Jeremy Swain
Sadie Lindell has been dead for four months - and now she is standing at the fence again. Almost Sadie. Her hair parts on the wrong side. She eats pepperoni, though the real Sadie was vegetarian since she was nine. She catches with the wrong hand, laughs in the wrong order, and remembers a lake house summer that never happened. Nadia Ferreira, thirteen, precise about everything, knows why the details are off: the thing wearing her best friend’s face is built out of tellings - a whole summer of Nadia talking aloud at Sadie’s grave, retelling their whole friendship, including the version of its ending she edited so she could live with it. It knows everything she said out loud. It knows nothing she never said. Fed on attention, it grows righter, solid enough for strangers to see. Unfed, it thins. And what it wants is to be kept - sung through Sadie’s fourteenth birthday, given a seat in Nadia’s life for good - while the price comes quietly due in the memories of everyone who tells its story: their own true Sadies, overwritten by hers. To send it back, Nadia must do the thing she has avoided since June: say the true version out loud, in order - the fight, the apology she typed and never sent, the goodbye she never got to say - and let the real Sadie go a second time. A scary novel for readers ages 10-14.
