Excerpt from Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A. S. King, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By shooting the darkest areas three zones lighter, you turned a black, lifeless max black zone 0 into a zone 3.

I think, in life, most of us did this all the time.

You essentially called the woman in the oven "unhappy." You called her "frustrated." And you called the family who was left over "grieving." You called them "hanging in there." You called them "dealing with it pretty well."

Everything is about detail in the Zone System, so if you shoot a zone 0 as a zone 0, there is nothing you can do with your exposure that will bring any detail to that zone. It is max black. There is no emulsion left on the negative. All you have is empty plastic.

That's how I felt about Darla. Like empty plastic.

Dad would say, "Come on, Cupcake, it's not that bad."

I wondered if that was what he'd said to Mom on Letter N Day. I wondered if his meter was off. If he was accidentally reading threes where there were zeroes. Or purposefully. You choose.

Dad was a recluse outside of his trips to the grocery store, which usually happened between 2 AM and 4 AM on a random weekday night. He never seemed to think about art anymore.

Now he just made calls all day from the couch and worked on his laptop. He got paid to help people through their computer issues. I always hoped that deep in his brain he was brewing a series of German expressionist paintings of domestic gas ovens and one day he would paint it.


After school on Wednesday—the last day of school before graduation—I went over to see Ellie with my camera to show her the pictures I'd taken of the kids posing at me all day as if they were movie stars.

As I walked across the road, I noticed no one was really around at the commune, which was strange because a lot of people lived there. Three families in the barn, two in the old hunting cabin out back, two in the ugly blue-sided prefab, and then the RVs, three or four of them, with a family apiece.

Of course, Jasmine lived in the best house—the old farmhouse—with Ellie and Ed Heffner, Ellie's father, who I rarely saw on account of his being a hermit.

Ellie said he was shy. When I met him the few times I did, though, he just seemed annoyed. I wasn't sure what he had to be annoyed about. Dad said none of them worked. They lived off the land and got by without having to have jobs, which sounded like heaven to me. Dad said they were nonconsumerists and when I asked him what that meant he said they didn't want to buy anything.

When I found Ellie, I could tell something was wrong with her, but when I asked, she said, "I'm fine."

I didn't push because I didn't really feel like caring. She was wearing a hippie shirt with the buttons undone just to the edge of the warning zone. Like Jasmine did. It could have been Jasmine's shirt for all I knew. Jasmine could have been the one who suggested to unbutton it to that point… while at the same time saying If you have sex too early, you'll regret it.

Ellie wasn't graduating with me, so I couldn't officially celebrate my last day of school ever with her, but I showed her the pictures on my camera.

"Who's that?" she asked, pointing at the tall guy from jazz band.

"Travis something. Johnson. Travis Johnson," I said.

"Shit. He grew."

"And that's Morgan," I said, pointing to an old busmate of ours.

"Damn! She's punk rock. Who knew?"

"I know, right?" Morgan used to be a geek. Then she found Joey Ramone.

"Is that Danny?" Ellie asked. Danny was her secret eighth-grade crush. In the picture, his girlfriend was hugging him and kissing his cheek.

"Yep."

"Huh. He isn't as cute anymore somehow."

"Yeah. A lot changed since eighth grade," I said.

Excerpted from Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A. S King. Copyright © 2014 by A. S King. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.