The Wrong Side of Right

DIAL BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street • New York, New York 10014

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
penguin.com

Copyright © 2015 by Jenn Marie Thorne

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thorne, Jenn Marie.

The wrong side of right / by Jenn Marie Thorne.

pages cm

Summary: After her mother dies, sixteen-year-old Kate Quinn meets the father she did not know she had, joins his presidential campaign, falls for a rebellious boy, and when what she truly believes flies in the face of the campaign’s talking points, Kate must decide what is best.

ISBN 978-0-8037-4057-0 (hardback) [1. Politics, Practical—Fiction. 2. Presidential candidates—Fiction. 3. Elections—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Love—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.1.T48Wr 2015

[Fic]—dc23 2014028077

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To all of my
parents

1

Tuesday, June 10

The Day the News Broke

147
DAYS
UNTIL
THE
GENERAL
ELECTION

The moment my horrible yearbook photo first appeared on millions of televisions, sending jaws dropping, phones ringing, and joggers tumbling off their treadmills across America, I was in the middle of my AP US history final.

The test room was silent, apart from the incessant
click click click
of the overhead clock, until the buzzer sounded and we rushed to hand off our best efforts and flee the building in relief. It was the last scheduled exam of the year, nothing waiting for us outside these halls but summer. Two seniors skipped past me along the linoleum. Even I felt myself smiling, really smiling, not just faking it.

“What did you think?” Lily Hornsby caught up behind me, more dazed than giddy. She’d been my assigned study partner in US history, which was a lucky break—she’d turned out to be one of the friendliest people in my new school.

“Mostly okay.” At her wince, I backtracked. “What was with that Grover Cleveland question? We didn’t go over that stuff at all!”

“I know, right?” She sighed. “At least it’s done. So what are you up to this summer?”

Good question. I’d been so focused on schoolwork all year
that I hadn’t thought ahead to the break. I should have been applying for summer jobs, pre-college programs, whatever it was that normal people did between junior and senior year. But until today, I’d been at my mental limit just studying for tests, thinking forward one day and then the next. Any further than that and the haze set in again, heavy and thick with sadness.

“I’m not sure yet,” I admitted.

We swung through the front doors, met by a blinding blue sky and a solid wall of Low Country humidity, plus the now familiar marsh smell that hugged my school on hot days. It was summer, all right. I needed to find a way to fill it.

“Whoa.” Lily pointed at the parking lot. “What’s up with that?”

Some sort of news event had sprung up in front of the school—three vans with satellite dishes on top, parked in a lazy triangle next to what looked like live reports being filmed.

Even in daylight, even on the opposite coast, the scene felt familiar. I wrapped my arms around myself, my skin prickling with dread.

“You all right?” Lily touched my shoulder.

“Yeah.” I forced myself to turn, glad that I’d parked on a side street and wouldn’t have to walk through that mess. “I just hope nobody’s hurt.”

“It’s probably a teachers’ strike.” Lily shrugged, but I felt her glance at me a second later. She knew about my mom, everyone did, which made her careful, sometimes painfully so. I forced a smile, embarrassed that I’d let myself get spooked.

A group of Lily’s friends was waiting for her on the corner. I gave an awkward wave and started to duck away, but Lily stopped me.

“A bunch of us are gonna go celebrate at Mario’s tonight,” she said, nodding in the direction of the James Island pizza place that was a magnet for most of my high school. “Like eight o’clock? You should totally come.”

She grinned and hurried away before I could conjure one of my usual excuses. One of her friends, a tall kid from my physics class, raised his hand in greeting and I called out to the back of Lily’s head, “Okay!”

This is fine
, I pep-talked myself, stepping into the shade of ivy-strung trees.
I’ll go out. Be normal
. Or at least learn to imitate it better.

Just as I got to my old Buick, my cell phone buzzed.

My uncle Barry cut me off mid-greeting.

“Kate, honey, you need to get home right away.”

His voice was fake calm. Panicked. My feet planted themselves into the ground, my hand starting to tremble. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here, but you gotta come straight home, and listen, honey, this is important. Don’t talk to any of the reporters. Okay?”

I glanced behind me, barely able to make out the crowd in the parking lot from here. “Okay. I’m on my way.”

I drove with both clammy hands clutching the wheel. The music on the radio sounded harsh, like the soundtrack to a horror movie, so I shut it off and listened to my short, sharp breaths and thudding heart.

