Excerpt from This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She tucked a curl behind her ear and gnawed first on her right thumbnail, then her left. What she had wanted to happen—had it happened? Had Andrew recognized her worthy soul? Wind rustled through the trees, exposing the pale underside of the leaves. Her mother always said that when the leaves turned over, it meant a storm was coming. It was late September but it still felt like August: humid and gray, the air thick and anxious.

A thump from behind snapped her to attention. Wendy was still in her kitchen, opening and closing the cupboard doors.

"What are you . . . doing?" she asked, her arms popping with gooseflesh. She had volunteered for the first study session because nobody else did, plus the Darby-Jones, by its boardinghouse nature, had a perpetual open-door policy. But she felt defensive about Wendy rifling through her mother's pots and pans—intruded upon— and her body tensed.

He shook his soda can, the few remaining drops swishing quietly. "Just wanted to recycle," he said. He crushed the empty can between his palms and tossed it into the sink. It made a bright metallic clank and Oneida frowned, thinking of the vintage porcelain basin her mother adored.

Wendy walked right up to her and examined her face intently. He didn't blink. He was less than a foot away. The only thing she could

think to do was stand very, very still.

"So," she said, her voice catching. "Are you looking for something?"

Wendy didn't say anything. He stared. He still hadn't blinked. His scar, up close, was mesmerizing, a twisted vine of white and pink that cut a half-circle down from his temple, so that his eyebrow was like a line of Morse code: a dash and a dot. Oneida focused on the scar for too long—long enough for Wendy to realize she was staring at it.

"I've been thinking," he said.

Wendy thrust a spoon at her. Oneida flinched, badly.

"Hey," she said. Her mouth seemed to have dried up. She coughed. "Hey, what are you doing with—"

"What does the back of this spoon say?" he asked. "Can you read it for me?"

She gritted her teeth. "It says Oneida," she said. "So what?"

"So you're named after a spoon." And he grinned, a huge wolf grin that sent a cold charge up the back of her neck.

"I'm not going to discuss this with you," she said. "But let's just say that both the spoon and I are named after the same geographic location and Native American tribe."

"Oh—oh, I see. What's your Indian name, Chief Red Spoon?"

"Hey!" she said, but Wendy just laughed.

"Shouts with a Spoon?"

"Get out," she said. She knew she was blushing horribly and she hated it, hated it, hated it—hated this stupid body of hers and its stupid blood. She shoved Wendy hard. He held up his hands in a don't shoot! gesture and backed up until he was on the porch.

"See you around," he said, "Sitting Spoon." Then he cackled and kicked the porch door open. For the first time since making the word her own, since co-opting it out of a sense of personal pride, Oneida spat it out as a gasping curse as she watched Wendy disappear.

"Freak," she said.

Less than thirty minutes later, the thunderstorm hit. Rain poured down the windows of the Darby-Jones in unbroken streams, splashing off the

sills, flooding the driveway, dripping into a blue saucepan on the side porch that Oneida had to empty constantly. She tossed another panful out the door and returned to the creaky pink- and orange- striped beach chaise where she did her best thinking, hidden away from the hustle of the rest of the house, nestled among lawn chairs, coolers, and a cracked flowerpot she had painted with misshapen pansies in the first grade. She'd brought the E volume from the old set of World Books in the study; E was one of her favorites (Egypt, Einstein, electricity, elephants), but today she wasn't interested, not really. Today she was a mess of nerves: because of Andrew Lu, because of Eugene Wendell, and because of the thunderstorm itself, which made the porch shudder and groan.

Excerpted from This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia. Copyright © 2010 by Kate Racculia. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.