Excerpt from This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She hated being teased. She hated that Wendy thought it was funny to upset her, because—why? Was she absolutely hysterical when she got upset? But she knew how to cope with being teased. What she couldn't cope with were secrets, and Andrew Lu was a complete mystery, as inscrutable as the Chinese characters she had watched him doodle on the cover of his notebook. An echo of the voice she'd quelled at twelve piped up: Why would he like you? Why would Andrew Lu, who is beautiful and brilliant and smells like coconut and coffee, whom strangers smile at when he walks through the hall, who has probably eaten sushi with real chopsticks and has traveled farther away than Syracuse— why would he like you?

It was a question she couldn't answer, so she slapped the encyclopedia shut, rolled on her side, and watched the rain pour down. Wind filled the porch screens like sails, and Oneida shivered in the light mist. It was barely four o'clock but it was dark, and the darkness made her feel tired and worn out. She closed her eyes. She didn't see the yellow taxi rolling up the Darby-Jones driveway until it was close enough for her to hear the tires crackling in the loose gravel, popping like corn beneath the rain. At first she thought she was dreaming. She had never seen a taxi outside of television; there were no taxis in Ruby Falls. You could walk the entire length of downtown, past the convenience mart, post office, dry cleaner, gas station, library, Milky Way Bar and Grill, and town hall, in about fifteen minutes. The car had a checkered stripe running from hood to trunk. Gingerly, she craned her neck, still sore after flinching from Wendy, to watch the car disappear around the front of the house. Barely five minutes later she heard her mother unlatch the main door and welcome the passenger into the hall.

Oh, great, she thought. Another stupid mystery.

She sat still on the porch. She heard her mother's scratchy alto welcoming the new tenant, asking for his coat, telling him to leave his bags at the foot of the stairs. Then Mona launched into her standard tour of the Darby-Jones, her voice drifting nearer as she made her way through the main communal rooms—the front hall, the dining room where Eleanor Roosevelt once drank a milk shake, the TV in the den, and the library; past the rear study (off limits to tenants, reserved as her daughter's study space) and the kitchen.

Her mother's bare feet slapped against the original antique tile as she described how the right side of the pantry was divided into equal spaces for each tenant but the left was strictly for Mona's personal use and house dinners. Had she mentioned that, for an extra two hundred a month, he could be included in the meals she cooked six days a week, excluding Fridays, when tenants pooled their money for take-out? The stove was gas; the left rear burner was finicky and needed to be lit frequently. The pots and pans were to be treated as though they were children, and if he was ever discovered using a metal scouring pad on anything Teflon, he would be lashed to a snowblower and dragged through town. Mona had a dry delivery, and when the mysterious new tenant didn't laugh or even chuckle awkwardly, Oneida wondered if he or she thought her mother was actually serious.

"And this," Mona said, stepping onto the porch, "is the side porch. Where we keep the lawn darts, watering cans, and my daughter." She smiled at Oneida and gestured for her to join them, which Oneida did, crossing her bony arms over her chest and leaning in as Mona hugged her shoulders. Her mother always smelled of flour and frosting, the result of years of mixing, baking, stacking, and piping sugar onto wedding cakes, and Oneida inhaled deeply. "Oneida," Mona Jones said, gesturing to the man standing in the kitchen, "this is Arthur Rook. He's taking the rooms over the garage."

Arthur Rook looked lost. He was very tall and thin, not skeletal like the tall boys at school, who had stretched the same amount of skin over bodies that grew half a foot taller in the space of a summer, but she could picture him as one of those stretched-skin boys in the not-too- distant past. He was far younger than any of the other tenants, and she wondered what he was doing in Ruby Falls. He had dark hair and really needed a shave. His eyes were very dark and very bright, and he didn't blink. He was looking at everything—no, he was studying. He traced the outlines of all the vague, inanimate lumps on the porch, as if he were searching for something he'd left there years ago but would only remember once he saw it again. Arthur Rook's gaze finally made its way to Oneida, and when their eyes met she felt a strange tickle in her throat, like she was supposed to say something to this stranger, or he had something to say to her. He acted as though he knew something she didn't, which, as always, annoyed her.

Excerpted from This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia. Copyright © 2010 by Kate Racculia. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.