Rose Gagliardi and the Muckraker's Toll (Book #1 of the ALA Series)

Homecoming Nominees (AKA BARF)

Rose wakes up with a start. Her dream plays over and over again in her brain. It's almost as if she's still asleep. She flicks on her lamp and reaches for her notebook and pen.

No way is she letting this idea leave her. She taps her pen against her chin, trying to remember how it started. Aha! The tip of the pen stays still on the paper for only a second before she's writing down her dream in a narrative format:

Silvia
The day my mother killed my father and herself is a memory that will forever be etched in my mind. I was fourteen, and she did it right in front of me. I did nothing to stop it. I could have hit her. I could've called the police when I knew she wasn't acting like herself. I could have shouted out a warning to my dad that she was behind him with a knife.

I did nothing. I stood behind her and watched as she jumped on him and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. I didn't even scream. When she stood up and dropped the knife in the puddle of his blood, the shock knocked itself out of me. I knew I couldn't be seen by her. If she could kill her own husband, someone she'd been with since high school, what would stop her from killing me?

I ran out of the house, down the road, out of our gated neighbourhood... I don't know how long I ran, but it felt like hours. I remember feeling my calves aching and blisters forming on my feet, though for a split second I forgot that my father was dead. I ran into the first store that I saw— the grocery store that my mother and I went to every Saturday, and as I ran through the double doors, I thanked my father for putting me in track.

Then it hit me. My father... I left my father lying dead on our living room floor. My mother killed him. 

When one of the cashiers spotted me, a smile sprouted on his face. He had no idea what happened. He knew my parents—in our small town, that wasn't unusual—but he had no idea that my mother had just killed my father.

He must've taken in the look on my face because his smile fell instantly. I can only imagine what I looked like. Horrified, shocked, disgusted, and on the verge of tears. What was the first thought that went through his head when he realized there was certainly something wrong?

Did he think I'd just gotten robbed? Or maybe he thought Sabine, my youngest sister, wrecked her dirt bike again. Last time she did that, I ran into the same grocery store and demanded that he call an ambulance. It was kind of embarassing considering she only had a broken wrist. But at that moment, I said nothing. He'd asked if he should call the police. I nodded. And that was it.

The rest has always been fuzzy, as if my brain has blacked out the rest of the trauma... I hate that about my brain. It can block out everything about that day, but not the worst part. Not the way my father was screaming in agony for help. Not the way that my mother forced the knife through his flesh again and again and again.

The worst part by far, the part I wish I could forget, was the look on my mother's face just before it all happened. There was a flicker in her light blue eyes. For just a second, the entirety of her eyes were black, as if her pupils had expanded to the entire real estate of her eyes. When I watched them shove my mother into the back of the police car that night, her eyes were blue, confused, and tear-filled.

"Silvia," she choked, "what happened? What's happening? What did I do?" I didn't respond. I couldn't. I hadn't spoken since just before she jumped on my father. Since I saw her eyes turn that awful color.

I shook my head. She screamed and the police told her to shut up. They told her that she would be spending the rest of her life in jail. They had concrete evidence against her, after all. I was the eye witness. I saw it all happen. There was no other suspect.