The Evolving Truth of Ever-Stronger Will

by Maya MacGregor

Genres: Young Adult; YA Social Themes; YA Romance

Synopsis

Will, an agender teen, struggles with the haunting aftermath of parental abuse as they forge a new life and love in this novel that is perfect for fans of If These Wings Could Fly and Last Night at the Telegraph Club.

Will is a 17-year-old on the cusp of freedom: freedom from providing and caring for their abusive, addicted mother, freedom from their small town with an even smaller mindset, and the freedom from having to hide who they truly are. When their drug dealer mother dies months before their 18th birthday, Will is granted their freedom earlier than expected. But their mother’s last words haunt Will: She cursed them with her dying breath, claiming her death was their fault. Soon their mother’s drug-dealing past threatens Will’s new shiny future, leaving Will scrambling to find their beloved former foster mother Raz before Child Protective Services or local drug dealers find them first. But how do you reconnect with family and embark on a new love when you’re convinced you destroy everything you touch?

Release date: October 31, 2023

Publisher: Astra Young Readers

Print pages: 272

Sample

Chapter One
 
You are a monster.

You know this already. It's one of the first things you learned, one of the first lessons you felt down to the cells and atoms that make you up. Your electrons buzz with it.

Since then, anyone who has tried to tell you otherwise, you have quietly counted among the world's many liars.

You were born that way; that much you know. They called you—well, never mind what they called you. Your name is Will, and that's what matters now. That you found your name.

People think it's supposed to be short for William or even Wilhelmina or, in one annoying case, Willard.

They're wrong about that, though, just like they're wrong about you not being a monster.
Your name is Will because that's what it takes to live among people who hate you for no other reason than that you exist.

So. Will. Will the Monster, here we are, and here you are.

Your life is about to change..

Ready?

 
 
 
Chapter Two
 
You stand there, frozen, as your mother stares at you with cobra-venom hate from where she has collapsed on the floor and says, “This is your fault.”

Then she dies.

You stand there, in your brown slacks and white button down and olive-green vest (you’ve just come from work, you seventeen-year-old curmudgeon), and you feel it as your little patch of earth shifts beneath your feet.

What are you going to do, Will?

You sure as hell don’t know. You’re four months from turning eighteen. You might escape getting put back in the system.

Right now you really wish Raz was here. It’s been years since you saw her and you’ve never been able to find her, but whenever you’re scared or freaked out or lost, you wish she was there. Like now. When you’re standing over your mother’s corpse.

You didn’t even attempt CPR. You remember Raz once telling you that freezing is a trauma response and doesn’t make you bad, but it’s hard to remember that right you’re your feet haven’t budged. You don’t need to check for a pulse. Whatever makes a human alive is gone. All that is left is a fleshy husk. Frances is dead, her body swiftly cooling, and you are a little more monstrous.

Maybe a normal kid would feel some kind of grief right now, but all you feel is relief. A long time ago, “Momma”became “Frances.” Is it so monstrous to be relieved that she’s finally gone?

You’re pretty certain it was a heart attack. She didn’t clutch her arm or anything—you read in health class that it’s different for double-X-chromosomed people—but you’ve always had decent instincts. And now? Time is slipping away into the bottom half of an hourglass, and while you have no idea how much of it you started with, you’re also pretty certain there’s almost none left. There’s a window where you can plausibly tell the EMTs that you came home and she was already dead. Problem is, you’re not sure what that window is.

You don’t know. What you do know is that you’re not going to risk someone bringing her back.
The room stinks of the usual cigarettes and PBR and now some urine and some other smell you’ve never smelled before but instinctually identify as Death. Frances’s last words ring through your head again anyway. This is your fault.

That solidifies a thought in your mind.

You’ve spent the past five years living in this latrine of a house with someone who literally, with her dying breath, blamed her heart attack on her only kid.

Actually, you don’t really know if you’re her only kid. You might not be. Frances had a lot of secrets.
Had.

Past tense already. You’re definitely a monster.

