Dream Walker

Everything Mrs. Temple does to Mia Burke is perfectly reasonable.

The A-grade essay comes back with a C and a page of considered notes explaining exactly why. Mia's friends leave the school paper one editorial decision at a time. The phone call home is made by a teacher who sounds genuinely worried about a bright girl who is slipping. Not one of those things is anything you could report.

So when Mia says the woman is doing it on purpose, her parents hear a sixteen-year-old making excuses, and they are kind about it: after the autumn she has had, of course she is struggling. Her boyfriend decides she is inventing it. The harder Mia pushes, the more she proves their point.

Mia is right. The only thing she has to go on is a look: on her first morning, in a room full of students, Mrs. Temple's eyes went past every one of them to the two who came from the island.

Mia has wanted to know what is out on that island since the end of summer. Out past Whisper Rock a man has gone to sleep in perfect health and not woken up, the people who can find anyone cannot find who did it, and the people who see what is coming saw nothing at all.

She is about to find out what the island is, and what it has to do with the woman who is taking her life apart. She is going to wish she had left it alone.