When We Were Lost Read online

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2019 by Kevin Wignall

  Cover design by Tracy Shaw and Sammy Yuen

  Cover art by Travis Commeau

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  JIMMY Patterson Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: April 2019

  JIMMY Patterson Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The JIMMY Patterson Books® name and logo are trademarks of JBP Business, LLC.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-41780-8

  E3-20190515-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JIMMY PATTERSON BOOKS FOR YOUNG ADULT READERS

  NEWSLETTERS

  For George and Rafael

  FOREWORD

  As someone who loves to tell stories, I’ve found that the best ones take you in a direction you never expected to go. I started reading When We Were Lost thinking that it would be a straightforward survival tale of kids whose plane crashes in a remote jungle. Kevin Wignall certainly packed it with all the nail-biting suspense and wild thrills of a terrific disaster narrative, but I was delighted to find it ends up being much more than that.

  We see the catastrophe unfold through the eyes of Tom—a friendless kid who just wants to be left alone. I think we all have a little bit of that in us, a part that makes us feel like we never quite belong. This story has Tom fighting to survive unexpected situations—the savage jungle and high school social hierarchies—and finding them both vicious to contend with in their own ways.

  In the end, this story is about being lost in more ways than one, and what it really means to be found.

  —James Patterson

  PROLOGUE

  It’s called the butterfly effect, and it’s the part of chaos theory that everyone loves. The idea is that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. Not directly, of course. It’s not like the wings disturb some air and that disturbance disturbs more air and so on until it grows into a hurricane—that would just be stupid.

  What it really means is that everything is incredibly complex, with millions of tiny factors built into almost every occurrence, and if you remove just one of them (the beat of the butterfly’s wings), then it might happen differently, or even not at all.

  So, years ago, some jerk named Matt Nicholson thought it might be funny to spike a girl’s drinks by slipping in vodka shots without her noticing. Unlikely as it seems, Matt Nicholson is the butterfly, and the spiking of the drinks is the beat of his wings.

  The girl was Sally Morgan and soon enough she was reeling. These were their first weeks at college, so when Sally went staggering out of the bar looking green, no one paid much attention—no one except Matt Nicholson, who thought it was hilarious.

  Outside the bar, a girl named Julia Darby spotted Sally, and though she didn’t know her, she knew this girl was in trouble and needed help. Julia stepped in, and managed to get her to a bathroom stall just before the inevitable happened.

  They were in different schools, studying different subjects, so if Matt Nicholson hadn’t spiked Sally’s drinks, Sally and Julia wouldn’t have met, not then, maybe not ever, and they wouldn’t have become best friends. And then Julia wouldn’t have introduced Sally to her friend from back home, Rob Calloway.

  So Sally and Rob wouldn’t have fallen in love, gotten married after college, had a child. And when the time came to make their wills, they wouldn’t have chosen Julia to be the guardian of their child should anything happen to them.

  And one night when the child was nine, if the cab they’d ordered hadn’t failed to pick up Sally and Rob from the restaurant outside Hopton, Connecticut, where they’d been celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary, they wouldn’t have decided to walk home along the road instead.

  And if the girlfriend of someone named Sean Hodges hadn’t dumped him for being a loser, he wouldn’t have gotten drunk and cried and driven over to her place. And if she’d taken him back or let him in, he wouldn’t have driven home again, angry and still drunk, and he wouldn’t have hit two people walking along a dark and quiet country road, killing them.

  So as much as they’d never really imagined it happening, Sally and Rob’s child, nine-year-old Tom Calloway, ended up in the guardianship of their oldest friend. But, it has to be said, she was someone they hadn’t really had much to do with in recent years. In truth, they’d tired of her woes and her flakiness, but even if it had ever crossed their minds to amend their wills, death had caught up with them first.

  And being landed with the responsibility of looking after a child had little impact on Julia’s lifestyle. So it didn’t matter eight years later that a school trip to Costa Rica for a special environmental project was completely not the sort of thing Tom would usually do, because Julia wanted to go on a yoga retreat in Italy, and the dates fit perfectly. So in the end, to escape her pleading, Tom agreed to go to Costa Rica, a place
he didn’t want to visit, with people he didn’t want to be with, to do things he didn’t want to do.

