Prologue

The boy next door.

It's a terrible cliché, isn't it? The one you eventually realize is The One after having your heart pulverized by an assortment of bad boys. We've all been there. Things were a little different for her though. She realized he was The One before she'd even met any bad boys, let alone had her heart pulverized by one. And in her case The One happened to be very much gay. That pretty much blows the cliché out of the water, don't you think?

From the day his family moved into the house that was slightly nicer and slightly bigger than hers, he was the center of all that she did. They were seven years old.

She was the one to make the first move-surprisingly forward for such a shy little creature. She'd been watching him for half an hour through a hole in the bottom of the fence, studying him to make sure he wasn't the type of boy who pulled the wings off flies or anything like that. He wasn't. He was the type of boy who would lie flat on his back in the middle of the lawn to make sure the sky above was still the same sky he'd left behind in Manchester. She didn't know what he was doing at first, of course. In fact, she thought he might be dead. Just my luck, she thought. Emily's moved to the other side of the world and a stupid boy moves into her house and goes and dies.

She briefly considered throwing a stone at his head to check his aliveness, but decided it was probably more sensible just to ask.

"Excuse me?" She was a very polite little girl because she'd been brought up by two very polite parents.

There was no response from the possibly dead boy, so she raised her voice. "EXCUSE ME! Are you dead?"

The boy slowly turned his head so he was looking straight at her face peering through the hole in the fence. His eyes were the same color as the sky and his hair was golden like...gold.

The boy narrowed his eyes. "No, I'm Kai. Are you dead?"

The girl laughed. "Of course not!"

"Good. We can be friends then." The girl liked the sound of that.

***

It was a good start. And the middle was good too. But the ending? Well, the ending left a lot to be desired. She would have written it differently if she'd had a say in the matter.

Every good story deserves a happy ending-it's a basic rule of storytelling.

The boy next door certainly shouldn't die.

---

Excerpted from Undone by Cat Clarke
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