Trip Through Your Wires. Sarah Layden

      Table of Contents

       Half-Title Page

       Title Page

       Copyright Information

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       Prologue

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

      Trip

      Through

      Your

      Wires

      Engine Books

      Indianapolis

       Engine Books PO Box 44167 Indianapolis, IN 46244 enginebooks.org

      Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Layden

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

      Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

       either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

      Also available in Hardcover and eBook formats from Engine Books.

      Printed in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      ISBN: 978-1-938126-19-2

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930801

      For Tom

      It stung like a violent wind

       that our memories depend

       on a faulty camera in our minds.

       —“What Sarah Said,” Death Cab for Cutie

      But don’t behave so childishly in [the] future,

       or be so anxious to see the world;

       for an honest maid and a broken leg are best at home,

       a woman and a hen are soon lost by gadding,

       and the girl who’s anxious to see also longs to be seen.

       —Sancho Panza in Don Quixote

      Prologue

      She had so few photographs from that year in Mexico, she sometimes wondered if it had happened at all. More than once, she’d been careless and exposed an entire roll of film to the light. She could just buy more, she reasoned, though she never did. The snapshots that did develop captured blurred subjects in unflattering shadows. And then there was Ben, insisting that she ought to live the experience, not photograph it like a tourist. After the first few months, she barely used her camera.

      She told herself that she’d always remember the winding streets of medieval Guanajuato, the mountain range casting shade, creating places to hide. That she would remember Ben, backlit by the sun, leading the way down an alley, Mike trailing close behind. She was there, just outside the frame. She was supposed to stay a full year, but couldn’t in the end. Her mind’s film flapped at the end of the reel, blank and sputtering.

      She thought that memory was hardened and permanent, something you could touch. An object as fixed as a photograph. But even pictures went missing. Mexico ought to have been embedded in her mind, but no.

      Carey, usually cautious, had managed to get herself to Mexico, to Ben, who hadn’t even known her. She’d labored over her study abroad application, almost certain she was applying to his program. There he was in glossy color: Ben and Mike pictured with others in a brochure for Intercambio, standing in front of a frighteningly beautiful cathedral. She’d seen another version of the photo on the wall at Prisanti’s, the Oakview Mall pizza shop where Ben tossed dough. He posed alone in that snapshot. Carey didn’t even have a job, didn’t need one, her parents insisted. Not like Ben, who could reliably be found behind Prisanti’s glass counter. She knew