Admitting it, even in your head, shores up your resolve.

You sit on the floor a safe distance away, insofar as there is such a thing—the surface of the moon wasn’t far enough to constitute a safe distance from Frances.

You observe what is happening right in front of you. That ineffable sense of death grows more inherently “effable” as the hours slip by. In the initial seconds, there was only a vague sense of wrongness, an instinctual twitch of the lizard brain. It screamed death even as Frances lay silent. But now? Now there’s more. The color has drained from her skin, making her fake tan sit in a layer of orangey-brown upon her flesh.

You remember watching crime shows that talk about lividity, blood pooling where gravity pulls it. In this particular case, that’ll be Frances’s ass. She’s slumped against the end of the half wall, eking her way downward with that irresistible force. It reveals something morbidly true: the human body without a person in it is simply a fleshy sack of so much meat.

The internet could tell you how all this works, but you can’t bring yourself to Google. You don’t know how long gravity will take advantage of her limp muscles before rigor mortis sets in, the two in an unconscious battle for control of her corpse.

The limpness in Frances’s face gives way to a strange rigidity. Her mouth is a tightened grimace.
You didn’t realize you were waiting for it until you saw it. To be fair, you don’t know enough about rigor mortis to know that it begins in the face. You learn this by watching it happen in real time.
Frances is dead.

You stand up and pick your way to the landline in the house, careful to avoid Frances’s feet. Hannah always marvels at the landline whenever she braves the house for your company.

“It’s like keeping a damn dodo tethered in the corner,” she said the first time she saw it. “Those things are practically extinct.”

Frances would never let you have a cell phone, even though you could have paid for it yourself if she didn’t steal all your paychecks to pay for her pack-a-day cigarettes. She used that same cash to buy herself the newest Galaxy whatever, usually glued to her hand, but you have no idea where it is now.
Moot point. It’s time.

Your fingers pick up the receiver and start to punch in 911.

You get as far as the first one and stop. Hang up.

You call Hannah instead. She, like the rest of the twenty-first century, has a cell phone.
She always answers when you call because she knows you can’t text. She answers on the first ring.

“What’s wrong?”

Hannah knows your schedule better than you do. She knows Frances’s too, so she can put together that if you’re on the phone when Frances is supposed to be home too, something’s up. Usually you’re not allowed near the phone unless it’s to order Frances her dinner.

The smell of urine is stronger on this side of the room.

“Is Matt working?” Matt is Hannah’s older brother, and he’s an EMT. He’s twenty-one and was the only person who made your freshman year bearable because he was an all-star at everything, and even the memory of him (he graduated the year before you two started) was enough to keep people from messing with his kid sister and her weirdo friend.

There’s a beat. “Yeah, I think so. Why?”

You say the words you hope you’ll only have to voice once.

“Frances is dead.” And then, softly, as if doing so any more loudly would bring Frances back to life somehow, “I need help making sure no one at school finds out, because they’ll have to report it to CPS. Do you think he can help?”

The hospital or coroner might not be much better if they tell the school, but maybe, just maybe—
There’s another beat, and this one feels like holy shit. “I don’t know, Will. But I’ll try.”

You give her a little more information, listening to her breathless questions, and then you both hang up so you can wait for Matt to show up.

Hannah doesn’t say she’s sorry. She knows Frances too well for that.

Again, you wish Raz was here.

#

When you were three years old, Frances left you in a Dumpster in Hagerstown, Maryland. Yeah, you know, you know. Usually that’s an ignominious honor reserved for babies, not toddlers, but Frances was always one to buck tradition. You spent the next six or seven years bouncing from (usually awful) foster home to (often worse) home until sometime around your eleventh birthday you landed with her. You only know her by the nickname everyone called her—Raz. She was shortish. Beautiful brown skin darker than your olive tone. Plumpish. She had a mass of waves that she kept raspberry-red from the shoulders down and were dark brown at the roots.

The first time you saw her, you knew it was going to be different. You’re not sure you were ever that right before Raz or have ever been so right since.

