For Ages
12 to 99

A wistful coming-of-age story with a haunting twist about four friends who spend their summer learning to become invisible—but disappearing comes at a cost.

Four girls. Four girls skating home, both sides of the road, fearless. Four girls at the mouth of an infinite ocean, sugared and salted with sand and seawater, the tide licking their sunburned feet.

This summer, they’re going to disappear.

For seventeen-year-old Callie and her best friends Talia and Cleo, every summer in their…

An Excerpt fromThese Bodies Between Us

1

The Start of Summer

You can measure the start of summer in a lot of different ways. You could call it the day after the last day of school. You could use Memorial Day, or the solstice, or the first day the temperature tiptoes over a hundred. If you’re in Little Beach, where I’m from, you could say it’s begun when the percentage of people in the grocery store is more tourist than local, or when the skating rink opens for seven-days-a-week service. But for me, the beginning of summer was always the day that Cleo arrived.

That year, it was June 16. School had ended only one day before, and I could taste the emotion of that ending on my tongue--the release, the excitement, the exhilarating knowledge that this was our second-to-last last day ever. My best friend Talia and I were seniors now, if, like us, you thought of the start of the summer as the real start of the next year. We sat at the top of the wooden steps of…

Under the Cover