A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK

An Imprint of Macmillan

EVE AND ADAM. Copyright© 2012 by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate. All
rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley
& Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia. For information, address Feiwel and
Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN: 978-0-312-58351-4

Book design by Ashley Halsey

Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto

First Edition: 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

macteenbooks.com
 –1–

EVE

I AM THINKING OF AN APPLE WHEN THE STREETCAR HITS AND MY LEG SEVERS and
my ribs crumble and my arm is no longer an arm but something
unrecognizable, wet and red.
An apple. It was in a vendor’s stall at the farmers’ market off
Powell. I’d noticed it because it was so weirdly out of place, a
defiant crimson McIntosh in an army of dull green Granny Smiths.
When you die—and I realize this as I hurtle through the air
like a wounded bird—you should be thinking about love. If not
love, at the very least you should be counting up your sins or won-
dering why you didn’t cross at the light.
But you should not be thinking about an apple.
I register the brakes screeching and the horrified cries before
I hit the pavement. I listen as my bones splinter and shatter. It’s
not an unpleasant sound, more delicate than I would have imag-
ined. It reminds me of the bamboo wind chimes on our patio.
 A thicket of legs encircles me. Between a bike messenger’s ropy
calves I can just make out the 30% OFF TODAY ONLY sign at Lady Foot
Locker.
I should be thinking about love right now—not apples, and
certainly not a new pair of Nikes—and then I stop thinking alto-
gether because I am too busy screaming.

• • •

I OPEN MY EYES AND THE LIGHT IS BLINDING. I KNOW I MUST BE dead because
in the movies there’s always a tunnel of brilliant light before
someone croaks.
“Evening? Stay with us, girl. Evening? Cool name. Look at me,
Evening. You’re in the hospital. Who should we call?”
The pain slams me down, and I realize I’m not dead after all,
although I really wish I could be because maybe then I could
breathe instead of scream.
“Evening? You go by Eve or Evening?”
Something white smeared in red hovers above me like a cloud
at sunset. It pokes and prods and mutters. There’s another, then
another. They are grim but determined, these clouds. They talk in
fragments. Pieces, like I am in pieces. Vitals. Prep. Notify. Permis-
sion. Bad.
“Evening? Who should we call?”
“Check her phone. Who’s got her damn cell?”
“They couldn’t find it. Just her school ID.”
“What’s your mom’s name, hon? Or your dad’s?”

2
 “My dad is dead,” I say, but it comes out in ear-splitting
moans, a song I didn’t know I could sing. It’s funny, really, be-
cause I cannot remotely carry a tune. A C+ in Beginning Women’s
Chorus—and that was totally a pity grade—but here I am, singing
my heart out.
Dead would be so good right now. My dad and me, just us,
not this.
OR 2’s ready. No time. Now now now.
I’m pinned flat like a lab specimen, and yet I’m moving, flying
past the red and white clouds. I didn’t know I could fly. So many
things I know this afternoon that I didn’t know this morning.
“Evening? Eve? Give me a name, hon.”
I try to go back to the morning, before I knew that clouds
could talk, before I knew a stranger could retrieve the dripping
stump of your own leg.
What do I do with it? he’d asked.
“My mother’s Terra Spiker,” I sing.
The clouds are silent for a moment, and then I fly from the
room of bright light.

3
 –2–

I AWAKEN TO AN ARGUMENT. THE MAN IS SIMMERING, THE WOMAN ON FULL BOIL.

They’re out of my view, behind an ugly green curtain. I try to
do what I always do when my parents fight, adjust my earbuds
and crank the volume to brain-numb, but something is wrong. My
right arm is not obeying me, and when I touch my ear with my
left hand, I discover a thick gauze headband. I’ve sprouted long
tubes from my arms and my nose.
“She’s my daughter,” the woman says, “and if I say she’s leav-
ing, she’s leaving.”
“Please, listen to me. She’s going to be your one-legged
daughter if you take her out of here.”
The man is pleading, and I realize he’s not my dad because
(a) my dad was never a pleader—more of a pouter, really; and
(b) he’s dead.
“I have superior facilities, the best medical staff money can
buy.” The woman punctuates this with a dramatic exhalation. It’s
my mother’s trademark sigh.
 “She’s in critical condition in the ICU after a fourteen-hour
surgery. There’s every chance she’s going to lose that leg, and you
want to move her? Because . . . what? It’s more convenient? Your
sheets have a higher thread count? What exactly?”
I feel pretty okay, sort of floaty and disconnected, but this
man, who I’ve decided must be a doctor, sounds a little freaked
out about my leg, which, as it happens, doesn’t seem to be behav-
ing any better than my arm.
I should probably reassure him, get my mother off his case—
when she’s like this it’s best to retreat and regroup—but the tube
stuck down my throat makes that impossible.
“I will not release this patient,” the doctor says, “under any
circumstances.”
Silence. My mother is the god of painful pauses.
“Do you know,” she finally asks, “what the new hospital wing
is called, Doctor?”
More silence. The contraptions I’m tethered to chirp con-
tentedly.
“That would be the Spiker Neurogenetics Pavilion,” the doctor
finally says, and suddenly he sounds defeated, or maybe he’s miss-
ing his tee time.
“I have an ambulance waiting outside,” my mother says. Check
and mate. “I trust you’ll expedite the paperwork.”
“She dies, it’s on you.”
His choice of words must bother me, because my machines
start blaring like a cheap car alarm.