Raz was amazing. You don’t think you were her first foster, and you hope you weren’t her last, because everything was just . . . different with Raz.

She made you blueberry pancakes on Saturday mornings and let you put as much butter and syrup on them as you wanted (spoiler: a lot). She was cool with you drinking a little coffee so you could be like her, more sugar and milk than caffeine, but you felt grown up. She let you lock the door of your room until you learned you didn’t need to do that there. She bought you new clothes—actual—new—clothes. She’d find random shows to binge watch with you on Netflix and it’s because of her that you’ve seen every episode of Friends (she hated Ross with a fiery passion, so you did too) and every time there was a joke that would have never made it past the writer’s room in the twenty-twenties, she’d turn to you with a spectacular eyeroll and say, “Progress we’ve made: Exhibit G” or something like that. She also knew everything about the shows, the actors, the bloopers, all of it—and shared it gleefully.

But most of all—more important than coffee or pancakes or privacy or 90s sitcoms—Raz helped you find your name. Frances had given you one, or someone had. But Raz knew how much you hated it, and not only did she listen seriously as you rattled off ideas, but she seemed as invested in it as you, firing off trivia about every name you suggested. Among the ideas: Raven, Imogen, Eleven (you had marathoned Stranger Things), and Ash (and Pokémon). Then one day, you said “Will,” and Raz’s head snapped up and her feet did little excited kicks.

“Will,” she said, as if trying it out. “You’ve got a lot of that, kid.”

You hadn’t even thought of it that way, but the moment she said it, you knew that was it. You read a fantasy series once, and the sorcerers in it used Will to do magic. You discovered, much later, that the series’ author had been a Frances—like your mother and the worst of your foster homes. That only made you cling to your name with hotter ferocity.

You never got to tell Raz that. You’ve always wanted to show her how your name became your armor.
Raz just got things.

She caught you one day staring at your skin and knew why. It wasn’t that you were really that much different-looking than the other kids at your school (you weren’t) or that you wished you were something else (you didn’t). It was just that you didn’t seem to fit. Anywhere. With anyone. Except Raz.

“Sometimes people live in the between spaces,” Raz said. “Like you and me. According to the world, we’re almost one thing and not quite another. Not white enough or Black enough, not Dominican enough or female enough, not male enough or whatever enough. But we’re enough. We’re us, and we’re real. We might feel like we live in the Upside Down sometimes, but—"

“The Upside Down is full of monsters,” you blurted, interrupting even though you never interrupted Raz. Something about Stranger Things got to you, and you didn’t realize what until then.

But Raz just smiled and reached out and smoothed a bit of dark hair back from your face. “That’s only how it looks to people who weren’t born there, Will. People make monsters out of what they fear or don’t understand, because they know it could just as easily be them.”
So your name is Will.

Raz worked her own magic to get the system to allow for the name change. It took almost the whole year you were with her, but she did it.

She took you all the way to Hershey Park to celebrate, and you rode roller coasters all day and she screamed alongside you. That night on the drive back, she told you that she was working on something she wanted to ask you about, and you were pretty sure she was going to ask if she could adopt you.

Three weeks later, though, Frances showed up at your—Raz’s—door with a stolen four-years-sober chip from AA or NA or something and a social worker saying that you had to go with her now.

Raz told you to go to your room, and you heard raised voices coming from the living room, at least some of it about your name change. Your body remembered the sound of Frances’s yelling. You felt each decibel climbing your spine like a ladder, burrowing into the base of your skull. The weight of your suitcase as you lugged it down the stairs after Raz helped you pack it with tears beaded on her eyelashes. The pure fear leaking out of your pores, all of it mingled with fresh fury when you saw the look of leashed rage on Raz’s face at Frances’s smugness.

Raz pressed a piece of blue paper into your hand as she hugged you goodbye, fiercely staring into your eyes and holding your hand tight around the scrap, murmuring, “It’s the way back to that in-between space” and you knew she wasn’t supposed to give you her information but she did it anyway and that more than anything told you she really had been planning to ask you to be her kid forever.
You cried on the way to Frances’s house. Not big hulking sobs but little streams of water that wouldn’t stop and just drip-drip-dripped off the side of your face.

