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

I was convinced that the bat was out of hibernation and was simply nesting there at night in the exact same place under the eaves of her back porch. If we were in any way smart, we'd have stayed until dusk that night to watch the bat leave in order to answer our curiosities about it, but we didn't. Ellie had commune chores and a secret boyfriend. I had reluctant homework and senioritis. We were happy believing the bat was fine.

When we met on Easter Monday in late April, the bat was still there, elbow pointed to the eastern horizon like it had been since winter. Ellie found a stick and poked it and then sniffed the stick.

"Doesn't stink," she said. "And there are no flies or anything."

"Don't bats have fleas?" I asked. "I heard they carry fleas and ticks and stuff."

"I think it's dead," Ellie said.

"Doesn't look dead," I said.

"Doesn't look alive, either," Ellie said.

She poked it again and it didn't move. Then she nudged the stick up into the siding where she could force the whole bat out with one slice and it fell into her mother's sprouting summer lilies. Ellie reached into the lime-green and came out with this oddity—perfectly intact, still furry, still with eyeballs, still with paper-thin wings folded like it was resting.

We leaned down and looked at it.

"It's petrified?" Ellie said.

"Probably more like mummified," I said.

She ignored my correction and placed the bat on the picnic table and went into the house and got a jar. I took a picture of the jar. I named the picture in my head. Empty Jar. "It's so light," Ellie said, weighing the bat in her palm. "Do you want to hold it before I put it in?"

I put my hands out and she placed it in my palm and we looked at it. Even though it was dead, Ellie seemed to see it as a new stray pet that needed a mother or something. When I put it in the jar, she sealed the lid and held it up and said, "I christen thee the petrified bat! Hear ye, hear ye, the petrified bat is king!"

"Might be a queen," I said.

"Whatever," Ellie said. She inspected it through the glass. "It's alive and dead at the same time or something."

"Yeah."

"It's the closest I've ever come to God," Ellie said.

"Amen." I was being sarcastic. Because Ellie said stuff like that sometimes and it was annoying. Because we were seventeen and this was silly, us finding a bat and acting like it was something special. This was what nine-year-olds did.

But then something serious came over me. I said, "Hold on. Let me see it." Ellie handed the jar to me and as I looked at it—a tiny lump of mummified fur—I said, "Maybe it is God."

The bat was dead but somehow it represented life because it looked alive. It was mysterious and obvious in one hollow, featherweight package.

"We'll put it in the shed," Ellie said. "My mom will never find it there because that's where we keep the cleaning supplies."

Ellie's mother didn't believe in cleaning.

My mother was dead, and I had no idea if she was ever a clean freak or what.

The ballad of Darla O'Brien

My mother wasn't conveniently dead, like in so many stories about children, whether they jarred dead bats or were attracted to beasts in woodland castles. She didn't die to help me overcome some obstacle by myself or to make me a more sympathetic character.

She haunted me—and not in some run-of-the-mill Hollywood way. There were no floating bedsheets or chains clanking in the night as I tiptoed to the bathroom to pee.

My mother, Darla O'Brien, was a photographer. She haunted the walls of our house with pictures. She was always there and never there. We could never see her, but every day, I saw her pictures. She was a great photographer, but she never became famous because we didn't live in New York City. Or that's what I've heard she said.

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.