NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Hi! Thanks for coming to check out my book. This is a sample only. This book is being published on 16th July 2020 as "My Backward Life" and has a different cover on amazon. 

All copyright laws apply. I hope you like it! 

(P.S. This book is a teen contemporary suitable for 12 upwards. )

FALLING SKY

Chills tingled through my body. I sat up with a gasp, one hand clinging to my bedcovers. Slowly, all the jumbled strangeness in my mind trickled down, vanishing beneath the familiarity of my bedroom.

The industrial-sized workbench for my Claymation projects stood beneath the two sash windows. Orange streetlight snuck through the curtains and shone across the paint pots, brushes, pens, and fabrics. My oak wardrobe rested against the far wall. Grandpa's threadbare armchair sat tucked in beside my bed.

My alarm clock flashed 6:08 a.m. I swiveled around to place my feet on the wooden floorboards. My feet...toes, ankles, heels, and skin. All normal. I stared at them for a minute. Why did I think there was something wrong with my feet?

Teeth chattering, I got out of bed. Mum's insistence on not heating the house would end up killing more than germs, I thought, as I tiptoed to the bathroom.

The light above the sink blinked to life with an electric hiss. The buzz made me queasy, and the brightness hurt my eyeballs. I shut my eyes. Images raced across my mind, fast, like one of those subliminal messages in a TV ad. Raindrops. Fingers levering open my mouth. A hand shaking my shoulder.

My eyes flipped open. Trembling, I stepped to the mirror to check my reflection, nose practically pressed against the glass. I looked the same as always: pale, slightly uneven skin, deep-set eyes which were muddy green at the center and lightened into cloudy blue, short brown hair, limp, in need of a wash, a heart-shaped face that looked younger than sixteen because of my puffy cheeks.

I turned to check my profile. No scratches. No bleeding. What was I expecting? My sense of what I thought had happened was breaking down, the coherence of it all crumbling.

I thought I'd died.

A shiver ran through me. I faced my reflection and tried to recall walking home from the gig last night. I could remember the high street, holding my key between my fingers, feeling flushed. But after that, nothing about getting home, letting myself through the front door, and coming up to bed.

I ran the tap until the water grew warm and spent a minute splashing my face. A voice floated in my head as though rising out of a deep hollow. A voice I didn't recognize. And he kept saying,

Can you hear me?

I suddenly noticed Mum standing behind me in the bathroom doorway and sucked in a shocked gasp. She was wearing her work clothes—silk blouse, gray trousers, sensible shoes. (My mother didn't believe in any other kind.)

"What's going on?" she asked. I shook my head. I had no idea. "I've been calling you for twenty minutes. You're going to be late."

"Late?" My voice sounded hoarse, as though I'd been shouting or screaming a lot. "What are you talking about?" I shuffled past her to my bedroom and got back into bed. As I pulled the covers up to my chin, the alarm clock caught my eye: 7:30 a.m. Had I been standing in the bathroom for over an hour?

"Listen," Mum said. "I'm annoyed enough with you as it is. Get up."

I only worked for Mum on Saturdays if her assistant had an emergency and couldn't make it to the shop. That was our agreement now because Mum had decided I needed to focus on my GCSEs and I had no arguments with the extra free time. Besides, I was supposed to be having lunch with Dad. I jerked the duvet over my head.

A moment later, she threw aside the bed cover, exposing me to the arctic cold of our house. "Where were you last night?"

"My room is freezing." I yanked the duvet back and curled beneath it, knees pressed against my chest.

"I said where were you?"

"At the gig!"

"What gig?"

"Geez, Mum. The one I told you about at Jackson's Lane."

Her eyes narrowed with an odd expression. "You know perfectly well you're not allowed out on a school night. You're not skipping school because you've been out doing goodness knows what."

School? School! It was Saturday.

I felt shaken, almost feverish, but I had a motto for moments like this: If in doubt, act skeptical and carry on. It was a response mode I'd ingrained into myself when I was twelve. It worked when Leah, Toya, and Rana returned from the Christmas holidays with photos of themselves in bikinis against a backdrop of pine trees and a Caribbean blue sea. Yeah, right guys, I can see it's photoshopped. It worked when Ana Green told me she was dating a married man. In fact, it had been automatic for so long, I'd forgotten how to enforce it conscientiously. But I attempted to do so now.

Mum ranted about how she had enough to deal with without me going off the rails and was it too much to ask for a little support and ended with:

"You've got two minutes. I'll take you to school myself."

Once she'd gone, I switched on my bedside light and stumbled about searching for my phone. My school uniform sat neatly folded on the armchair. I ignored it because I distinctly remembered throwing it in my wash hamper when Chrissy, Rana, and I were getting ready for the gig.

I found my mobile under my pillow and switched it on. The home screen glowed, showing a photo of me standing in a field in a blue jumpsuit, a crash helmet under my arm, grinning at the camera. I had never seen the picture before in my life. Nor had I ever worn a crash helmet. It was when I saw the date though, that any hope of normality shattered.

Thursday 20th November.

Six days after the gig. Six days since Friday night.

SIX DAYS!

The phone slipped from my fingers. Hyperventilating, I staggered to the window, leaned across my workbench to open it wide, and stuck my head into the frosty winter air. Outside, a woman clicked past, coat buttoned up, scarf wrapped tight around her neck. She hurried along, not at all perturbed by the fact that today was Thursday!

I rubbed my face and realized tears were rolling down my cheeks.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? said the boy's voice in my head.

