From Gram.
Because when it comes down to it, waiting for someone to
die is like being told a tornado is coming. You press pause on
your life and brace yourself—but you don’t know when it will
hit, how bad it’ll be. You can prepare all you want, but in the
end, you just don’t know.

When I arrive at the hospice facility after school, Gram is
asleep in the bed—but her face is slack, her chest rising and
falling slowly. Natalie waits at her side, and she looks up with
a weary expression, her hair in a messy knot.

“Where’s Teddy?” I ask.
“He went to grab something to eat. It’s exhausting being
here all day.” She says it like it’s my choice to go to school, as
if I wouldn’t rather stay here with my grandmother, begging
the universe to let me keep her. I pull up a chair on the other
side of the bed and try to block out my sister’s existence. It
doesn’t work.
“Her vitals were weak this morning,” Natalie murmurs.
“They’ve been adjusting her medication.”
“Her vitals were weak two days ago, then they got better.”
“Well, she’s worse now,” Natalie says. “She hasn’t woken
up all day, and they don’t know when she will. Mom nearly collapsed and I had to call Albert to take her out for some air. She’s
going to need you after this, so don’t pull one of your stunts.”
I scoff. “Stunts? It was five years ago, Natalie. I had every
right to move in with Gram.” I lean toward my sister. “And I’m
still glad I left. I don’t regret a second of it.” I sit back, feeling
sick that Natalie brings out the venom in me.
“Where will you run away to this time?” she asks bitterly.
“There’s no one to pick up your pieces anymore.”
I glance sideways at my grandmother’s face, serene in
sleep . . . or sedation. “She’s not dead, you know,” I whisper.
“So stop acting like she is.” I take Gram’s hand, noting how
cool her skin is. I stand and the chair scrapes loudly on the
floor. “I’m not going to sit here listening to this,” I tell Natalie.
“Have Teddy call me when he gets back.”
I walk away, feeling my sister’s glare on my back. “That’s
right, Caroline,” she calls out dramatically. “Run away. Take
all the attention for yourself. You’re worse than the two-yearold because you should know better.”
“Drop dead,” I say, and then suddenly wish I could take
it back. I turn to my sister, her expression stunned and hurt,
but it’s too late to apologize. Instead I can only lower my eyes.
“Love you, Gram,” I tell my grandmother, hoping she
can hear me. And then I leave, planning to come back when
Teddy does. Just as I get into the hallway, the sunlight outside
the window fades behind a cloud, making it seem suddenly
dark. It’s eerie even though I’m safe. My phone rings, startling
me. I glance at the caller ID and take a deep breath.
“Hey,” I say into the line.
“Well?” Simone asks. “Are you coming with me or do I
have to kidnap you? Please tell me it’s the first option because
I’m running low on chloroform.” She launches into a description of the party, who will be there, and what her outfit options
are.
“It’s not a good time, Mony,” I say, interrupting her. “My
sister is a rag and my mother is having a breakdown. I swear to
God if Teddy falls apart, I might just lose it completely.”
“Maybe you need some space from your family.” She says
it as if she actually believes the words and isn’t just trying to
bend me to her will. “One night off. Come on, Linus. Don’t
make me forge important high school memories alone.”
I smile, thinking it over. A party—a college party—sounds
like a truly good time, the sort of good time we’ll talk about
for the rest of the year. Then again, these moments with my
grandmother could be the last I have.
“So . . . ,” Simone says, waiting for my decision. “Are you
going to spend the evening with me and distinguished alumni,
or are you going to argue with your sister all night?”
It might be my imagination, but the hallway seems to
darken even more. No one is around, and for one moment
everything is quiet. And then I sigh.
“Simone,” I start, my decision made. “I’m going to—”