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    The Long Night of Leo and Bree
    The Long Night of Leo and Bree
    The Long Night of Leo and Bree
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    The Long Night of Leo and Bree

    By Ellen Wittlinger

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    About this ebook

    Nobody should have a night like this...

    8:30 P.M.: It's been four years since Michelle was killed. Leo can't stand to be at home with his mom -- she's crazy with rage. He's got anger of his own and pictures of his dead sister he can't get out of his head.
         9:00 P.M.: Bree parks her mom's car and locks the doors. She's in a bad part of town, but she knows the bar has to be around here somewhere. All she wants is to escape for a while and have a good time.
         9:15 P.M.: Leo, out for a drive to get away from his mom, spots Bree. Why is this girl alive while Michelle's not?
         By 6:30 A.M., when their long night is over, everything has changed
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
    Release dateJul 10, 2012
    ISBN9781439116517
    The Long Night of Leo and Bree
    Author

    Ellen Wittlinger

    Ellen Wittlinger is the author of seventeen YA and middle-grade novels. Her novel Hard Love won both a Printz Honor Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her books have been on numerous ALA Best Books lists, Bank Street College of Education lists and state award lists. Ellen has won state awards in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Her work has been translated into many other languages including Turkish, Croatian and Korean. She has taught at Emerson College in Boston and in the Simmons College Writing for Children MFA program.

    Read more from Ellen Wittlinger

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      I think I would have liked this book if I hadn't read Robert Cormier's book Tenderness first. As it was, The Long Night of Leo and Bree gave me a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know if it really was, but it SEEMED like a total Tenderness ripoff (only with a happier ending). I couldn't feel for either of the characters -- especially Bree -- and the ending was not believable.

    Book preview

    The Long Night of Leo and Bree - Ellen Wittlinger

    8:00 P.M.

    Leo

    She’s screaming at me again, like I’m deaf, like I’m stupid, like I don’t know what day this is. I knew she’d be crazier than usual today—that’s why I got up early and went to work at the garage before she woke up this morning. I figured there was no sense taking a chance—the more I’m around her today, the more likely I’ll start seeing those pictures flashing in my mind again.

    After work I stopped at the store to get some hamburg and a jar of pickles for dinner because she likes that. I thought maybe I could get her off the subject, get her quieted down with a full stomach. I’m not a great cook, but I can make decent hamburgers. Gramma showed me how. She usually does our cooking, but she’s down to Quincy this week with my Aunt Suzanne, who just had another baby. Ma calls Suzanne a frigging baby machine, unless she calls her something worse.

    It’s bad timing that Gramma’s gone this week because sometimes she can get Ma to calm down. I can’t. I just make things worse. Which is what she always tells me I do. But I don’t think that’s fair because I have tried to help out. I quit school this year to work at the garage because she said we couldn’t all live on what Gramma made answering the phones at that doctor’s office. She said I was eating too much and we couldn’t afford it.

    She bitches at me all the time, even though I help out around here more than she does.

    But I know she can’t really do anything. She’s pretty much nuts most of the time. It didn’t used to be like this. Before my sister Michelle died four years ago (four years ago tonight), we didn’t live at Gramma’s apartment. We still lived in Fenton, but in a regular house with my dad. He worked over at the power plant and Ma worked at a fabric store down on Russell Avenue. We weren’t rich or anything, but we were all alive and nobody was insane.

    After Michelle died, Dad turned into stone. The rest of us were more like glass, but he was stone. Just sat around the house all day, staring at the wallpaper like he could see down through all the layers. Pretty soon he got fired from the plant and he didn’t even seem to care. Then he packed up a duffel bag and told us he was moving down to Kentucky.

    Why? Where? Ma yelled at him. You don’t know anybody in Kentucky!

    That’s the point, he said. I can’t stand knowin’ anybody anymore. I have to disappear. And that’s what he did. Although he did send me a birthday card last year with fifty dollars in it, and the post office mark said Louisville, so I guess that’s a clue. Maybe someday I’ll drive down there and disappear too.

    When I was a kid, Dad would take me down to the power plant and show it off to me and me off to the guys he worked with. He was proud of his whole life, it seemed like. But after Michelle died, the rest of us just turned into some broken-down mess. I can’t even remember what any of us looked like without a picture.

    Leo! Where are you? She’s still screaming, but I’m downstairs in the basement storage room where she won’t find me. I come down here lately when I need to get away—it’s a great hiding place. Somebody left an old couch sitting here and some dining room-type chairs. Stuff people aren’t using anymore they put down here—there’s all kinds of crap: garden tools and suitcases and boxes of old clothes. There’s a light in the corner so you can see to do stuff, although usually I don’t have much to do, maybe read one of these old magazines people got piled up. It’s hard to read, though, when I get Ma’s crazy voice stuck in my head, noisy as a chain saw, slicing through my brains.

    There’s even a toilet behind this door in the back—kind of filthy—but I use it if I don’t feel like going back upstairs yet. I bought some toilet paper and some root beer and saltines at the store this afternoon and brought them down here like this was my home. It’s kind of cold in the basement, so the root beer doesn’t even need to be in a fridge. I’m starting to think of this as my place, where I can escape from her and her damn voice. Ma doesn’t know this room is here, even though Gramma’s apartment is just one floor up. See, Ma never goes outside our apartment anymore; she never even answers the door, so, to her, going down into the basement of the building is like a normal person getting on the space shuttle. No way.

    "Leo! Come here this minute! You worthless turd! Come here!" She’s just getting wound up; she calls me worse than that when she really gets going. I know what she wants. She wants me to sit up there and talk to her, like she isn’t a lunatic or something. And I know what she wants to talk about too, but I won’t. I’m starting to have those nightmares again anyway—I do every year around this time—other times too, but always in March, and they always get real bad the closer it is to today, March 19.

    Sometimes the nightmares get so bad I think I might be as crazy as Ma. And sometimes it seems like there’s this noise in the corner of my brain—I can’t stop listening to it, but I don’t know what it is either.

    I don’t think anybody outside notices, though. I’m pretty careful when I talk to people. The guys at the garage think I’m just this quiet kid who’s pretty good with cars. Sometimes I come into work and I feel so mad from the nightmares and from remembering and thinking too much, and my stomach is pitching around so bad I feel like I’m gonna puke, so I don’t talk to anybody until I can swallow all that awful feeling way down. I try to joke around with the other guys, but it’s hard. They’re mostly older and they like to talk about women in ways that . . . well, ways that remind me of Novack.

    Michelle was seventeen years old, just like I am now. She seemed so grown-up to me. She was the person who always made everything all right. When Michelle was around, nobody argued—not me and Ma, or Ma and Dad—she just knew how to get you in a good mood. She had plans to be a social worker, so she could get everybody else in Fenton to settle down too. It probably wasn’t too realistic, but that was her hope.

    I took Michelle’s side against Ma the first time she spent the night at Novack’s place. Ma said he was too old for her and a wiseass besides. I argued she was old enough to make up her own mind, even though I didn’t like him much myself. I wasn’t just arguing for Michelle, though—I was also arguing for me, that I was getting old enough too and wanted to be allowed to make up my own mind. When you’re thirteen, it never occurs to you there are people in the world rotten enough to kill your sister in a horrible way for no good reason.

    Michelle never really had a boyfriend before Novack. She was kind of shy and just average pretty, but really nice. Not the type high school boys are in the market for. At least not around here. She had a job three nights a week working at the gift shop down the hospital, and one night Novack came in to buy some flowers for his girlfriend, who was laid up in

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