Authors: Marisa de Los Santos

Saving Lucas Biggs (26 page)

BOOK: Saving Lucas Biggs

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Crossing the ruins of the garden, Charlie tripped on a cucumber vine and crashed into Margaret, and as soon as he got himself steady again, she shoved him down in a patch of brand-new tomatoes, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing.

“Not to dispute the importance of your family quirk,” I told John O’Malley, with a nod toward the two of them, “but sometimes you don’t need to be a time traveler to see the future.”

Margaret

2014

I WON’T SAY THAT I DON’T THINK about the bad things now and then. I’ve been woken up by the sight of Theodore Ratliff’s dead, oyster-wet eyes and by the sound of Judge Biggs’s voice sentencing my father to death. I’ve almost fallen off my bike at the sudden memory of Elijah Biggs, his face swollen with hate, bringing that cane down on Aristotle’s skull. And maybe all my life, I’ll imagine a sight I never saw but that visits me anyway: Aristotle’s poor, battered body swinging from a beam.

But mostly what I think about is all the different ways of being brave.

Aristotle was brave by fighting on his own terms, without bullets or bloodshed. Grandpa Joshua was brave by having faith in Luke, decade after decade, a lifetime’s worth of faith, no matter what. My dad was brave by standing up to the Victory Corporation. Charlie was brave by being my friend, by staying, like it was no big deal, through death sentences and smoke bombs and time travel and by taking enormous risks to help me. My mom was brave by serving coffee and cookies to our kind neighbors, even when her heart was breaking. Maybe I was even brave, too, although what might’ve looked like bravery from the outside was just me loving my dad, same as always.

But on the way back down the mountain, after a day at Aunt Bridey’s vine-choked wreck of a house, a day that was possibly the most perfect day in history, I did what felt like the bravest thing I’d ever done, and maybe this sounds weird, but right before I did it, I thought about Lucas Biggs. Because he was brave, too, brave enough to change his life. Maybe there in the park that used to be Canvasburg, when he reached out and took the Quaker star, he felt what I felt as I walked down Mount Hosta with all my favorite people: that sure, the past matters—but the present? The present is here and here and here, a sky full of light, a path under your feet, your hair lifted by wind, the smell of flowers, green grass, red rocks, all of it tumbling toward summer, and all of it yours. All you have to do is set fear aside and stretch out your hand.

Lucas Biggs stretched out his hand. So did I.

I stretched it out, grabbed Charlie’s, and held it. He held mine, too, right there in the one now, the spot where we stood, and the road went onward, onward, onward all the way home.

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to the following people:

our beloved agent, Jennifer Carlson, who told us to go for it with so much enthusiasm that we really couldn’t say no;

our editor, Kari Sutherland, who always understood, even when we didn’t, and put us through the wringer in the best possible way;

everyone at HarperCollins Children’s Books;

Dan Fertel, Isaac Fertel, Annabel Teague, Kristina de los Santos, and everyone else who read
Lucas Biggs
in its early stages and so graciously gave us their thoughts;

the Ballotta Garman family and all the good people at Wilmington Friends School;

Finn and Huxley, loyal and true, who had us wondering how we wrote all those years without dogs at our feet (or on our laps);

our children, Charles and Annabel Teague, who make us sharper and kinder, better people and better writers, and who are just really great to hang out with.

And finally, David is grateful for Marisa, and Marisa is grateful for David. Writing a book with your best friend—life doesn’t get much sweeter than that.

About the Authors

MARISA DE LOS SANTOS
has published three
New York
Times
bestselling novels for adults, including
Love Walked In
and
Belong to Me
, while
DAVID TEAGUE
is the author of the picture books
Franklin’s Big Dreams
and
Billy
Hightower
.
Saving Lucas Biggs
is their first joint venture. Married for over twenty years, Marisa and David live with their two children, Charles and Annabel, and their Yorkies, Finn and Huxley, in Wilmington, Delaware.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors and artists.

Credits

Cover design by Laura Lyn DiSiena

SAVING LUCAS BIGGS

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

www.harpercollinschildrens.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

De los Santos, Marisa, date.

Saving Lucas Biggs / by Marisa de los Santos and David Teague. — First edition.

Pages cm

Summary: “When thirteen-year-old Margaret’s father is sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit, she knows the only way to save him is to use the forbidden family power of time travel”— Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-06-227462-5 (hardback)

[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Time travel—Fiction.] I. Teague, David. II. Title.

PZ7.D339545Sav 2014

2013043189

[Fic]—dc23

CIP

EPub Edition © MARCH 2014 ISBN: 9780062274649

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