  And that’s the butterfly effect. If a jerk named Matt Nicholson had not spiked the drinks of a girl named Sally Morgan, Tom Calloway, if he’d been born at all, would not have been boarding a plane more than twenty years later, a plane that, unbeknown to Tom or any of the other people in his school party, would never reach its destination.

  CHAPTER 1

  It wasn’t that Tom didn’t care about the environment. He recycled and he liked those David Attenborough documentaries on TV, but he couldn’t help thinking there was a lot of hypocrisy out there too. Hypocrisy like burning a ton of fuel to fly a whole bunch of schoolkids from the richest country in the world to look at plants and butterflies in Costa Rica. He just didn’t buy it.

  That was one of the reasons he didn’t want to be on this trip—because it was fake, a vacation dressed up as saving the world, a vacation without the fun, paying resort prices to stay in some insect-infested eco-camp.

  Then there were the people—thirty-nine other kids, three teachers, one teacher’s wife. He supposed the other kids were okay, interesting in their own ways, probably friendly, certainly friendly enough that they were friends with each other. It was just that Tom wasn’t really one of them.

  Once, when he was a little kid, he was given a jigsaw puzzle as a gift, a complex picture of a castle, and one wet weekend he’d completed it, only to find there was one piece left over. It wasn’t a duplicate, either, but an odd piece that had crept in from some other puzzle.

  Tom had kept it, and still had it at home. At the time he hadn’t been sure why he’d kept it, but in the years since, he’d come to think that he was that jigsaw piece. He was shaped right. He looked right. At first glance, most people might have imagined him a perfect fit. But he didn’t fit.

  Whichever picture he belonged in, it wasn’t this one, the one that was his life right now. And he was fine with that, because he realized that the spare piece he’d found in his jigsaw had probably been a missing piece from some other person’s jigsaw, and somewhere—maybe at college, maybe later—there’d be a picture that he would fit into.

  It wasn’t just Tom who thought this way about him, either. The other kids knew that he was different, detached, playing the game by his own rules. Even the teachers saw it, and unfailingly mentioned it in his school’s uniquely lengthy report cards (which Julia never read), the most recent one being no exception.

  Tom’s academic record speaks for itself and I have to commend him on it. I only wish he would make more effort to become an active part of our homeroom group. As it is, he’s aloof to the point of being unfriendly, which is a great shame because I feel he could contribute enormously to the group if he chose to do so.—Mr. Glenister, Homeroom.

  Well done, Tom, on an impressive junior year! As you know, I’ve urged you to throw yourself just a little more into the life of Hopton High and I hope your involvement with the forthcoming trip to Costa Rica is an indication that you’ve heeded my advice and will take the chance to bond with your peers!!—Principal Rachel Freeman.

  Tom is a puzzle. His work is of a consistently high standard, and his comments in class are always incisive and to the point. I only wish he would give a little more of himself, both to his studies and to his fellow students.—Miss Graham, AP English Literature.

  Miss Graham was a puzzle too. She was young enough and attractive enough that it sometimes felt a little weird being alone with her, and she’d told Julia this year in a parent–teacher conference that she was “desperate” for Tom to become more involved with his classmates.

  She was here now, one of the teachers on the trip, and she was currently doing one last head count before boarding, slowly working her way across the group, her mouth moving as she counted in silence. But she reached Tom and stopped dead, a look of amazement or confusion, followed by a strange smile, as if she still couldn’t quite believe that he was on this trip.

  She cursed under her breath then and went back to the beginning, her mouth forming a silent and labored one, two, three… and perhaps that summed up as well as anything how Tom didn’t fit in, how unlikely it was for Tom to be part of a trip like this, that his very presence was enough to leave Miss Graham incapable of counting to forty.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I’m glad you chose to come on this trip, Tom.” It was Miss Graham, sitting next to him on the plane. “Hopefully it’ll give us all a chance to get to know you better.”

  “Miss Graham, it’s only two weeks.”

  She laughed, as though he’d made some clever joke, which hadn’t been his intention, then turned to say something to Barney Elliott, who was sitting on the other side of her.

  Tom had flown a lot with Julia and, while he had to admit she’d been more like an unreliable roommate than a parent, he could at least say she knew how to travel. They always turned left as soon as they entered the plane, heading for business or first class.

  On this trip, though, he was at the back, as were most of them. Mr. Lovejoy and his wife were sitting in the middle section, near the door, with Jack Shaw, who was 6′7″ and needed the legroom, and Maisie McMahon, who was tiny, but who, for some undisclosed health reason, also had to sit up there.

