Naked
Author: Stacey Trombley
Release Date: July 7, 2015
Publisher: Entangled Teen
305 pages
Summary from Goodreads:
The best place to hide is in a lie…
I could never fit in to the life my parents demanded. By the time I was thirteen, it was too much. I ran away to New York City…and found a nightmare that lasted three years. A nightmare that began and ended with a pimp named Luis. Now I am Dirty Anna. Broken, like everything inside me has gone bad.
Except that for the first time, I have a chance to start over. Not just with my parents but at school. Still, the rumors follow me everywhere. Down the hall. In classes. And the only hope I can see is in the wide, brightly lit smile of Jackson, the boy next door. So I lie to him. I lie to protect him from my past. I lie so that I don’t have to be The Girl Who Went Bad.
The only problem is that someone in my school knows about New York.
Someone knows who I really am.
And it’s just a matter of time before the real Anna is exposed…
And it’s just a matter of time before the real Anna is exposed…
There’s a strange tapping on my window. My heart pounds in my chest
as I remember the last time. Nothing happened then, but I do sort of
wish I had Zara with me now.
I take a deep breath and tiptoe to
the window and peer out. A happy face peers back at me. I blink and
then slide open the window.
“What the hell are you doing here, Jackson?” His eyes are bright and alive, and I realize I’m very happy to see him.
“I want to show you something,” he says.
“Normal people come to the door, you know?”
He shrugs. “You told me your parents were strict—figured this was the safe way.”
I
shake my head. He’s crazy. And sneaking around my parents with a boy,
even a boy as innocent as Jackson, probably isn’t the best idea in the
world. Especially after what happened at dinner. I narrow my eyes. “Is
it important?”
He nods eagerly, and I sigh. Good thing I didn’t
change out of my school clothes yet. Besides, the chances of my parents
coming to my room are nonexistent. After that big speech, my dad will
want to bask in his own glory while he gives me time to think over his
“lesson.” I grab a pair of tennis shoes from my closet, flick off the
light so my parents think I’m sleeping, and climb out the window.
“Okay, what’s so important?”
He
grabs my hand and laces his fingers through mine, which makes my heart
patter in a completely idiotic way. And then he runs, pulling me with
him. I notice he’s wearing a backpack. We run down the street and behind
one of the houses, back to the field with the honeysuckles and my mini
Central Park.
Then we stop. The sky is a dark blue, but there’s
still a little bit of light peeking out over the horizon. The field is
right in front of us, with the little specks of lights flickering in the
darkness. “Fireflies,” I say.
Jackson turns to me, his eyes bright. “You are human!” he says with a sly smile that makes my stomach tumble.
At least my cheeks don’t get hot. I do have some composure. “But they’re actually called lightning bugs.”
“What? You made that up.”
“Did not!”
I laugh, and we both grow quiet and watch the little specks of light in the dark field.
“My
family used to go camping in the summer when I was little,” I say. “My
mom and I caught fireflies together. But we haven’t done it since I was
eight or so.”
“What happened after that?”
“I don’t
know. My dad started working more, we stopped talking to our cousins and
even my grandparents for some reason, and my parents got stricter and
stricter.” I shrug, wondering if that was actually the beginning of the
end of my parents’ relationship, and I just hadn’t seen it. The same way
they didn’t see the way those changes affected me. “That’s around the
time that everything changed for me because they wouldn’t let me out to
play with kids my age, and they stopped playing with me, too.” I’m
telling him more than I’m supposed to.
“Loneliness sucks.”
I nod.
He takes off his backpack and pulls out a jar. “Maybe we can make her a present.”
“My mom? You don’t think she’ll say they’re too…you know…childish?”
He takes my hand. “Maybe. But maybe she needs to remember what it was like when things were good.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just
some things you’ve said… It sounds like you guys haven’t been happy in a
long time.”
He’s right. It’s been a long time since we were happy. Not
just me. My mom. My dad.
Then he tugs on my hand and brings me
into the field, thankfully saving me from having to confirm or deny
anything. I wonder why they’re even still here, the fireflies. It’s
September; aren’t they usually gone by now? There aren’t as many as
there are in the spring and summer, but there’s enough for me to catch
about ten in Jackson’s jar. When we’re finished, he pokes tiny holes in
the lid of the jar and hands it to me. We walk back to where he left his
backpack, and I set my jar down.
“Is the night over?” he asks,
his eyes alight with something else. Something very unchildish, and it
kind of scares me. My whole body feels alive. At his look, heat rises
into my cheeks.
Thankfully, it’s too dark for him to see. I don’t know
what Jackson and I are, but I do know that I don’t want to go home. Not
yet.
Stacey Trombley lives in Ohio with her husband and the sweetest Rottweiler you’ll ever meet. She thinks people are fascinating and any chance she has, she’s off doing or learning something new. She went on her first mission trip to Haiti at age twelve and is still dying to go back. Her “places to travel” list is almost as long as her “books to read” list.
She wants to bring something new to the world through her writing, but just giving a little piece of herself is more than enough.
Keep a look out for her debut novel NAKED, coming from Entangled Teen in 2015.
Keep a look out for her debut novel NAKED, coming from Entangled Teen in 2015.
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