At first Frances seemed sympathetic.

“It’ll be good, Will,” she said. “You and me. Fresh start.”

She said it an hour into the drive, winding through the hills of western Maryland, each curve taking you farther and farther away from Raz.

You think for that moment she actually might have meant it. It was the one time you ever remembered her saying your name without building it out of knives.

But then you woke up the next morning in a strange bed in a stinky room of a stinky house and discovered that she’d burned the scrap of paper Raz had given you. You found the edge of it, blue with a yellow-brown char, in Frances’s ash tray.

Frances waited for you to react, smoking silently and watching to see if you would, and you didn’t.
But you knew she’d left a scrap of it on purpose.

To show you that she may have thrown you away like trash, but she had fished you back out before you had a chance to be someone else’s treasure.

To show you she hadn’t forgotten that you are a monster, but that you are her monster, and that she would not let you go.

#

Matt arrives with the coroner and the ambulance together about twenty minutes after you call Hannah. No sirens, no flashing lights even. Not that anyone would see them. Your house isn’t that close to anything.

He meets you at the door, his partner and the coroner hanging back, and you wonder what Matt told them. You don’t really care, though the muted pity on his face bothers you. He takes one look at Frances, sighs, and then turns to give a hand signal to the others. You don’t see their response beyond a ripple of movement in your peripheral vision that implies a sudden lack of urgency.

Matt’s about six feet tall, with brown skin closer to the olive color of yours than to his sister Hannah’s, which is so pale she’s almost translucent. His hair is brown, and he has nice hazel eyes that sometimes lean toward green in the right light. Right now, they’re watching you as if he’s waiting for you to do something.

He doesn’t offer any condolences either, just like Hannah. That says enough.

“Hey, Will.”

“Hey.” It feels stupid to say that tiny little word at a moment like this.

He follows you into the house. Matt walks over to Frances and touches her cheek, sighs, then closes the door behind you after a brief nod to the others outside.

Matt became an EMT is because he found his best friend dead just after they graduated from high school. You suppose he’s a good person to have on hand here. He at least knows firsthand what it’s like to find someone close to you dead. Even if the circumstances couldn’t be more different.
“You see what happened?”

When you hesitate, Matt holds up his hands.

“Officially, on the record, you found her dead, okay? Maryland law says we can pronounce her dead at the scene without needing a medical opinion if rigor mortis is in effect, and she’s in the early stages of rigor. We won’t attempt resuscitation, but we will need to inform law enforcement so they can alert the medical examiner. It’s not for an investigation, just protocol. I don’t want you to worry about that.” Matt pauses, blowing out a breath. “Not a person in Bright Springs who knew Frances who wouldn’t feel sorry for you even if they don’t know you from Lizzo. Frances didn’t make friends, Will.”

“I know.”

“I’m telling you that you can tell me. You ain’t got to worry that anybody will come after you for this. Hell, when I told dispatch who was reported deceased, Renee crossed herself and said that maybe god really is merciful.”

That startles you a little. You have no idea who Renee is, but you hadn’t realized so many people knew Frances. Then again, you didn’t have to spend much time with her to know her. A Frances drive-by was usually enough to make people steer clear next time they saw her coming.

“I don’t want CPS sticking their useless heads in,” you say finally, the words singeing your insides. “They didn’t give a shit yesterday, and they sure as hell better not try and pretend they give a shit today. I’ve got one year of high school left. One, Matt. Four months until I’m eighteen.”

He nods. Runs his fingers through short hair. “I can’t promise anything, but you’ve got people in your corner. Technically I’m supposed to run it up the chain if I suspect abuse or neglect—”
You can’t help the sharp sound that erupts from your throat.

