Excerpt from I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My phone is gone.

Lost? Taken?

I turn my face toward the road.

A car is coming.

I wave my hand weakly until it gets close and then my arm drops to my side. The car eases to a stop next to me, and I stare at the blurry edge of the driver's side door as it opens and a beige heel descends to the ground.

I follow it all the way up to the woman it belongs to.

Oh.

The most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life.

An aura of light surrounds the curves of her body so perfectly, I can't help but wonder if she's real. She crouches in front of me, her eyes a pale blue, their sweet concern offsetting the devastating angles of her breathtaking face. Her white skin is summer-tanned, glitter-flecked, rays of sunlight threading themselves through the short strands of honey-blond hair hanging loose at the nape of her neck. She looks like something out of a magazine, her beauty almost defiant in the face of everything that's put it before me, refusing to be less than what it is even though there's a dead girl out there right now, rotting.

I need to go to Aspera, I tell her.

There's a body in the woods.

Ashley James.

The deputy sheriff's little girl.

The woman makes some calls and then everything she says after that seems to end in my name, but I don't remember telling it to her. Something about the gentle persistence of hearing Georgia, Georgia, over and over again keeps me from floating too far away. And then we're in her car and it's the nicest car I've been in in a long time, and I shiver against the cool leather seat, my head lolling against the window.

Every time my eyes drift shut, she says my name.

Georgia.

The view changes and there's a gate in the distance stretched across the road. Even from here, I can make out the gold lettering across its top, sparkling in the light, declaring itself:

A S P E R A
PRIVATE. NO ADMITTANCE. MEMBERS ONLY.

"What if they don't let me in?" I manage.

But the gate opens before we even reach it.

My pulse quickens as the lodge slowly appears on the horizon, only to unmake itself before I can get a closer look.

"You're already in," the woman tells me.

I finally realize who I'm sitting next to.

"Georgia," she says, alarmed, stopping the car as my head falls forward. Her hand comes to rest against my cheek and carefully turns my face to hers, as though she wants to be sure she's the last thing I see.

"Was I at Aspera?"

The shape of my brother stands at the window, staring out at the hospital's parking lot view. I don't realize I've asked the question aloud until he moves to my bed, reaching for the cup of water on the stand beside it. Ice rattles against plastic as he brings the straw to my lips and then: a cold miracle against the sandpapered insides of my throat. Beyond my room, the soft sounds of doctors and orderlies moving down the corridor, beds being rolled from one place to another, beeps from machines I wouldn't know the names of ...

Tyler comes into focus slowly, his thick brown hair knotted in a bun at the back of his head. The cold white glow of the room's lights cast the lines in his light brown face in sharp relief. He works construction all day, every day, the wear and tear of the job belying his thirty years. Mom had him when she was twenty-seven and then I came along, an accident when she was forty-one. He got the benefit of her youth and the heart that body housed, and I got—something else. We don't look the same. Different dads. Mine was a fuck-and-run, the way Mom told it, but Tyler's is Tony Ruiz. Lives down in Roanoke. Tyler visits him sometimes, but mostly keeps him at an arm's length, like if Mom couldn't make it work with him, he shouldn't either.

That loyalty to her is the difference between us.

Excerpted from I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers. Copyright © 2022 by Courtney Summers. Excerpted by permission of Wednesday Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.