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

"What do you think it's like?" she would ask me, even though she knew it made me uncomfortable to talk about it. I think she figured since she was fourteen and curious, so was I.

"I don't know," I'd say. "I don't really care."

"You don't care? Really? Come on. You care."

I didn't care.

"What about that kid on the bus you used to crush on? Didn't you ever think about doing it with him?" she asked.

"Markus Glenn?"

"Yeah."

"Don't you remember? He was such a perv."

She picked at a fingernail that was bothering her. "What'd he do again?"

"The porn guy."

"Ohhh. Yeah. Him," she said. "So, who do you like now?"

"Nobody."

I never told her that after Markus Glenn showed me those pictures on his computer in seventh grade, he asked me to touch him there where his shorts were sticking up like a tipi. When I wouldn't touch it and I told him I was going home, he said, "You're never going to be a real woman acting like that, you know! Anyway, you're flat as a board!"

I didn't tell her that from that moment forward, I never even wanted breasts because then kids like Markus Glenn would look at them. I didn't tell her that from that moment on, I sometimes didn't know what a woman was really supposed to look like.

"You liked one kid in your whole life? I don't buy it."

"I told you. I don't care," I'd said.

I picked up my camera and held it at arm's length and took a picture of myself not caring. I called it: Glory Doesn't Care.

The Zone System

Everyone in school on those last days posed. Before then, I'd catch them at their desks working, or in the computer lab researching, or in the library reading. They never looked up. On Monday, three days of school left, they made funny faces. On Tuesday, they hugged a lot. The last day of school for seniors, the Wednesday before graduation, everyone looked right into my camera and smiled or grabbed friends and acted as if they would never see each other again—as if they were never going to have a class reunion, as if we were all going to die on graduation day. You could see the fear in their faces, masked by joy, but it was there. I snapped picture after picture even though I didn't plan on sharing any of them.

"Us! Us!" a group of jazz band girls said. Snap.

"Can you take a picture of us, too?" nearby vo-tech guys said. Snap.

"Hey, Glory! Take a picture of us, willya?" Football cheerleaders draped all over each other. Snap.

On the way to lunch for the very last time, there were three girls who never liked me because of the FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE bumper sticker on my [dad's] car, one of whom claimed this made me a dyke back in eleventh grade. "Last day at lunch! Come on. Take a shot of us buying our last crappy high school food."

I did.

But they didn't know that I focused on the chicken nuggets, soggy fries and lump of macaroni salad on their plates instead of their clueless faces.

It would seem from this that I was popular, and with my camera, I was. My camera kept me safe. Kept me in good standing with people who wanted a picture of themselves. Kept me behind the camera rather than in front of it. I even skipped the one group picture I should have been in for yearbook—which was the yearbook club picture. I didn't get regular senior pictures taken either. Instead, I submitted a self-portrait with my eyes closed. I had to fight to get them to include it. Luckily, the only pull I had in school was with the yearbook advisor.

The picture looked like me, dead.

I was interested in death the way Ellie was interested in sex. The less adults talked to us about things, the more we wanted to know, I guess.

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.