“—but frankly, Hannah told me enough for me to suspect that yesterday would have been a more appropriate time for that than today.” He sucks his teeth. “Shit, Will. I could maybe get in trouble for this, but I’ll tell whoever that you’re staying with family or something if they ask. Maryland doesn’t have an official emancipation process, really, so if we can just hold out till you hit eighteen, you’ll be good to go. This town can be shit, but it’s also a small town where my mom’s name carries some weight. Cops might not love her, but they know she’s not someone to mess with. We won’t let anyone try to rip you out of here. I don’t want to see you up to your nose in strangers who think they know best any more than you do.”

It’s weird to think Matt’s on your side. Nobody under the age of twenty in this town besides Hannah falls in the category of Team Will, but from what Matt’s been saying, the adults (some of them, anyway) might be willing to look the other way while you bust your ass to survive this mess until eighteen.

Matt might say he won’t let anyone try to rip you out of here, but he can’t be certain they won’t succeed anyway. You know too well what happens to kids like you. Your trust in adult authorities to do the right thing—or to listen to you at all—is at such low elevation, it’s practically the Dead Sea.
Matt goes over to her again, presses his fingers against the skin of her neck. She was a skinny thing, in spite of all the beer she drank, but taller than you and—

“I think it was a heart attack,” you say finally, because you have to say something. “She was getting up to get a beer because I hadn’t come home yet, and when I walked in the door, she had kind of keeled over at the half wall there. She saw me and I kind of froze. She slid down and”—This is your fault—“Then she was just . . . gone.”

“There’s likely nothing you could have done,” Matt says. “Even if you’d started chest compressions immediately, by the time we got here, it would have been too late. We would have tried to resuscitate her for at least fifteen minutes, but she would still be dead.”

You think he’s saying this for your benefit, so you don’t feel guilty for letting her die without trying to help. Or for letting two hours go by before you called anyone.

“Thanks,” you say, because you think that’s what you’re supposed to say.

“You want to stay at our place tonight? Hannah was going to make up the air bed in her room just in case.”

You take a deep breath, your body’s reflexes forgetting about the stench in the air. You want to say yes, but something stops you.

“Maybe tomorrow,” you tell him instead. “I’m going to need to . . . clean up.”

That you’re having this conversation two feet from France’s dead body isn’t lost on you. That Matt’s treating you differently—like an adult instead of his kid sister’s friend—isn’t lost on you either.
He nods. “Okay if I let them in now?”

“Yeah,” you say, stepping backward.

You look at Frances for the last time, then you open the door before Matt can and go outside.
Perching on the end of the tiny porch, you scuff your foot in the gravel as Matt and his partner go in. Hearing them go through the motions is surreal. Words like “no brain activity” muttered loudly enough to reach you, the beep of machines. The zip of a bag, the plastic gasp of an air pump, the creak of a gurney.

You hear someone ask about “the kid,” and for a moment, you hang suspended over your body, which has tensed like it’s the one in rigor mortis.

“Hell of a start to adulthood, this,” is all Matt says, and it seems to be enough. Only a grunt answers it. Matt adds one more line, and you think it’s for you. “But I think Will had to grow up long before crossing that line. They’re a hell of a fighter, and they’re not alone.”

The tension in your body relaxes in increments—albeit with diminishing returns.

Not long later, the sheriff’s department shows up, a couple of young deputies. Thankfully, the cops only ask a few questions, mostly to Matt. He fields everything with finesse.

“Hannah’s best friend” is a phrase you make out amid the cloud of dissociation, as well as Matt and Hannah’s mother’s name, Dana.

“They’re not alone,” Matt says again to the cops.

Eventually, they leave. You stay.

Time stretches out longer than the two hours you spent sitting on the floor next to Frances’s body.
They’re not alone.

Matt didn’t tell them a single outright lie—except that one.

With the cops gone, the EMTs work quietly. Understanding seems to echo in the silence.
Maybe, just maybe, you’ll get through this for real.
But you know this is only the first hurdle. And you know you cannot trust the system to leave you alone.

You don’t go back in until Frances is gone.