L auren glanced down at her feet as she pedaled her bike toward the woods. She wore brand-new turquoise high-tops; they looked sort of like the Chuck Taylors she’d wanted, but they were off-brand from Kmart. They didn’t have the Chuck label in the back but they were still pretty cool. She thought so, anyway. They would have to be cool because her mom had told her repeatedly they couldn’t afford the name-brand ones. At least no one else at school had turquoise. They were so bright they practically glowed in the summer sun, but by the time she went back to school in the fall they would be properly beaten up and she wouldn’t look like a dork. By the time she went back to school she would be almost fifteen (the end of November—five months away still), which meant she would be one of the older kids in the freshman class but still younger than Miranda, whose birthday h

MMrs. Schneider had spent the morning peering through the curtains at her across-the-street new neighbors. She didn’t know just what the world was coming to when Mexicans could move onto a decent street where decent people livedwithout so much as a by-your-leave. They played loud music in Spanish and they shouted at each other in Spanish and they always seemed to be cooking something foreign.If they wanted to eat strange food and speak a strange language, then why hadn’t they just stayed in their own country instead of coming here to take jobs away from good American folk? she wondered.She knew that most of the adults in that house had jobs on the canning line at the chili factory and she didn’t think that was right, even though Mrs. Schneider didn’t know anyone who’

 L auren saw her mother and brother come out of Frank’s deli and walk toward the Sweet Shoppe. She wrinkled her nose a little and turned her head away, even though there was little to no chance of her mother seeing her through thewindow in the dim interior of the arcade.She stood next to Miranda, who was standing very close to Tad, the greasy-haired (and also greasy-faced, Lauren thought) object of her affection who did not look at all like Matt Dillon.On the other side of Tad was his friend Billy, who also did not look like Matt Dillon and who seemed to have about as much interest in Lauren as she did in him—that is, none at all.Tad was very involved with his latest round of Karate Champ and they were all supposed to care just as much as he did.Lauren didn’

 L auren hadn’t wanted to ride her bike after finding the bloody handprint on the seat, but she finally conceded that it would take longer to walk it home. Plus, if she walked it and someone else came along the road they might notice theblood.She didn’t have a tissue or anything to wipe it off, so she grabbed a handful of dirt and scrubbed it over the seat until the print was distorted. This left her hands both dirty and bloody, but she scrubbed them on her cutoffs as best she could and thought that it just looked like mud.Her mother would no doubt complain about the stains on her shorts, but then her mother complained about every little thing Lauren did, so what else was new?She sat carefully on the bike seat and tried not to think about what was on her hands and under the back p

 R ichard Touhy III was the mayor of Smiths Hollow, like his father Richard before him and his father Richard beforehim. In fact, Richard Touhy III could trace an unbroken line of mayors named Touhy all the way back to the first mayor of Smiths Hollow, a man appointed by the Chicago baron who’d either saved the town from ruin or built it from the ground up, depending on who you talked to.At the moment he very much wished that his father and his father before him had worked at the canned chili factory like everyone else in town. It would be a blessing to worry about nothing more complicated than the mortgage and his union dues and whether his wife was boffing the postman.He was pretty certain, as a matter of fact, that his wife, Crystal, was boffing someone while he sat in his