Girl, Unframed

by Deb Caletti

Genres: YA Family

Synopsis

A teen girl's summer with her mother turns sinister in this gripping thriller about the insidious dangers of unwanted attention, from Printz Honor medal-winning and National Book Award finalist author Deb Caletti—perfect for fans of Courtney Summers's Sadie.

Sydney Reilly has a bad feeling about going home to San Francisco before she even gets on the plane. How could she not? Her mother is Lila Shore—the Lila Shore—a film star who prizes her beauty and male attention above all else…certainly above her daughter.

But Sydney's worries multiply when she discovers that Lila is involved with the dangerous Jake, an art dealer with shady connections. Jake loves all beautiful objects, and Syndey can feel his eyes on her whenever he's around. And he's not the only one. Sydney is starting to attract attention—good and bad—wherever she goes: from sweet, handsome Nicco Ricci, from the unsettling construction worker next door, and even from Lila. Behaviors that once seemed like misunderstandings begin to feel like threats as the summer grows longer and hotter.

It's unnerving, how beauty is complicated, and objects have histories, and you can be looked at without ever being seen. But real danger, crimes of passion, the kind of stuff where someone gets killed—it only mostly happens in the movies, Sydney is sure. Until the night something life-changing happens on the stairs that lead to the beach. A thrilling night that goes suddenly very wrong. When loyalties are called into question. And when Sydney learns a terrible truth: beautiful objects can break.

Release date: June 23, 2020

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

• Exhibit 1: Recorded statement of Sydney E. Reilly, 1 of 5
• Exhibit 2: Aerial photo of 716 Sea Cliff Drive
• Exhibit 3: Photo of Lila Shore, Giacomo “Big Jake” Antonetti, and Sydney Reilly, Original Joe’s, North Beach, undated

I had a bad feeling, even before I left home. A strong one. If I’m here to tell you what actually happened, well, it started there. With a sense of dread. Like some pissed-off old ghost was going to haunt me until I heard whatever she had to say. It was eerie and unsettling like that. Urgent.

The feeling was there late at night, when I was alone in the dorm showers and the hot-water pipes creaked and groaned like a dying man, and it was there when I lay awake in the dark, watching headlights flash across the ceiling in a way that made me pull my covers up. But it was there in bright daylight, too, when Hoodean and Cora and Lizzie and Meredith and I went to Cupcake Royale and we made fun of Hoodean for getting vanilla (he always got vanilla). It was there on those last weeks of school, when the sky was blue and the sun was out and the air smelled delicious.

I tried to tell myself there were logical reasons for it. I didn’t want to go to San Francisco anyway. I know it sounds crazy, since Lila lived in that Sea Cliff mansion perched above the Pacific. But I was happy at school—just being in class, or walking around Green Lake with Meredith, picking out what dog we’d want. Or sitting on my bed with Cora under my Frida Kahlo poster, playing our favorite songs to each other. Volleyball in the fall, crew in the spring, dim sum in the International District with Meredith’s parents.

Leaving my friends for the whole summer—that’s why I felt dread, I thought. Especially since things were getting so good lately. I felt like IT was about to happen. I didn’t know what IT was, exactly, just something large, something that would change everything. Maybe IT was love, the passionate, all-encompassing kind, or actual sex, or maybe something else. Whatever it was, I wanted it bad, this something-big. I could feel it coming. I could feel it when my group of friends would be walking down the street, elbowing each other, laughing too loud, and people watched us with what I thought was envy. Or when we’d stroll into Victrola and the men would look up from their laptops to stare, even when Hoodean was with us. God, if I missed IT because I was stuck in a jillion-dollar house with my famous mother, I’d be heartbroken.

Which was another logical explanation for the dark feeling that followed me. Three months with Lila. She was a celebrity, and she was beautiful, but she was still my mother. The summer before, when I was fourteen, I wanted to tell her everything, to be best buds, to do stuff together. And then suddenly I didn’t. Moms—they can be like a winter coat, helpful and warm and cozy, but then spring comes, and it weighs you down and maybe you just want to feel the cold anyway.

But I’m supposed to be telling you the truth, aren’t I? And the truth is, Lila was never like that. She wasn’t a warm and cozy mom like Meredith’s, even if I felt the weight of her.

And the truth is, nothing made that sense of doom disappear—no explanations, no blue sky, nothing. It was persistent. It was spooky.

I didn’t know what that feeling was. I didn’t know which exact ghost from the past was trying to warn me. But she was real, and I didn’t listen.