Ex-Purgatory by Peter Clines (best book club books TXT) 📕

ALSO IN THE EX SERIES

FROM PETER CLINES

Ex-Heroes

Ex-Patriots

Ex-Communication

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Peter Clines

Excerpt from The Fold copyright © 2015 by Peter Clines

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Broadway Books,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

a division of Random House LLC,

a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Random House LLC.

This book contains an excerpt from The Fold by Peter Clines. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition from the Crown Publishing Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-8041-3661-7

eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3662-4

Cover illustration: Jonathan Bartlett

Cover design: Christopher Brand

v3.1_r3

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Then

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Then

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Then

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Then

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

People Can Depend On Me When Things Get Tough. Then

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Epilogue

Epilogue II

Acknowledgments

An Excerpt from The Fold

SYLVESTER TAPPED HIS pencil on his knee. He did it like a drumroll, so the sound was sharp against his jeans. He always had a pencil, even though she couldn’t remember him ever using a notepad. Three months now, a dozen sessions, and he’d never taken one note.

He was bald, but she was pretty sure he shaved his head. It made it tough to figure out how old he was. His tight goatee came to a perfect point under his chin. He had dark brown eyes, and his eyelids hung low. It gave him a relaxed, thoughtful appearance.

Sylvester stopped tapping the pencil, leaned back in his chair, and gave her a look. “How are you sleeping?”

She shrugged. “Same as always.”

“Which means?”

Her fingers danced on the arm of her wheelchair. “I don’t like the mask. If I try to do anything except sleep on my back it pulls at my head or leaves marks on my face. And it doesn’t fit right. Air leaks out and blows over my eyes, so they’re always dry when I wake up.”

“Has it always been like that?”

She shook her head. “No. I mean, the whole thing only started a while ago. Near the end of senior year.”

“Have you tried different masks?”

“Yeah. Dad tried altering them, too. It doesn’t make any difference.” Her lips twisted into a weak smile. “I think I’ve got a funny-shaped head.”

“It looks fine to me,” he assured her.

She blushed. Just a little. “Thanks.”

“You understand why you have to wear it, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Do you resent it?”

“Didn’t we go over all this ages ago?”

“We did,” said Sylvester, “but I want to see if your answers have changed any.”

She shrugged again. “It’s keeping me alive. The doctors—the other doctors—they say I stop breathing as soon as I fall asleep. The first couple times it happened they were pretty sure I’d died in my sleep. Severe sleep apnea.”

“One of the worst cases on record,” he said.

“Yup. Mom gets worried whenever I stay up late because she’s worried I’ll nod off in class and asphyxiate.”

“Big word.”

“I’ve heard it a lot.”

“So do you resent it? The mask?”

“It’s keeping me alive.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

She sighed. “I don’t like it, but that’s just the way it is, right? I wish I didn’t need it, but I also wish I didn’t need to use a wheelchair most of the time. And I wish I had red hair, too.”

“Why red hair?”

“Because black hair and pale skin make everybody think you’re some kind of Goth. Red hair and pale skin mean you’re a sexy Irish girl.”

“Are you Irish?”

“No, but nobody knows that.”

He tapped the pencil three times on his knee, then a fourth. “Are you worried how the mask’s going over at college?”

Sylvester had covered one side of his office with black-bordered motivational posters. She still wasn’t sure if it was serious or a joke to make people lighten up. “A little bit,” she admitted after a minute of poster-studying.

“Why?”

“Honestly?”

“That’s the whole point of this.” The pencil tapped twice for emphasis.

“I always wonder if everyone thinks I’m some kind of freak,” she said. “Every study session, every party, every late night hanging out, I’m always the girl who has to get back to her room and strap this thing to her head before she falls asleep. And how’s that—” She looked back at the wall of posters and stared at one marked Desire.

“And how’s that … what?” he asked.

She glanced at the office door, toward her mother in the waiting room. “What if I meet a guy?” she asked. “What if I meet someone and things are going great? The chair’s bad enough, how do I tell him, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do it in my room because I’ve got to make sure I strap on my Darth Vader mask before I fall asleep or I’ll probably die’? What guy wants to hear that?”

Sylvester smiled. “That’s your big worry?”

Her mouth twitched into a smile for a moment. “It’s one of them.”

He took a long, deliberate look of his own at the door, at her mother in the waiting room. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” he said, turning his gaze back to her, “but I don’t think you need to worry about guys in college not wanting to have sex. Even if you have to strap on an oxygen mask afterward.”

She blushed again. “I just think it’s going to be weird.”

“Trust me. They won’t care.”

She turned back to the wall of posters.

He let the silence stretch out between them for a minute. Then he rapped the pencil on his knee once. “You’re still having the dreams?”

She