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

Darla was a nearly famous photographer. Dad, before his present incarnation as the man on the Jazzy in the freezer aisle, was a painter. They built this house with the money Darla inherited from her mother after she died from non-microwave-oven cancer in 1990. Darla inherited $860,000, which was a lot of money. Her sister, Amy, inherited the same amount and blew it all on frivolous things. A tanning bed. Trips to Mexico. Bigger boobs. Shoes. A lot of shoes.

As sisters go, they were as opposite as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. Sadly, the immortal one in this case was too distracted by sales at Macy's to start the Trojan War or launch a thousand ships.

After Darla died, Aunt Amy tried for years to con me into having a First Communion in a pretty white dress. She would try to teach me about confession and sin and the Virgin Mary, but all I could see when she told me about Catholicism were her weird, round, wobbly silicone boobs.

She always wore low-cut tops.

Even when she dressed to sell God to little motherless girls.


Amy didn't come around anymore. I didn't expect a graduation card or any sort of present from her, though she did still send birthday cards—usually with overly girly motifs that made me want to puke. Amy always had a way of going over the top because I told her I was a feminist when I was twelve, and she told Dad he'd brainwashed me into being some sort of half-boy.

Which was bullshit. I was not a half-boy. I was still totally myself. I just wanted Aunt Amy to get paid as much as a man if ever she got off her lazy ass and got a job.

Why did everyone mix up that word so much?

My dad didn't brainwash me; I was simply aware. And from the looks of things around my high school, I was in the minority.

Ellie told me once that the feminist years were over.

"What the hell does that mean?" I'd asked.

"It means that's so 1970s or something. Twentieth-century."

I looked her up and down. "And hippie communes are twenty-first-century? Seriously?"

"You know what I mean," she said. "It's over. We got what we needed. We don't have to fight anymore."

I remember exactly what I said that day when she said that. I said, "Homeschooling is making you stupid."

But it wasn't homeschooling. She'd said what most people really think.

Empty plastic

I hadn't always been the yearbook photographer. Halfway through senior year, they asked me to step in. Ms. Ingraham, the yearbook advisor, said she figured I'd have a good eye. She did not mention why she figured this. She did not mention that I might have inherited my eye from Darla-whose-eyes-no-longer-saw.

"John Risla was expelled," Ms. Ingraham said.

"I heard." He was a serial plagiarizer. We all knew it was coming.

"Do you think you'd like to be our yearbook photographer for the rest of the year?"

"Sure," I said. "But I don't want to be part of the club."

"But—I…" she stammered.

"I just want to take pictures," I said. "That's all. No club."

"Okay," she said. "That would be great."

Dad supplied the camera—a digital. To make myself feel better about using a digital, I tried to shoot every yearbook picture using the Zone System.

It was totally possible. Just because it was invented by two guys who used to make their own emulsion and paint it on 20 × 24-inch glass plates in the 1940s didn't mean the Zone System couldn't be used by anyone using any kind of camera.

It was all about exposure.

While everyone else my age had their digital cameras set to automatic, I dug out Darla's old handheld light meter.

A light meter could tell you what zone everything in a scene fell into. Bright spots—waterfall foam, reflections, a polar bear—were high numbers. Shadows—holes, dark still water, eels beneath the surface—were low numbers. You had to let the light into the camera in just the right way. You had to meter: find the dark and light spots in your subject. You had to bracket: manually change your shutter speed or aperture to adjust the amount of light hitting the film—or in my case, for the yearbook, the microchip. You didn't want to blow out the highlights, and you had to give the shadows all the detail you could by finding the darkest max black areas and then shooting them three zones lighter.

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.