Excerpt from Four for the Road by K J. Reilly, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 1

My mom died and everyone says that I'm not handling it well.

I would think that if I was handling it well, that would be the time to worry. Like if I was going to parties and having friends over and acting normal, because no one should act normal when things are not normal. I mean that would be like watching TV when the house is burning because you forgot to shut the oven off which I only did once. Not because I wanted to die or didn't care that the house was on fire—it was just that I really didn't notice on account of the fact that my mom died and that made me not notice things. But just about everyone found that hard to believe, especially the firemen because they said that when they found me there was so much smoke in the house that I couldn't see the TV and I was still sitting there staring at it anyway.

Okay, so my mom died twelve months three weeks one day six hours and fourteen minutes ago and some people think that I should be better by now and not burning down the house and maybe I should be smiling sometimes and speaking more and going to parties and because that's not happening I ended up at the Bergen County Hospital Center on Monday night at seven thirty in Room 212 which is on the second floor just turn right past the vending machines and the restrooms on the left.

Inside Room 212 there's a circle of chairs and boxes of tissues and a coffee setup with Styrofoam cups and cookies with swirls of chocolate on them and everyone here is seventy or eighty or a hundred years old except for me so it's weirder than I thought it would be and it makes me really sad to be here, even sadder than I was before I showed up, especially when one of the really old guys named Henry starts to cry when he tells us about his wife of fifty years and probably four weeks three days fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds or something like that. I look at him—we all look at him—as he gets up to speak and a wisp of cotton for hair hovers like a cloud over his head and his lip quivers. He says her name is Evelyn and she has blue eyes the color of the sky in Montana in winter and then he says that they went on a whale watch in Nova Scotia for their fortieth wedding anniversary and grow sweet peas and tomatoes in their backyard and she saved up sleeping pills and then he helped her mash them up in chocolate pudding so she could go peacefully and on her own terms when she was ready and I'm thinking I'll never come back to Room 212.

When Henry's finished talking, the moderator who has short blond hair and freckles on her cheeks and looks like Peter Pan except without the green tights turns right to me and says, "Do you want to say anything or introduce yourself to the group or tell us who you lost?" And I say, "No." Then she says, "Please," so I say, "I lost my mom."

Then it gets all quiet, last-man-on-Earth, apocalypse quiet, until Peter Pan says, "I'm so sorry. How did she die?" and I say, "Me. I killed her."

That completely sucks the air out of the room and shocks Peter Pan and now all the old people look even more concave and shriveled than they did before I said it but Henry at least stops crying and everyone looks at me with their sunken old-people eyes like I am a monstrosity of unprecedented proportion or one of the great Horrors of the Western World and then they turn away and stare at their feet because people don't like to look at murderers especially if they killed their mom. For the longest time it just stays all quiet and nobody eats cookies or drinks coffee and Peter Pan doesn't know what to say so she just sits there like the rest of them and I feel even worse than I did before I came into Room 212. I mean I have no idea why I said that I killed my mom because my mom died in a car accident and I wasn't driving or in the car with her or texting her or yelling at her on the phone and I wasn't the drunk driver of the eighteen-wheel tractor trailer that hit her either.

Excerpted from Four for the Road by K J. Reilly. Copyright © 2022 by K J. Reilly. Excerpted by permission of Atheneum Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.