The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(3)

Yeah, detention on the first day of school. Detention every day for the entire first week of school, actually. So far, I’d written papers on disrespect, inconsiderateness, and honor. I thought he was actually going to take his ruler and break it over my head when he asked for one defining wiseacre, and I only wrote one sentence: I prefer smart aleck, sir.

The truth was, Mr. Wickworth spent more time watching those survival reality-TV shows on his school computer than he did teaching us. The walls of his classroom were decorated with quotes from famous authors I’m pretty sure he made up (“School is important. Pay attention in class.”—Ernest Hemingway). Trust me, if I had the choice between listening to an hour of TV static or sitting through one of his lessons, the static would be about a hundred thousand times more interesting.

“Well?” he said, fingers pinching my shoulders. “What do you have to say for yourself, Prosperity?”

Sometimes I wished I could be reprogrammed to think before I opened my mouth. “Since when do I have to say anything to you outside of class?”

You know when you try to cook an egg in the microwave, how the yolk starts to wiggle, then puff, then explodes all over the walls? I was pretty sure Mom would have had to take my uniform to the dry cleaners to get Mr. Wickworth’s brains out of the fabric if Prue hadn’t suddenly appeared.

“There you are, Prosper!” she said, brightly. Her friends trailed behind her, glaring at me over her shoulder. “Oh, hi, Mr. Wickworth! Are you enjoying the festival? Grandmother asked me to pass along a hello and to thank you for all your hard work.”

Mr. Wickworth’s hand lifted off me. I turned just in time to see the amazing change come over his face. His lips parted, and the face that had been as red as Prue’s fire-bright hair took on a delighted, rosy kind of pink. “Oh. Miss Redding. Forgive me, I didn’t see you there.”

He, along with everyone else standing nearby, created a path for her. When she reached me, she put a hand on top of my head and gave it a little pat—a stupid habit she’d developed since she shot up three inches taller than me over the summer. Clearly we weren’t identical. With my black hair and dark eyes, and her red hair and blue eyes, we didn’t even look like we shared the same parents.

But I remembered how it used to be. I remembered all the hospital rooms. I remembered having to go to school without her, and then coming home and showing her all the pictures I’d drawn of it since we weren’t allowed to turn on our phones to take photos. I remembered the way my blood turned cold each time she looked pale, or her breathing became labored.

I remembered, when we were really little, getting out of bed in the middle of the night to check on her. To make sure her heart was still beating.





Grandmother called Prue’s heart condition the only bad luck the family had had in centuries. That’s true. But even on the worst of days, I could make her laugh with a dumb story, watch a movie with her, help her get around the house, or make her lunch when our parents were traveling. I knew all the emergency numbers for her doctors, and still do.

But Prue was a Redding, and she survived, even when doctors said she probably wouldn’t. Our parents founded Heart2Heart, an international charity dedicated to raising funds for underprivileged children with heart defects, and Prue became the face of it. The whole country was pulling for her with each surgery, and the most recent one, two years ago now, made her healthy and strong enough to do the things she’d never be allowed to before.

Prue enrolled in the Academy with me. She made friends who weren’t related to us, and those friends happened to be the kids I never told her about, the ones who would fill my backpack with dirt or steal my homework.

And then, like all of the pent-up Redding good luck previously denied to her hit at once, she became president of our class, and set three consecutive track, horseback-riding, and archery records, and won a statewide essay contest about the need for better access to clean water in underserved parts of India. The one time she had brought home a report card that had a single A-on it, the teacher actually apologized to her for failing to teach up to her standards.

Prue is amazing, anyone will tell you that. It was just…now she knew the truth about me. I couldn’t hide what other people really thought of me when she could see it for herself.

We came from a family of winners, record-setters, and firsts, and there wasn’t a day that went by that our grandmother let me forget that I wasn’t one of them.

Well, I, Prosperity Oceanus Redding, was proud to report that I was the first to set the record for the most times of dozing off during class in a single year, winning me some disbelief from parents and teachers, and twenty-four straight trips to the headmaster’s during sixth grade. The only reason they hadn’t kicked me out of the Academy was because my great-great-great-great-grandfather had literally built it with his bare hands.

You think it stinks to be named Prosperity? Try being named Prosperity when you get straight Ds in school, and everyone in your family starts hinting you should consider trash collecting instead of college. I don’t know what’s wrong with that. Trash collectors are nice people, and they get to ride on the back of trucks all day and do the important work of keeping the streets clean. That sounded pretty good to me.

But from the moment I’d first fallen asleep in his class, Mr. Wickworth had decided that I was garbage that needed to be disposed of, and Prue only proved his point when she swept in and acted like she had to clean up my messes, no matter how small.