Therese Fowler - Exposure

Exposure is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Therese Fowler

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

Fowler, Therese.
Exposure : a novel / Therese Fowler.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52625-0
1. Parental overprotectionFiction. 2. Fathers and daughtersFiction. 3. High school studentsFiction. 4. Malicious accusationFiction. I. Title.
PS3606.O857E97 2011
813.6dc22 2010048109

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Misa Erder
Jacket photograph: Inmagine/Sassystock

v3.1

To my boys, who have to navigate a world fraught with challenges
and dangers I never imagined as a teen .

And to their peers, and their peers parents,
who are trying to do the same .

And, lastly, to the ones who werent able to weather the storms .

Contents

ACT I

I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,
Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that recedes;
I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul as it leads .

SARA TEASDALE

INE HOURS BEFORE THE POLICE ARRIVED , A NTHONY W INTER stood, barefooted and wild, on the narrow front porch of the house he shared with his mother. The painted wooden planks were damp and cool beneath his feet, but he hardly noticed. In his right hand he held a fallen maple leaf up to a sun that was just breaking the horizon. In his left he held his phone. He squinted at the leaf, marveling at its deep blood-orange color, amazed and happy that nature could make such a thing from what had, only a few weeks earlier, been emerald green, and before that, deep lime, and before that, a tight, tiny bundle of a bud on a spindly limb, waving in a North Carolina spring breeze. Hed always been an observant person; he hadnt always been so romantic. Amelia brought it out in him. She brought it out in everybody.

When she answered his call, Amelias voice was lazy with sleep. It was a Monday, her day to sleep a little later than she could the rest of the week. Tuesday through Friday, she rose at five thirty to get homework done before her three-mile run, which came before the 8:50 start of their Ravenswood Academy school day. At three oclock was danceballet, modern, jazzthen voice lessons twice a week at five; often there was some plays rehearsal after that, and then, if her eyelids werent drooping like the dingy shades in her voice teachers living room, she might start on her homework. But more often she would sneak out of her astonishing house to spend a stolen hour with him. With Anthony. The man (she loved to call him that, now that hed turned eighteen) with whom she intended to spend all of her future life, and then, if God was good to them, eternity to follow.

Seeing Amelia and Anthony together, you would never have guessed they were destined for anything other than a charmed future, and possibly greatness. Perhaps Amelia had, as her father was fond of saying, emerged from the womb coated in stardust. And maybe it was also true what Anthonys mother claimed: that her son had been first prize in the cosmic lottery, and shed won. They were, separately, well tended and adored. Together, they were a small but powerful force of nature. Love makes that of people, sometimes.

That morning, nine hours and perhaps five minutes before his arrest, Anthony stood on the narrow front porch with a leaf and a phone in his chilly hands. Amelia was saying, I dreamt of us, in a suggestive voice that stirred him, inside and out. He heard his mother coming downstairs, so he pulled the front door closed. Unlike the rest of his schools faculty, she knew about Amelia and him; in her way, she approved. Still, he preferred to keep his conversations private. There were certain things even an approving mother wouldnt want to hear. Certain things he absolutely did not want her to know.

T 8:35 THAT MORNING , A MELIA PARKED HER CAR IN THE student lot and sat with the engine running, keeping warm until Anthony arrived as well. She was still smiling with her recollection of his words, spoken softly as shed swum up out of sleep and into the day. Hed quoted her Shakespeare:

No sooner met, but they looked;No sooner looked but they loved;No sooner loved but they sighed;No sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason;No sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy.

She knew the lines by heart. She had been Rosalind, he Orlando, in last years school production of As You Like It . And while the lines were Rosalinds, about her cousins love for Orlandos brother, this was, after all, their story, in verse.

No sooner looked but they loved .

Love at first sight. Amelia, sixteen when it struck, a focused high-school junior whose romantic experience with boys was tenuous and limited, hadnt believed it could happen to someone like her. But as with anything that a person dismisses and then experiences in full forcea hurricane, the Lord, a visit from a ghostshe was converted instantaneously. With her heart pierced as surely as Shakespeares lovers had been, she became Immediate Loves happy evangelistquietly, though. Selectively, so that her father would not find out and ruin everything.

Whenever her most trusted girlfriends heard her talk about seeing Anthony across the stage at auditions, of falling for him before hed even spoken a single word, the girls gravitated toward her like she was fire and they were chilled travelers of a hopeless, barren snowscape. Oh, to be loved. To have love, true love, not the pistol-in-my-pocket variety they were offered all too often. Or worse: the lurid, online-porn-fed ambitions of the most heinous of their rich-boy classmates, whose ideal woman was an oversexed Lady Gaga in fishnet and pasties. No. To be Amelia, who had Anthony , that was the dream these girls nurtured. Anthony was passionate. A nonconformist. Perhaps best of all, Anthony was a secret.

They were sure Amelias father, Harlan Wilkes, would kill her, or maybe Anthony, or maybe both of them, if he found out Amelia was not just dating someone he disapproved of but was, in planning a future with Anthony Winter, deceiving her father in every possible way. The girls talked about Amelias risky love with dewy, faraway expressions, with smiles and sighs. They trailed Anthony like ladies of the court, always respectful of Amelias claim on him but, at the same time, always angling to be the one he might turn to should anything ever go wrong.

Sitting there in the parking lot, Amelia watched car after carmany of them luxury models bought from her fathers franchisespull into the lot and park while the heaters air warmed her skirt-bared legs. Save for the pleasure of seeing Anthony, she didnt want to spend yet another day at Ravenswood. Shed been attending school there on the forested, esteemed campus since she was four years old. The buildings and grounds, the sports fields, the stadium, the teachers and staff, the classrooms, the gymnothing seemed to have changed in all that time. There were new students every year, yes, but they were, for the most part, replicas of all the students who had come before them, and models for the ones who would come after. Amelia knew the word for her feelings: ennui . She knew the remedy, too: escape.