  The rest of the party took up two blocks of seats at the back of the cabin. Coach Holdfast, the gym teacher and football coach, sat at the front of the first block with the members of his team who were making the trip—he was laughing and joking and occasionally chanting “Go Hawks!” like he was still a kid himself.

  Miss Graham was in the other block at the very back of the plane, with Tom on the aisle next to her. Boarding was almost finished now, and she turned to Tom and said, “Can I make a confession?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it, but he made a show of looking interested and she smiled, a little embarrassed, before saying, “I’m kind of scared of flying. Always have been. Turbulence—that’s the worst.”

  “So why did you come?”

  She shrugged, as if to ask what other choice she’d had.

  Barney, on the other aisle seat, who was the same age as the rest of them but looked smaller and younger, said, “You know, Miss Graham, it’s almost impossible for a large aircraft to be brought down by turbulence.”

  She turned to him and said, “Really, is that true?”

  “Absolutely. The structure’s never compromised and pilots really don’t have a problem with it.”

  “Oh. But how come planes crash then?”

  “They don’t, statistically. I mean, yes, of course planes crash, but it’s so statistically improbable that your plane will crash, it’s really not worth thinking about. I mean, you don’t go to sleep every night worrying your house will burn down, but it’s more likely you’ll die in a house fire than in a plane crash.”

  “How interesting.” She turned back to Tom. “Did you hear that, Tom?”

  He nodded. He was actually thinking that the statistics probably weren’t much comfort to people sitting on a plane that was hurtling in a ball of fire toward the earth. But he was saved from having to say anything because a girl named Olivia stood up a few rows ahead of them and looked at Miss Graham.

  “Miss Graham, can you tell Chris to stop annoying us?”

  Miss Graham gave a knowing look to Tom, as if they were both adults, a look he actually mistrusted in some way, and then she said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He let her pass and as he sat again, Barney said quietly, “I think Miss Graham has the hots for you.” Tom looked at him, and Barney added defensively, “It does happen. You see it in the news all the time.”

  “Do you have a statistic for it?”

  Barney wasn’t sure how to react, but settled for saying again, “It happens, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Tom noticed movement up ahead and, although he didn’t believe Barney was right about Miss Graham, he was fairly relieved to see she’d decided the best course was to swap seats with the oafish
and apparently annoying Chris Davies.

  He came clumsily down the plane and said, “Graham said I have to sit here. Can I have the aisle seat?”

  “No.” Tom got up to let him in, then sat down again.

  Chris shook his head. “Olivia—what a bitch. I can’t help it if I had a dream.”

  Chloe, sitting in the row behind them, said, “Not the dream again! Chris, just shut up about it.”

  He didn’t turn in his seat but raised his voice slightly for Chloe to hear, sounding too loud as he said, “You won’t be saying that if I’m right and the plane crashes.”

  Barney said, “What?”

  “I dreamed it. And it was exactly this plane.”

  Joel Aspinall was sitting across the aisle from Tom—student rep on the school council, son of some local politician—and he leaned forward now and said, “Chris, bro, you need to keep it down or we’ll get thrown off the plane.”

  “Maybe we should get thrown off. Then you’d all be thanking me when it crashes.”

  There was a murmur of voices in response, the talk clearly getting to some of them, but then from somewhere behind, possibly the back row, a very clear voice sounded, not raised, but deadly serious.

  “Christian!” It was Alice Dysart, who’d known Chris since kindergarten and whose family was close to his. They were nothing alike, but the connection, whatever sort of connection it was, obviously carried some weight, because Chris yielded instantly and slumped down into his seat.

  He still couldn’t resist turning to Tom and whispering, “This plane will crash. We’re all gonna die.”

  He was such an attention seeker that it was hard to tell whether he’d really had a dream and was genuinely nervous, or whether it was some poor attempt at causing a stir.

  Either way, Tom looked at him and said, “I don’t care.”

  Chris kept eye contact for a few seconds, then seemed to give up and faced forward again. Tom did too, staring at the seat in front of him, struck by a strange realization.

  He didn’t believe for one minute that Chris Davies had been having prophetic dreams, but he also realized he’d been telling the truth, that he actually didn’t care. Whatever was going to happen would happen anyway, and one day or another they would all die. The way Tom saw it, there wasn’t any point worrying about whether that day might be today.