Excerpt from Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A. S. King, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PROLOGUE

The clan of the petrified bat

So we drank it—the two of us. Ellie drank it first and acted like it tasted good. I followed. And it wasn't half bad.

When we woke up the next morning, everything was different. We could see the future. We could see the past. We could see everything.

You might say, "Why did you drink a bat?" Or, "How did you drink a bat?" Or, "Who would do something like that?"

But we weren't thinking about it at the time. It's like being on a fast train that crashes and someone asking you why you didn't jump before it crashed.

You wouldn't jump because you couldn't jump. It was going too fast. And you didn't know the crash was coming, so why would you?

BOOK ONE

The origin of everything

School is the same as anything else. You do it because you're told to do it when you're little enough to listen. You continue because someone told you it was important. It's like you're a train in a tunnel. Graduation is the light at the end.

Hippie weirdo freaks

Ellie Heffner told me that the day she graduated would be the day she left her family and ran away forever. She'd been telling me that since we were fifteen years old.

"They're freaks," she said. "Hippie weirdo freaks."

I couldn't argue with her. She did live with hippie weirdo freaks.

"Will you come back and visit me, at least?" I asked.

She looked at me, disappointed. "You won't still be here then, will you?"

I had one week to go. Three more school days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and optional Baccalaureate on Friday and then a weekend wait to graduate on Monday. I still got postcards and letters from colleges and universities in the mail every week. I still threw each of them away without opening them.

It was Sunday night and Ellie and I were sitting on the steps on my front porch facing her house, which was across the road.

"I don't know," I answered. "I have no idea where I'll be."

I couldn't tell her the truth about where I thought I'd be. I almost did a few times, weak times when I was gripped by fear. I'd almost told her everything. But Ellie was… Ellie. Ever since we were little, she'd change the rules of a game halfway through.

You don't tell your biggest secrets to someone like that, right?

Anyway. I had a week until I graduated. I had zero plans, zero options, zero friends.

But I didn't tell Ellie that either because she thought she was my best friend.

It was complicated.

It had always been complicated.

It would always be complicated.

The origin of the bat

The bat lived at Ellie's house. We saw it first on a weekend that February. She pointed at the tiny lump of fur lodged in the corner of the back porch and said, "Look. A hibernating bat."

We saw it again in March and it hadn't moved. We talked about the bat's upcoming awakening and how it would soon swoop to the surface of Ellie's pond and eat newly hatched insects and touch its tiny wingtips off the water.

But spring came and the bat didn't move. Didn't swoop. Didn't seem to be dining on any of the tasty neighborhood pond bugs. One of its elbows—if that's what bats have—stuck out a little, like it was broken or something. We talked about how it might have an injury or a birth defect.

"Like the way I can't bend this finger down all the way since I broke it," Ellie said, showing me her right-hand index finger.

Life on Ellie's commune was different. They used hammers before they could walk. They didn't have any plastic. They swung on a homemade swing with a wooden plank as a seat. They played on the frozen pond without adult supervision and had chores that involved livestock. Ellie was in charge of chickens. One time when she was seven, she broke her finger while hammering a door hinge on a chicken house back into place.

Excerpted from Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A. S King. Copyright © 2014 by A. S King. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.