Almost a year ago, I’d gotten a call just like this one. I was coming out of a movie theater with a bunch of friends, turning my phone on, laughing about how bad the movie was. I answered, even though I didn’t recognize the number. It was Marta, my mom’s best friend. Her voice was controlled too, like Barry’s, like she was fighting to keep a scream at bay.

“You need to come home, Kate,” she’d said. “Something’s happened.”

It wasn’t until I’d gotten to my house that fear set in, icy and creeping, frost on a field. Our LA bungalow was surrounded by local news crews, there to report my mother’s death.

Community hero, founder of the Cocina de Los Angeles Food Bank, dead at age thirty-five.

“It was instant,” Marta had told me, safe inside the living room and wrapped in a blanket like I was the one who’d been pulled from a car wreck. “She didn’t feel any pain.”

As if anybody could know that.

Marta had a quiet word with the news crews and they packed up and left. She stayed the night and I half slept for seventeen hours and when I woke up, my mom was still dead, but her brother, Barry, and his wife, Tess, had arrived.

They were nice people whom I’d met a few times before. They had a grown son and a landscaping business in James Island, South Carolina. They were all I had in the way of family—no grandparents, no father, not even his name, and suddenly no mother. They were willing to take me.

And now, nearly a year later, they were calling me, telling me to come home, to my new home, where this couldn’t
be happening, couldn’t possibly be happening to us again.

I pulled around our corner to find a gridlocked freeway where our house should be. My foot hit the brake. There were news vans in neighboring driveways and rows of cars penning in the tidy hedges all along the usually sleepy street. I recognized only a couple of the bumper stickers and window decals—parents, here to pick up their kids from the day care center Tess operated from our house.

An agitated blonde came down the sidewalk, balancing her toddler on one hip while struggling to shove his cluttered bag over her shoulder. I rolled down my window and drifted closer to her SUV.

“Mrs. Hanby!”

Her taut face dropped when she saw me. She let her son into the car, glaring at the news vans. “You need to get in there fast, hon. They just keep coming—I barely managed to get Jonah out!”

Behind the glass of the backseat, Jonah blinked at me, saucer-eyed. I probably looked just like him. I swallowed, had to ask.

“Is it my aunt? Is Tess okay?”

“Oh sweetie. You haven’t seen the news.” Mrs. Hanby came around to give my arm a squeeze, her eyes squinting with pity. “She’s fine, but you need to go on home now and find out for yourself.”

She tapped my car twice, like she was spurring a horse and weirdly, it worked. I drove, holding my breath, past two gleaming black Town Cars, past my uncle’s truck with the big sign on it advertising “Quinn Yards,” past
the first news van, dimly registering the letters
CNN
emblazoned on it. There weren’t any cars in the driveway. But there were people—hordes of them, masses, carrying cell phones, microphones, cameras.

I turned in slowly, hoping they’d move out of the way, praying I wouldn’t have to call attention to myself by laying on the horn.

I didn’t need to. They parted, all right. They practically ran, flanking my car like the waves of the Red Sea before falling in behind me. I shut off the engine and heard an unnatural hush settle around the Buick. A camera was pressed against the passenger window. Its red light was on.

I opened my door and the tide rushed in. They were a crash of voices, a wall of faces, something out of a zombie movie.

“Excuse me,” I cried, trying to politely shove a camera-man so I could shut my car door. The crowd pressed closer, howling. I couldn’t make out words until a petite brunette with a peacock-branded microphone scrambled into my path and asked: “When did you first learn that Senator Cooper was your father?”

“What?”

The words weren’t connecting. They were nonsense words. Magnetic poetry.

I tried to push forward, but there were hands, microphones blocking me at every angle. Then there came a ripple in the wall and a large bald black man walked through, wrapped one arm around me, and ushered me past the crowd, onto
the porch, and through my front door, saying, “You’re all right, kid, you’re all right.”

Aunt Tess was first to greet me. I coughed a sob and rushed to hug her, but she gently held me back.

“Kate,” she said, in an unnaturally singsong tone. “You have a visitor.”

And then, through the door to the living room, I saw him.

He was slowly rising from my uncle’s battered armchair, his hand shaking as he loosened a red silk tie. He stared at me, eyes wide, like I was a ghost, like I was covered in blood or wielding a gun, like I was terrifying.

I knew exactly who he was. Everybody in the country did, especially juniors who’d just finished their AP US history exams.

Senator Mark Cooper. Republican, Massachusetts.

Candidate—President of the United States of America.