6
 “Evening?” My mother rushes to my side. Tiffany earrings,
Bulgari perfume, Chanel suit. Mommy, Casual Friday edition.
“Sweetheart, it’s going to be okay,” she says. “I’ve got every-
thing under control.”
The quaver in her voice betrays her. My mother does not quaver.
I try to move my head a millimeter and realize maybe I’m not
feeling so okay after all. Also, my car alarm won’t shut up. The
doctor is muttering about my leg, or what’s left of my leg, and my
mother is burying her head into my pillow, her lacquered nails
digging into my shoulder. She may actually be crying.
I am pretty sure we’re all losing it, and then, on my other
shoulder, I feel a firm pressure.
It’s a hand.
I follow the path from hand to arm to neck to head, moving
just my eyes this time.
The hand is connected to a guy.
“Dr. Spiker,” he says, “I’ll get her into the ambulance.”
My mother sniffles into my gown. She rouses herself, stands
erect. She is Back in Control.
“What the hell are you doing here, Solo?” she snaps.
“You left your phone and briefcase behind when you got the
call about the”—he jerks his chin toward me—“the accident. I
followed in one of the Spiker limos.”
I don’t recognize this guy or, for that matter, his name—
because, really, what kind of a name is Solo, anyway?—but he
must work for my mother.

7
 He looks down at me, past the tubes and the panic. He is
scruffy-looking with too much hair, too little shaving. He’s tall
and wide-shouldered, muscular, blondish. Extremely blue eyes.
My preliminary taxonomy: skater or surfer, one of those guys.
I’d really like him to get his hand off me because he doesn’t
know me and I’m already having personal-space issues, what with
the tubes and the IV.
“Chill, Eve,” he tells me, which I find annoying. The first
phrase that comes to mind involves the word “off,” preceded by a
word I have absolutely no chance of pronouncing since it in-
cludes the letter “F.”
Not in the mood to meet new friends.
In the mood for more painkillers.
Also, my mother calls me Evening and my friends call me E.V.
But nobody calls me Eve. So there’s that, too.
“Please reconsider, Dr. Spiker . . .” The doctor trails off.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” says the guy named Solo.
He’s about my age, a junior, maybe a senior. If he does work for
my mother, he’s either an intern or a prodigy. “Will you be com-
ing in the ambulance, Dr. Spiker?”
“No. God knows what microorganisms are in that ambulance.
My driver’s waiting,” my mother says. “I’ll need to make some calls
and I doubt the back of an ambulance is the place. I’ll meet you
at the lab.”
The doctor sighs. He flips a switch and my contraptions
still.

8
 My mother kisses my temple. “I’ll get everything set up. Don’t
worry about a thing.”
I blink to show that I am not, in fact, worried about a thing.
Not with the morphine drip taking the edge off.
Solo hands my mother her briefcase and phone. She vanishes,
but I can hear the urgent staccato of her Jimmy Choos.
“Bitch,” the doctor says when she’s out of earshot. “I don’t
like this at all.”
“No worries,” Solo says.
No worries. Yeah, not for you, genius. Go away. Stop talking
to me or about me. And take your hand off me, I’m nauseous.
The doctor checks one of my IV bags. “Uh-huh,” he mutters.
“You an MD?”
Solo makes a half smile. It’s knowing and a little smug. “Just
a gofer, Doctor.”
Solo gathers up my bagged belongings and my backpack.
Suddenly I remember I have AP Bio homework. A worksheet on
Mendel’s First Law. When a pair of organisms reproduce sexually,
their offspring randomly inherit one of the two alleles from each
parent.
Genetics. I like genetics, the rules, the order. My best friend,
Aislin, says it’s because I’m a control freak. Like mother, like
daughter.
I have a load of homework, I want to say, but everyone’s buzz-
ing about purposefully. It occurs to me my biology worksheet
won’t be all that relevant if I’m dying.

9
 I believe death is on the list of acceptable excuses for miss-
ing homework.
“You’re going to be fine,” Solo tells me. “Running 10Ks in no
time.”
I try to speak. “Unh onh,” I say.
Yep. Can’t pronounce “F” with a tube in your mouth.
Then it occurs to me: How does he know I like to run?

10
 EVE  AND  ADAM

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