Nowhere but Home A Novel - By Liza Palmer Page 0,137

not an animal.)

My sister’s chocolate chip cookies are the stuff of legend. My family sends urgent texts—ALEX IS MAKING HER CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES—and we all drop everything and beeline for her house where we are met with that smelllll, oh the smelllll. Is there anything better than the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven?

During a crisis, Alex will bake. She will put the chocolate chip cookies in little baggies and present them to you when you’re sad, hurting, sick, or just having a bad day.

They are love embodied.

Mom’s Bean and Cheese Burritos

This is probably the food that defines me. It’s my all-time favorite food in the world and only my mom really knows how to make it.

The pinto beans simmering in the pot, the white cheese (or “Monterey Jack” as some people call it), the flour tortillas my mom would flip on the burner with her deft hands.

This dish is home. Love. The feeling of being safe and sound.

Well, this dish is my mom.

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MORE LIKE HER

What really goes on behind those perfect white picket fences?

In Frances’s mind, beautiful, successful, ecstatically married Emma Dunham is the height of female perfection. Frances, recently dumped with spectacular drama by her boyfriend, aspires to be just like Emma. So do her close friends and fellow teachers, Lisa and Jill. But Lisa’s too career-focused to find time for a family. And Jill’s recent unexpected pregnancy could have devastating consequences for her less-than-perfect marriage.

Yet sometimes the golden dream you fervently wish for turns out to be not at all what it seems—like Emma’s enviable suburban postcard life, which is about to be brutally cut short by a perfect husband turned killer. And in the shocking aftermath, three devastated friends are going to have to come to terms with their own secrets . . . and somehow learn to move forward after their dream is exposed as a lie.

An Excerpt from More Like Her

Prologue

Operator #237: Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?

Caller: I’m a teacher at the Markham School, there’s a man here with a gun. He—[shots fired in the background]

Operator #237: Ma’am? Ma’am?!

Caller: [unintelligible screaming] Oh my god. Oh my god . . . Is she dead? Oh my god . . . [unintelligible]

Operator #237: Ma’am, please—

Caller: You need to hurry . . . please. Please, god. Hurry! [unintelligible] Noooooo!!!! So much blood . . . there’s so much blood!

Operator #237: Ma’am, I’ve sent them— the police. Now—tell me where you are in the school.

Caller: [unintelligible] The teachers’ lounge. Upstairs. We’re on the balc— Just stay down! Stay down!

Operator #237: Ma’am, please, I need you to calm down. Is the shooter still in the teachers’ lounge with you?

Caller: Calm down? He’s . . . oh my god [unintelligible] Is he dead, too?

Operator #237: Ma’am, I just want you to stay on the line with me until help gets there. How many people are in danger?

Caller: What? All of us! All of us are in danger! He’s got a gun?! What do you think? Stay down! Oh my god! No!

Operator #237: Ma’am, is there any way you can block the door?

Caller: The doors are glass, there’s no point. No! Stay down! Frannie!? No . . . oh my god. Oh my god . . . Did he get her? Did he get her, too? [unintelligible sobbing]

Operator #237: Ma’am, please. Please.

Stay with me. Please. Ma’am?!— Dial tone—

Total time of call: 1:23:08

Chapter 1

Lipstick and Palpable Fear

I’M NOT THE GIRL MEN CHOOSE. I’m the girl who’s charming and funny and then drives home alone wondering what she did wrong. I’m the girl who meets someone halfway decent and then fills in the gaps in his character with my own imagination, only to be shocked when he’s not the man I thought he was.

I’m the girl who hides who she really is for fear I’ll fall short.

SO, WHEN EMMA DUNHAM introduces herself to me as the new head of school, I automatically transform into the version of me who doesn’t make people uncomfortable with her “intensity,” who doesn’t need any new friends and who loves being newly single and carefree. In short, the version of me that’s as far away from the genuine article as is humanly possible.

“Headmistress Dunham,” she says, extending her hand. To my horror, Emma Dunham is cool, like take-me-back-to-the-fringes-of-my-seventh-grade-cafeteria cool.

“Frances Reid,” I say, extending my hand to hers. I won’t slip and introduce myself as Frances Peed, the moniker given to me as I