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

The words

Me.

I.

Killed.

Her.

Just came out and now they are sitting there like a disgusting amorphous thing in the middle of the room and I can't take them back or rewind my mouth or cover them up so I just stand up and leave Room 212 and head for the elevator which is left past the vending machines and the restrooms on the right.

Peter Pan–without–the–green–tights runs out after me and finds me punching the down button to the elevator over and over again and says, "Please wait."

I say, "I should probably just leave because I upset everyone, especially Henry who doesn't need to be any more upset than he already is."

Peter Pan says, "Please don't go. I'd really like you to come back inside. We all would."

I smash the down button again and say, "If Henry dies of a heart attack brought on by shock and extreme sadness tonight it will be my fault and I'll have to come back on Wednesday and tell all the other old people that I killed him, too."

"Look," Peter Pan says, "we have a group for teens that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays that you would probably like better than the Monday-Wednesday group."

"Will you be there?" I ask, and before she can answer I add, "Wait, that doesn't make sense, 'cause kids my age are too young to have lost someone," and she says, "I know you've lost your mom, and I can't imagine how hard that must be, but you're not the only one. And yes, I'll be there."

I look at her pixie hair and freckles and nice smile and she says, "Losing someone you love at a young age happens more than you think," so I say, "Okay, maybe I'll come back tomorrow."

Then Peter Pan tries to give me a hug and I get all awkward and kind of tense up and pull away and then I feel even worse but she says, "Whatever you are feeling is okay, and we will work with you to make it better," and I want to tell her that what I'm feeling isn't okay at all because if it was okay it wouldn't feel this bad and my dad wouldn't have had to sign me up for this group, but instead I ask, "How? How will you make me feel better?"

She says, "One step at a time," and smiles.

Her smile is just one of those things that makes you feel better even though you're soaking wet and freezing cold and were just struck by lightning and are probably going to die any minute. So when the elevator door finally pings and slides wide open with a slurpy electronic hiss, I don't step inside because Peter Pan is standing there with this hopeful, expectant look on her face and it's like the sun just peeked out when it's raining.

She's quiet for a minute and then she smiles again and says, "Let's go back inside."

Her voice is soft—mom-talking-to-little-kid soft—and she doesn't have a big bright smile. It's more of a trust-me-on-this-one smile which is just the right amount of smile under the circumstances so I say, "Okay."

So, here I am. Staring at my feet slapping against the shiny, slime-green linoleum on the second floor of the Bergen County Hospital Center as I walk back to Room 212 with Peter Pan walking right next to me. When I steal a glance over at her, she looks happy—like, found-one-of-the-Lost-Boys happy—so at least that's something.

As soon as we sit down we go around the circle again and everyone except for me and Henry introduces themselves and says who they lost and how they're doing—which is not good or they wouldn't be here—and then Henry picks up right where he left off like I never said a thing about me killing my mom. He tells us the whole point of his life was to take care of Evelyn and then it gets so quiet and so uncomfortable again that it sounds and feels like it would if you were standing in a morgue waiting to identify a body. I mean, it's almost as bad as when I said I killed my mom because everyone in Room 212 knows that Henry is going to die any second because he just told us that the whole reason he is living is Evelyn, and Evelyn is gone.

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.