The Key Ingredient Read Free

town has extra jobs to do.
    The year Fletcher came to the mountain, I was a senior in high school, and with the clueless self-­assurance only a teenager possesses, I’d applied to some of the best schools in the country and was waiting for one of them to welcome me with a fat scholarship. The last thing I was looking for at that moment in time was a reason to stay in Switchback.
    Fletcher Wyndham was an intriguing mystery. It was rare for a new kid to show up out of the blue, and rarer still to enroll in a new school in January of senior year. The moment he appeared, we all knew he was different. He had long hair and wore skinny jeans, high-­top sneakers and a battered vintage jacket. He was so good-­looking that girls would stare and nudge each other, pointing him out to their friends.
    In a small town, you can have all the secrets you want, but ­people will still speculate. For instance, Fletcher moved here with just his father, and neither of them ever talked about Fletcher’s mother. Depending on which rumor mill you subscribed to, you could hear different stories: She was in Florida. In prison. In an insane asylum. I heard she was dead. I heard Fletcher’s father had murdered her. I heard Fletcher himself murdered her.
    The day he came up to our place at Rush Mountain, I felt a little thrill of excitement. Maybe this year, I thought, the sugar season would have some spice. My older brother, Kyle, hired him on the spot, of course. The sap was running like crazy, and he needed lots of workers. Tapping the trees and collecting the sap was only the beginning. The fresh sap, which is mostly super-­cold water, has to be brought to the sugarhouse and put into the reverse-­osmosis machine to remove a good portion of the water before it goes into the evaporator pans. It doesn’t take a lot of training, just a strong back and a willingness to work outside in crappy weather.
    Since our own family history is rooted in scandal, I didn’t get why Mom was so worried about Fletcher Wyndham “drifting into town,” as she termed it. I also didn’t get why knowing who your ­“people” are is such a big deal. For example, everyone in Switchback knows Degan Kerry’s ­people; they’ve been around as long as the Rushes have, but they’re all sketchy, and Degan, who was in my grade at school, was the worst of the lot.
    It did no good at all for me to point out to my mother that the way to get to know a person was to hang out with him. Thanks to the town gossip mill, my mother was convinced that Fletcher Wyndham was an express ticket to perdition.
    That only made me want to know him all the more. And then when he looked at me and grinned with a certain slant of his head, I started to want him in a more serious way. A maybe-­you’ll-­be-­my-­first-­time way.
    I had not yet experienced my first time. When I was in high school, I stayed busy competing for blue ribbons at cooking contests and swim meets, my two favorite subjects. I was never the popular prom-­queen kid in school. That role belonged to Celia Swank. She was that girl we all wanted to be, with dead-­straight blonde hair and perfect boobs, and a way of laughing that made everyone else want to join in. She’d glide through the hallways of Switchback High, confident in the knowledge that every girl wanted to be her friend, and every boy wanted to nail her. She was the first of my friends to have sex—­tenth grade—­or at least, she was the first to talk about it.
    As for me, I was determined to wait, not for marriage because that was too far away, but for the right guy. Gran told me—­more than once, because I guess she wanted to make sure I heard—­that after you give yourself to somebody in that way, you can’t get it back. So you’d better make sure you pick the right somebody.
    My mom warned me to stay away from Fletcher Wyndham. “He and his