"Louise!" Mum hollered up the stairs. The high-pitched warble shook me out of a semi-trance. I pulled off my pajama bottoms, grabbed panties from the drawer, and got dressed. I had to find out what had happened on Friday night. Right before leaving the gig, I'd drunk some of Rana's water. Maybe someone had drugged it, and this was a hallucinogenic flash-forward. I'd never smoked pot for exactly this reason. Well, not exactly—not because I thought I might wake up one day and it would be Thursday instead of Saturday—but because I had gone to a lot of effort to be well adjusted.

I buttoned my purple shirt and decided I wouldn't do anything until I'd spoken to Chrissy. My best friend would know how to handle this. She'd know if someone had spiked our drinks on Friday night, and why I couldn't remember.

* * *

A few minutes later, I sat huddled in the Renault with Mum driving. She cut through backstreets attempting to avoid the traffic, which despite four years of evidence to the contrary she still believed was possible. I watched her, fear rolling through me in tidal waves. I didn't dare say anything about what was happening, for the same reason I didn't argue with her when she took me to that psychologist several years ago for sleep deprivation: I was petrified there was something seriously wrong with me.

Mum drove with both hands on the wheel, checking the wing mirror before she signaled, turning the wheel neatly, one slim hand folding over the other. I studied her to see what I was missing. Hair cut short like a boy, streaked silver and gray so she looked older than fifty-three. Shirt ironed. Bruises tucked beneath her eyes from lack of sleep. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The silence was freaking me out.

"I'm sorry about last night," I said.

"You didn't even wake me when you came in. I was worried about you."

"Sorry." I had no idea where I could have gone late on a Wednesday night. And why didn't I remember?

"This has been a terrible week, Louise. For both of us. But I'm concerned. You seemed to take it so well, and then you started acting..." Her brows squinted together and she winced.

Mum wasn't exactly the most observant person. I must have been acting a whole lot of crazy to attract her attention. But when I thought of the last six days, there was nothing. Not the slightest vague notion of anything since walking home from the gig.

I closed my eyes. Pictures barreled towards me. For a fraction of a second, I saw a woman roll down a window of a car and ask what was wrong. Then a boy, crouched beside a body in a halo of car headlights, told her to call an ambulance. I jerked, gripped my seat belt, and stared forward. Mum's gaze zeroed in on me. I took deep breaths.

When she stopped staring, I grabbed my phone from my bag, selected the Chrome search icon, and loosened up my hands so they weren't trembling so much. I had to stay in control, not flip out, and to do that I needed to detach myself from the situation.

Every event had a logical explanation. My brother Josh had taught me that. He made a living swanning around posh parties and getting people to sign twenty-pound notes before he pulled them out of uncut pineapples. He was twelve years older than me, and for the six years we'd lived under the same roof, his mission had been to make me believe in the impossible. Santa, the Tooth Fairy, children who lived underwater... He even went as far as painting fairy-dust footprints on my wall and convincing me my best friend when I was five, had teleported to our neighbor's kitchen. But they were all just sleights of hand, variations of the Magic Hanky and the Disappearing Coin.

I rubbed a new crack in the top-left corner of my phone that I couldn't explain and scrolled through the last six days of BBC news. There were reports about Hurricane Lucy, Climate Change meetings, and protests in Iraq. I was searching for clues. If Dynamo could teleport to the other side of a glass shop window in front of dozens of people, then maybe Josh could teleport me six days into the future. Though not really six days into the future, just an illusion.

We turned into St John's Gardens. A bell was ringing. Girls in blue uniforms and purple shirts pushed through the wrought-iron gates of the main Edwardian building. The coats, rucksacks, hats, and satchels moved in quick, staccato bursts. It was like watching stop-motion photography.

I peered through the windscreen at the sky, remembering a line from a story my dad used to read about a chicken being gobbled up by a fox. 'The sky is falling. I'm off to tell the king.' But the sky wasn't falling. It was just an ordinary, wintry day with heavy cloud cover.

Mum sighed. "I want you to come straight home after school. I'll close the shop early. I'm going to get you an appointment at the doctor's."

Blood drained from my head. "Which doctor's?"

"Doctor Fleisher."

"No way." I'd sworn I would never go back to that creepy therapist. The one time Mum took me, it had felt like Fleisher was trying to peel off my skin and suck out my brain.

Mum's knuckles grew white as her grip tightened on the steering wheel. "Louise, there's nothing wrong with getting help. You don't have to talk to me, but you need to talk to someone."

Talk to someone about what? Did she know I was having a memory glitch or was this about Dad? He hadn't been at home this morning. Yesterday, I'd found my parents in the kitchen with smashed glass on the floor. Mum had immediately walked out. Dad then asked me to meet him for lunch on Saturday with my sister Carol, and Josh.

Except none of that happened yesterday. It was last week.

"I don't need to talk to anyone. I'm fine."

"This isn't a request, Louise. I'm taking you to the doctor's."

The panic mounted, fuzzing my vision. I saw myself sitting in a flowery armchair, my back to Fleisher, face to face with a horrible painting of a woman screaming.

"I'm not going. It's out of the question." My feet hit the curb. I slammed the passenger door behind me.

Mum rolled down the window. "Louise!" she called. I took a couple of steps towards the school gates. "Louise!"

Girls flowed around me, rushing to get to registration. On the road, a car horn blasted. I glanced back. Forced to clear out the way, Mum's Renault lurched forward. I dipped my nose into the high collar of my older sister's hand-me-down duffel coat and turned away.

So this is what I remembered: