Excerpt from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Some schools are named after presidents or astronauts. Ours honored a nineteenth-century Norwegian violinist and our mascot was a furry bull. I opened my eyes to see Kristi, chasing it along the sidelines.

Darva made a tsking sound. “When it comes to high school girls, I thought the bar was set pretty low, but man, she knocks it over.”

“You’re a high school girl.”

“A status that will be changed tomorrow, when I hop a train to Sandusky, Ohio.”

“What’s in Sandusky?”

Darva’s eyes squinted behind her lavender-tinted glasses. “Oh, sand. Some dusk.”

Every day Darva made plans to escape to “anywhere but here,” sometimes to great and faraway cities and other times to Podunk and its many counterparts. She claimed every hour spent in high school caused the death of a million innocent brain cells and that she could no longer be a participant in their slaughter.

“Write me when you get there, okay?” I said, nudging her shoulder with my own, and we watched as the Washburn Millers trounced the Bulls 37–6.

A transfer student, I was grateful that Darva had befriended me the first day of school.

“What have you got?” she asked, sliding her lunch tray onto the table as she sat across from me. “An infectious disease?”

Looking around the empty table, I scratched my head. “Yeah, malaria. I picked it up on leave in Da Nang.”

The girl laughed. “I personally like boys who’ve seen war before they’ve graduated high school. Gives them a certain maturity.”

She pressed the edges of her milk carton apart and then forward, opening up a little spout.

“By the way, malaria’s not contagious.”

“What are you, Albert Schweitzer?”

“Darva Pratt,” she said, holding up her milk carton.

“Joe Andreson,” I said, and clinked her carton with my own, toasting my first friend at Ole Bull High.

It was a friendship that would have consequences.

“What’re you hanging around with that freak for?” asked Todd Randolph, whose locker was next to mine.

I spun the dial of my combination lock. “What freak?”

“That freak,” said Todd, gesturing at Darva, who, with her dangly earrings and ropes of love beads and bracelets, fairly jingled as she continued walking down the hallway to her own locker. “That hippie chick. She doesn’t even wear a bra, man.”

I didn’t say anything but looked pointedly at the chubby-girl breasts revealed underneath his snagged Ban Lon shirt.

Todd Randolph flushed. “Fuck you.”

“Todd, buddy,” I said, clapping him on the back, “I’m flattered, but really—no thanks.”

Like any other high school, Ole Bull High had a tightly controlled clique system, but I just couldn’t be bothered with it. This is not to say I was above all that crap; not only had I had a fair amount of prestige at my old school, I’d enjoyed it. I was not the king, like Steve Alquist, whose letter jacket sleeves barely had room for all his award insignias, but I was at least in the court, and I took pleasure in all its privileges. I was a part of everything that mattered—but everything that mattered was now two hundred miles away.

“No,” I said when my mother told me we were moving. “No, I’m not going. No way. Forget about it.”

“Joe,” said my mother, her eyes tearing up, which never failed to make me cave in just to stop them. “Joe, I know all your friends are here, and your team . . . but I need you. I can’t make it here anymore, and I can’t make it in Minneapolis without you.”

She wouldn’t have had to “make it” anywhere had my father not gone off and gotten himself killed in the stupid Cessna of stupid Miles Milnar, who was Granite Creek’s big-shot developer (“We’re going to turn this hick town into a resort haven!”) and my dad’s best friend. Their last view of anything was probably the soybean field they were about to crash into; Miles Milnar never got to see Granite Creek become “the next Aspen” (the jerk—didn’t he consider our lack of mountains a slight disadvantage?), and my dad never got to see me graduate from the eighth grade. I suppose it’s lousy to lose your dad at any age, but to lose him at fourteen seemed especially cruel; here I was on the cusp of manhood (my voice cracking like spring ice, the rogue hair sprouting on my chin) with no man to pull me up, clap me on the back, and welcome me into the club. For a while there, I really thought I was going to die from the pain of it. Or the anger.

Excerpted from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik Copyright © 2007 by Lorna Landvik. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.