Chapter 1
Avalon Harwood nudged the wheel of her BMW with her forefinger and it did exactly what she wanted it to do. Which officially made it unlike everything else in her life.
The speedometer quivered on up to fifty as she eased it into the first S turn.
She’d passed a 40 MPH sign a while back.
But she knew this network of back roads that laced through Hellcat Canyon, California, as instinctively, say, as she knew how to get to the bathroom in her apartment in the pitch dark when clothes and shoes and books were strewn in her path. Which was all to the good, because for the past three hours she’d been preoccupied by the images crashing and pinging inside her skull like a handful of change circulating in a hot dryer.
For some reason, she kept coming back to the sparkly orange toenails.
This time she imagined the gas pedal was her boyfriend Corbin’s windpipe.
The speedometer quivered up to fifty-five.
Threaded through all those ghastly images were important philosophical questions. Such as: What would her life be like if she didn’t alwayswonderthings?
Like that time when she was nine years old and she’d wondered whether her big toe would fit up inside the faucet of the bathtub.
And as it turned out, it could.
It just wouldn’t come back out again.
She’d panicked and shrieked and her brother Jude had called the paramedics, mostly because he’d always wanted a reason to call the paramedics, and when they arrived something like five minutes later Jude had run out the door to greet them screaming, “Get the paddles!” because he’d seen it on a TV show. (To this day, “Get the paddles!” was family shorthand for any emergency.)
And then there was: What would her life be like if she didn’t always feel as though she had something toprove?
Like the time when she was twelve and she’d built a ramp and proceeded to jump her bike over the narrowest part of Whiskey Creek. Because back then she would have done anything to impress Mac Coltrane, and when she was twelve, jumping Whiskey Creek on a bike seemed the logical way to do it.
That jump, however, had been worth it for two reasons.
For those three glorious seconds during which she was fully airborne.
And for those three seconds after she came to: flat on the ground, dazed but unbroken, half in the creek, half out, bike half on her, half off—Mac Coltrane kneeling next to her, saying her name.
And she knew that even if her heart had stopped for good, the expression in his hazel eyes would have jolted it back into pounding, joyous life again.
Sometimes she thought it had never quite beat the same way again.
But then she’d always kind of experienced Mac as a series of jolts. Every summer between the ages of ten and sixteen, her heart was a pinball in her chest, pinging whenever she saw his bike thrown down in front of someone’s house or chained to the newspaper rack in front of the Variety Store downtown where everyone went to buy candy, or when she caught a glimpse of a dark-haired boy of a certain height in the grocery store or library or anywhere, really.
Right on cue around the next S turn, she caught a glimpse through the trees of the old Coltrane summer home at Devil’s Leap. It was what her dad called a Victorian pile, but it had starred in her fantasies from the moment she’d laid eyes on it when she was about eight. How could it not? It had a turret, for God’s sake. The turret was shingled in curving tiles like the body of a dragon, and the whole thing was painted a sort of deep, dusty rose, a singular color that glowed like something you’d find at the end of the yellow brick road when the sun hit it at this time of day. It had seemed entirely reasonable when she learned that Mac Coltrane lived in it, because she’d never before or since seen anyone like him.
The one and only time she’d been inside it occupied a unique fixed point on the graph of her life: it was the best and the worst day to date.
Though in light of today’s events, she might just have to review the rankings.
Three hours ago she’d been all but airborne with happiness. An old friend from her San Francisco State teaching program days, Rachel Nguyen, had invited Avalon to tell an audience of a hundred-some-odd young entrepreneurs in San Jose her story: how four years ago, she’d been an exhausted full-time student who paid for classes by working full-time as a cocktail waitress at a bar frequented by Ivy League computer nerds. Then came the night she’d wistfully wondered out loud to the nerdy-cute Dartmouth computer science grad who kept hitting on her: What if there was an online game or app that gave you the full college experience—football, the student union, part-time jobs, dates, competing for the classes you wanted—and made it all fun and no work?
Five years later, GradYouAte had eight full-time staff members, a couple of interns, a dozen-some-odd contractors, a few investors, a little board of directors, and shareholders and was closing in on actual, albeit slim, profits. SilliPutty, the Silicon Valley news and gossip site, had recently run a photo of her perched on a desk in a vintage slit pencil skirt, a funky orange pump saucily dangling from her toe; that Dartmouth grad, all curly hair, too-big-but-somehow-just-right nose, hip-nerdy glasses, and dimples, had his arms looped around her from behind. The headline readGradYouAte’s Avalon Harwood and Corbin Bergson Talk Success, Vision, and How They Make Mixing Love and Work Look Like Child’s Play. She had a title (CEO), a nice chunk of cash in the bank, an adoring live-in boyfriend, and life, for the most part, was like skipping, la la la, through that pleasant green meadow where the Teletubbies lived, apart from the challenges of parking in San Francisco, maybe. And the expense. And maybe that one time she’d been mugged at gunpoint.
Secretly, no one was more bemused about all of this than she was. There were days, in truth, when it felt more like something that had sort of happened to her rather than something she’d actively engineered.
After she’d soaked up the applause and basked in the light of all those inspired faces, Rachel told her, “Damn, girl, you knocked that presentation out of the park. Any time you want to do any workshops, say the word. I’ll set you up.” While Avalon had quit the teaching program to create GradYouAte with Corbin, Rachel had gone on to build a leadership training business so gloriously successful she was now looking for the perfect North State headquarters for seminars and retreats.
Somewhere on the road between San Jose and San Francisco Avalon became aware that her happy glow was shot through with a sort of restless wistfulness. She found herself putting off returning to GradYouAte’s offices on Van Ness and Market for the same reasons she might not want to immediately follow up, say, an excellent chicken piccata with a bag of Doritos (though both had a place in her culinary repertoire). She’d stopped instead and impulsively bought a tiny jar of limp flowers an ancient Russian woman purloined from yards around her neighborhood and sold off a blanket on the sidewalk near her apartment, and she decided to go upstairs to her apartment to drop them off. Corbin would love them because they had a quirky origin story. “The only thing I’m allergic to is the mundane,” he’d told that SilliPutty reporter the day of their interview. He was probably saying things like that in a marketing meeting right now over a cutthroat game of ping-pong in their offices. Corbin often refused to like something if he suspected even one other person had liked it first.
She trotted up two flights and was about to slide her key into her door lock when she paused.